Katy Rouse, assistant professor of economics in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, recently published a paper titled, "The Impact of Year-Round Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Mandatory School Calendar Conversions."
The paper, co-authored with Steven McMullen of Calvin College, appears in Volume 4, Issue 4 of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The paper was cited on a Wall Street Journal blog in March and on economist Tyler Cowen’s MarginalRevolution blog on October 31, 2012.
An abstract of the paper is provided below:
In 2007, 22 Wake County, NC traditional-calendar schools were switched to year-round calendars, spreading the 180 instructional days evenly across the year. This paper presents a human capital model to illustrate the conditions under which these calendars might affect achievement. We then exploit the natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement using a multi-level fixed effects model. Results suggest that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student. Moreover, when the data are broken out by race, we find no evidence that any racial subgroup benefits from year-round schooling.