Our 180-day school year is a 19th Century relic
For more than a hundred years we’ve used a system of a 180-day school year. It’s a structure that was created in the 19th Century age of farming. As a public school parent seeing the lack of rigor firsthand, I get frustrated that there is a two week ‘Christmas’ break, a one week winter break and a one week spring break. And, of course, a long summer…to say nothing of holidays and teacher training days.
Sometimes it seems like the kids are out of school more than they are in it. I’m joking, of course, but we certainly can’t pretend that the kids are overworked in terms of time in the classroom. Our school year is 63 days shorter than Japan’s. It’s too much of a disparity.
On the teacher’s side, the current Seattle contract pays teachers for 184 days in the September through June schedule. This is broken down into 177 days with kids and seven days without.
In today’s new world, we should ask the question: What makes sense in terms of the length of our school year? Why 180? Is that the best approach given the massive amount of data and research worldwide showing how much kids lose in the summer?
Why is the number of school days set at the state level in Olympia? I believe we should reopen the policy conversation about the length of the school year at the school, district and state level.
Why shouldn’t a passionate principal have the authority to work with her or his community to design a different length of the year? Would that introduce chaos for parents and the system? Perhaps, but surely our top down model of managing public education could use a little more chaos designed to think in new ways. Surely, at least at the district level, communities should have a stronger voice to build a more customized school year that works for them to increase academic quality.
As a public school parent, I want kids to have a fun, engaging and family-oriented summer experience. I want them to have sufficient time to “be a kid.” As a legislator I also know the data proves that so many kids realize substantial loss of critical learning in the gap of summer, especially low income students, from which they don’t recover in the fall. And the cycle continues. If kids read, study and continue during the summer then they enter the fall with gusto. If they sit in front of a screen all summer, the literal and figurative damage is not modest. And we pay for it financially while the kids pay for it the rest of their student lives academically.
We all know that teachers work really, really hard during the year and that they are amazing in their management of 30 kids in a classroom. But surely we can acknowledge as a state and a society that a 184-day working year is a pretty good gig.
Would it be a radical departure from our modern political orthodoxy–even politically dangerous–to ask the entire infrastructure of education in our state to work an extra few weeks of the year at their current salaries?
Yes the logistics would require hard work and a lot of strategic planning around buses, janitors and other vital service providers…and some more money to be sure. But surely we can have the courageous honesty to acknowledge that we are falling further and further behind and our old fashioned structure is literally killing our future.
We should have the courageous honesty to engage in the discussion openly and directly. And it’s not just the length of the school year, it’s the larger policies around more effectively responding to local needs.
If a school district wants to expand their school year, why should Olympia be in the way?
Should the school year be 190 or 200 or more days? I don’t know, but the the old fashioned, rigid, model of 180 days set in the 1880s around an agrarian economy doesn’t make sense for my four kids in a 21st Century interconnected global community. I suspect it’s not working for yours either.
We are so much more than what we’ve become.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
“Would it be a radical departure from our modern political orthodoxy–even politically dangerous–to ask the entire infrastructure of education in our state to work an extra few weeks of the year at their current salaries? ”
I think such an approach would be pretty unfair, actually, for all the folks who aren’t already working year round. There are many reasons. In my experience many teachers, especially in the early years of their careers, work second jobs during the summer. I’m guessing that many do so because they need the income (as opposed to doing it to fill the time). To ask them to give up that extra income, and to work longer for the same compensation at their district job would mean an actual pay cut in their annual comp. And since this would impact the young folks starting out, how much would that add to the already high amount of drop off that we see in people leaving education in the early years?
Second, there’s a fair amount of quantitative evidence that many people who would have gone into teaching 40 or 50 years ago are now attracted to better paying/higher status fields. To be blunt, most really smart women no longer aspire to teach, they go into law, medicine, or business. The pay and status in teaching is too low to compete with these other fields. If we cut compensation even further as you suggest — by increasing the work hours with no increase in pay — I would anticipate this trend would continue and even accelerate. To my mind we should find policies that try, once again, to attract the “best and the brightest” to teaching, not just for two years in Teach for America, but as a career.
There are many more arguments. The idea sounds fundamentally unfair. Most of us understand when a recession causes us to take a paycut, forgo raises, or be forced to take furlough days. In contract, the problem you want to address is not short-term and emergent, you’re proposing a whole scale re-thinking of a major institution. Funding such a change on the compensation of those who are the system’s “worker bees” just isn’t the right approach.
“We all know that teachers work really, really hard during the year and that they are amazing in their management of 30 kids in a classroom. But surely we can acknowledge as a state and a society that a 184-day working year is a pretty good gig.”
Are you taking into account that most teachers have to have two jobs because the pay is so crappy?
We need a longer school day and longer school year if we are to reach these children and have everyone succeed. Yes, I belive we should all get paid for the extension but even if everyone volunteered one day a month, it would make a huge difference. you are right in that teachers do not get pain enough for what they do, but there are more important things in life, like the success of our future. i vote as a teacher and a parent for a longer school day and school year!
We should have school 6 months and summer 6 months