There’s sometimes a lot of hand-wringing amongst ed reformers about the connection between the traditional school year and the agrarian cycle.  The idea is that our Labor Day to Memorial Day school calendar is the remnant of food production cycles, when children and young people were needed during the later summer months to contribute on the family farm.  While that may be the genesis of the school calendar, it hardly seems like its much of a driving force these days.  Just because it started that way, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve kept it simply out of custom or convenience.

There is, of course, some legitimate concern with what is known as the “summer slide.”  Under conditions of limited resources, it makes sense to look at low cost interventions that might have an outsize positive impact on learning outcomes.  The logic goes that you could simply do some shifting of the calendar with the same number of work days and carve away at the long summer break that is responsible for learning loss.  Many schools and districts have done precisely that, building in a fall break and a longer winter recess to cut back the number of weeks of summer.  Personally, I love our 5 week winter recess at my current school, and that leaves just a 7 week summer break.  

Moving to a shorter summer also allows for the extension of the school year.  This is a more robust intervention, albeit an incredibly pricey one.  Adding 20 days to the school calendar would logically add at least 10% of the entire annual budget.  In one of my former districts where we negotiated an additional two days to the annual calendar, teachers received a 6% salary increase and hourly employees had their daily rate extended.  It was a very pricey intervention. From the moment the agreement was signed, moving from a 180 to a 182 school day calendar, everybody seemed to talk about going back to 180 days.  Unsurprisinginly, teachers weren’t terribly excited about it.  The community seemed a bit indifferent about the whole thing, as families still had to scramble for summer school programs, if they wanted to participate at all, which many of them opted not to.  Eventually, when state budgets got tight (which they always do in the somewhat predictable cycle of school funding), those two days were first turned back into teacher professional development days and then cut out of the calendar altogether.   It was a relatively short-lived experiment.  

It seems that the idea of a summer break away from school has embedded itself into how we think about schooling and childhood.  While it is certainly true that for many families living in poverty, summer might not be a mythical place of family vacations and long lazy afternoons by a pool, it may also be true that families across the socioeconomic spectrum see some value in having a longer break from formal schooling.  Most working adults can tell you that the constancy of the work calendar year after year leaves little space for ideas of transformation and new beginnings.  Life can seem at times to just melt together when you remove the milestones and benchmarks of more periodic cycles.  

I can’t help but wonder if there is some wisdom in the broader cycles of nature that led to the agrarian school calendar in the first place.  The school year gives a clear sense of beginnings and endings that punctuate our childhoods.  There is a real sense of anticipation for the school year, with a chance for reinventing ourselves, starting with a fresh slate, and taking on new independence and responsibility as we move from grade to grade.  Sometimes the cynics in us point to purely mechanistic reasons for the way we structure schools into grades and semesters.  “We’re training you for the industrial complex,” goes the saying.  I tend to see it more as a progressive, upward developmental cycle as our skills build.  In a world that is increasingly individualistic, the common rites of passage of school are some of the few collective experiences we have left.  In our rush to maximize and optimize learning, we might be breaking down the very things that hold us together.  

Yes, perhaps I too get a little too enthusiastic about matters of school calendars.  I can’t help but get excited at the launch of the school year.  It is a time of new possibilities to be sure.  I remember the transition from elementary to junior high, when it seems most of the young women got the message simultaneously to cut their hair short and go for a new look along with starting at a new school.  I took advantage of the transition to high school to shed my thick pair of eyeglasses and go for contact lenses, hoping that I would come back a somewhat reinvented version of myself.  In some ways, it felt like it worked.  I hope we don’t try to amalgamate schools into individualized pathways with no space for collective rites of passage.  Nostalgia aside, I still love that feeling of anticipation and possibility on the eve of a new school year.