End Summer Vacation
Same days off. Better days off.
Not more school — the same school, spread out. Keep all 180 days, keep every day off, and stop delivering eleven of those weeks in a single block in July that works for no working parent in America.
To be clear about what this plank is not: it is not more school. The number of instructional days does not change. The number of days off does not change. What changes is that the time off stops arriving in one enormous summer block and gets distributed across the year in breaks of two to three weeks.
The summer calendar is an artifact. It was not built for agriculture — that is the thing everyone says, and it is backwards; nineteenth-century rural schools often ran through the summer and closed for planting and harvest. It was built for cities, for heat, for buildings with no air conditioning, and for families wealthy enough to leave town in July. All four of those conditions have since changed.
What this fixes, in order: the single largest childcare cliff in the country, which arrives on the same day every year and lasts a quarter of it. The learning loss that shows up in the data every autumn. And a teaching profession in which every member is contractually required to take vacation during the most expensive eleven weeks of the travel year.
Teachers work the same number of days for the same pay, and get the option of a holiday in October.
Asked and answered
- You want to take summer away from children.
- We want to give them October, February, and April instead. Identical total. Children do not require that their rest be administered in one eleven-week dose, and the research on what happens academically during that dose is not kind.
- What about teachers?
- Same days worked, same pay, and a vacation they are no longer forced to take simultaneously with every other teacher in America. Balanced calendars are not our invention — thousands of schools already run them. We just put it on a yard sign.
- What happens to summer camp?
- It operates year-round at roughly a quarter of the intensity and roughly the same annual volume. We are not unsympathetic to the disruption. We are also not changing course.
- Family vacations?
- Will become possible in months when flights are cheap and the parks are empty. You are welcome.
- Isn’t school scheduling a local matter?
- It is, and it stays that way. The federal government does not set your district’s calendar. It can fund, study, and loudly advocate for balanced ones, which is the entire mechanism being proposed here.