Yes, that would indeed wreak havoc on parents who could reliably get enough vacation time together for one three-week trip but not for anything like four two-week periods or whatever the new schedule would create, and who would have trouble affording childcare for those periods.
I think this is one of those It Shouldn’t Happen, And Therefore Won’t scenarios: Something a certain type of person thinks they can disprove by arguing that schools should have adequate and reliable A/C, and anyone who’s arguing that they, in practice, don’t is arguing that they shouldn’t and is, therefore, a horrible person we should all ignore.
There’s a philosophical injunction against trying to create an Ought from an Is. There is no corresponding injunction against trying to create an Is from an Ought. Probably because the philosophers thought nobody would be stupid enough to try.
We have a couple of year-round schools through 8th grade in my area. The people who love it the most are the local faculty who can leverage the longer winter break for family trips as the professors also have more time “off” (off in the sense that they don’t have meetings or classes). As a Scout leader it is a bit of a pain for scheduling summer camp and other high adventure treks to fit between the end of year-round, and the beginning of fall activities for the older Scouts.
Putting everyone on this would require all of the extra curricular providers to change their model to match, and in the transition might rob kids of some fulfilling activities.
as I said earlier we tried it and there wasn’t enough improvement to make the added costs and scheduling hassles worth it
they were going to have the hs district start the year I started hs but due to accounting errors they discovered they owed the millions they thought was surplus and by the time they had the money the idea had passed
I’m in favor of it, but then again I had enough summer school classes* to know that it doesn’t kill a person. Students would be fine, families would be fine. (Teachers and administrators might be boned, for all I know.)
mostly to get ahead - I took 5 1/2 years of math during the four years I had of high school.
Long summer breaks are just too important to lose. I’m thinking of summer camps where some kids go for several weeks or some kids go to activities like day camps.
Some kids work summer jobs.
Teachers need the time to take classes for accreditation.
Some kids take summer school which can allow them to take more classes during the year or makeup classes they might have failed.
Some schools lack air conditioning and even if they do, AC is very expensive. Around here they will have limited AC for summer school.
Few kids go to summer camps longer than 4 weeks. You can still have summer camps. Plus you could have winter camps (ski camp, for example) and spring camp (garden camp) and fall camp (harvest camp). Summer camp businesses would have fewer customers at a time, but with staggered schedules, they could stay open year-round, not needing temp workers as much.
All these institutions could adapt. Summer jobs could become shorter stints. Accreditation could occur during breaks. Summer school could become makeup school.
Okay, sure. But here in NC, for example, schools are already in session in August, so a lack of air conditioning is already a big problem that wouldn’t get that much bigger by being in session in July. And those districts that don’t have air conditioning? They wouldn’t need to go year-round.
If the educational benefits are there, then we need to prioritize realizing those benefits, not throw our hands up at the first HVAC issue that arises.
As I mentioned, we had year round school for a brief period when I was a kid in VA. I found this paper on the experience as well as in some other jurisdictions.
It found that year round schools were not cost effective, nor providing an improved learning environment for kids:
I feel and felt the same way, while week and a half breaks were great (about as long as they got, occasionally) and my parents would sometimes extend them to 2 full weeks for vacations, it was not the so longed for freedom that summer provided, a time to forget one is a student, and just be a child.
The German school year makes sense to me. They only get 6 weeks off in summer, but more evenly dispersed one week breaks throughout the year. And I believe 2 full weeks at Christmas/New Year.
As a kid, of course, I would have hated the idea of not having my three full months of summer break.
All of the posts talking about family vacations seem way off-base. As Hermitian stated, there aren’t many people planning month-long vacations anyway. And the notion that vacations are only ever taken during school breaks is nonsense. Every school I have ever worked at had families take their kids for extended vacations in the middle of the school year, and the teachers had to make up work packets for their students to take with them (as if that was effective instruction). Even Title I schools where there isn’t much money had this happen because families often went away to visit family in other places, whether cities, states, or countries.
Many of the objections to this idea stem more from human resistance to change than anything else.
Having been in schools since I was 4 years old (a long time), I think the US education system needs to be completely rebuilt, but fat chance of that happening. Even New Orleans stuck with the traditional, failing model.
Placing children in classes based on age rather than ability leads to teaching to the middle and underserving or neglecting lower and higher ability students; Letter grades are thoroughly inadequate for describing student progress; 5 and 6-year-old boys are unsuited for the current model of schooling, and by the time they are old enough to sit and work, they are often turned off by the process and too-frequently medicated.
No one wants to think about the money that would be needed to make schooling work for more children, or the power that would need to be stripped from certain educational entities.