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Mike Peterson Published: July 29, 2013 1 minute 2 comments

(Saturday)

(today)

Deflocked begins a back-to-school arc before anyone else dares, and for a good reason: Jeff Corriveau is riffing on the disappearing summer vacation.

It's getting hard to keep track of the school year. When I was growing up in New York, school started shortly after Labor Day but then dragged on into the third week of June, while other states were bailing out around Memorial Day.  

Many — I have no basis upon which to say "most," though it's my impression — states used those two holidays to frame the school year. In fact, I remember at one point a minor uprising in Colorado when the school year started a week before Labor Day and ended a week after Memorial Day, and parents accused the Powers That Be of attempting to trap us in-state for the benefit of local tourism. As I recall, we got Memorial Day back, and I have since watched the start of school there creep slowly backwards, deeper into August.

In recent, and not-so-recent, years, however, the proposal of doing away with the old agricultural model of the school year entirely has gained traction. Governor Mario Cuomo suggested year-round schools in 1989, when I was still a business writer at the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY, and it got a chilly reception from the people I interviewed on the topic.

That link is to a fairly slow-loading PDF, but the gist of the Sunday full-page-plus is that educators feared burn-out both in their own ranks and among the kids, while local family attractions feared that the loss of summer vacation would kill off anyone that Walt Disney hadn't already put out of business, both because they would no longer have a defined "tourist season" and (even if snow and cold weren't factors) they couldn't afford to stay open year-round for a trickle — however consistent — of visitors, and because they counted on both students and teachers as seasonal employees.

And there was also the cost of air-conditioning school buildings in the north, which not only means retrofitting them but then paying for both the added utility usage and maintenance. Anyone wishing to debate this point need only spend six to eight hours in a roomful of pubescent sixth graders in mid-June.

Now, since that time, I have had a friend whose teaching skills I greatly admire work in Los Angeles at a year-round school, and she reports that, while it took some getting used to (and not just for selfish but for some rather substantive reasons as well), the fact that kids retained more information when their breaks were no longer than three weeks was a decided benefit.

But I would insist that (A) a longer school year and a different schedule are not the same thing, that (B) anyone who thinks "teachers only work 180 days a year" is too ignorant of the realities of education to deserve a seat at the table and that (C) once these pedagogical geniuses realize they'd have to pay janitors, clerical workers, cafeteria staff and their beloved highly trained gunslingers for longer periods of time, plus retro-fit the buildings, plus pay to both heat schools in winter and cool them in summer, their interest in educational reform will taper off significantly.

Which is a good segue to my main argument, which is that increasing the school year is so far down the list of sensible priorities in reforming our out-dated schools that it hardly registers on the Reform-O-Graph_TM.

I cannot say it any more eloquently than I did in this 1991 column, also from and copyright to the Press-Republican. (You can click on it for a larger image or download a hi-res version here: View this )

(Deflocked, Sept 7, 2011)