Stop Stealing Summer!

I am writing this blog entry on the afternoon of August 11th....or in the minds of most of America's educators, on the 11th day of autumn.  For at least a generation now, America's education sector has waged a coordinated, aggressive, and absolutely exhausting war on summer break, particularly in August, the summer month that perhaps defines summer more than any other.  In state after state, schools have been moving the goalposts of their "fall" start dates, creeping them earlier and earlier into August.  My latest reminder was hearing that the municipal pool only two blocks away from my apartment was closing for the season on August 7th.  Why?  Because so much of their lifeguard staff was returning to school.

Indeed, most Southern states are already in the classroom as of the first Monday in August, which is absolutely delusional given that this is the part of the country where summer weather burns the hottest in the month of August.  The Midwestern states typically at least wait until the second half of August to start classes, but in Iowa a state law had to be passed several years ago to keep schools from nudging their start dates earlier and earlier.  When I was a kid, school started after Labor Day in Minnesota.  It was actually passed into state law in 1986.  But most southern Minnesota districts have now successfully attained "waivers" from the state allowing them to start classes on the third or fourth week of August. 

Yet almost every year, during the first or second week of "fall" classes in August, I hear about schools dismissing early for the day "because of the heat".  Well yeah....that's why students have historically not been in school in August....and why it's still stupid to force them to be.  Global warming is not making the prospect of heat-related early dismissals any less likely.

It's not entirely clear what's driving the education industry's tireless obsession with earlier school start times, but it seems the primary reason is that educators prefer to have their school year neatly divided into semesters that end before Christmas break and begin after Christmas break.  I can see how that would be nominally preferable, but not to the degree of disruption it causes for everybody's life outside of the classroom.  Let's speculate about just a few of the reasons that taking away August from the general population negatively impacts those who don't work in the education field....

I mentioned the early closing of the municipal pool forced upon my community.  Pools are already money pits for the communities that host them, but they're even bigger money pits when they can only be open during a shrinking window that doesn't include some of the hottest weeks of summer.  This is true not just for pools, but all manner of theme parks and tourist destinations who depend upon the limited weeks of summer for their economic survival.

That leads me directly to the general notion of summer vacations.  August has always been the month of the year most associated with families going on vacation.  It's the worst possible month for the schools to throw a monkey wrench into vacation plans, stripping families from spending critical time with one another and stripping the tourism industry from the critical weeks of the year that those families support them.

August is fair season.  The primary reason that the state of Iowa voted to keep schools from pushing their schedule up earlier into August is because the Iowa State Fair uses a lot of school-aged teenagers as employees and tens of thousands of additional students participate in 4-H at these fairs.  This is the same reason why Minnesota, which has a later state fair, has historically not started school until after Labor Day.  But now that so many Minnesota schools have pushed start dates into early August (and in the region of the state with the most 4-H participants to boot), classrooms have frequently been half full because so many students are showing at the Minnesota State Fair.  Those students are thus missing critical early weeks in the classroom all to suit the schools' scheduling preference.  It's not as easy as bumping the fair schedule up earlier to accommodate the changing school calendar, both due to preexisting contracts and the schedule of county fairs that lead up to the state fairs which also can't be arbitrarily rescheduled on a dime.

And speaking of teenagers working at the fairs, teenage summer employment generally is in some degree of peril if students are no longer available to actually work in the portion of "summer" that's actually summer.  Some employers would be more flexible than others with this sort of thing, but there's plenty of places who would need summer help in August than wouldn't in May when so many young people are now finishing school for the year.  If the schools are gonna make it more complicated for employers to hire summer employees, then maybe they'll just quit hiring summer employees, denying hundreds of thousands of young people key early job skills.

All of that fits into the larger point that not all "education" comes from sitting in classrooms.  The experiences afforded to young people (and their families) during a summer break that actually parallels the calendar are often priceless to their development as people, helping them discover their passions and generally find out who they are.  Our culture has long been structured around serving this dichotomy on a specific timeline, and the bar should be very high to force a full-scale realignment of that timeline as the schools keep insisting upon.

Enough states have already forfeited the month of August to the education industry to give us possible evidence where forcing students to give up their family vacations to sit in sweltering classrooms in mid-August actually comes with tangible benefits to student performance.  There's zero indication that it does, and in fact the states that require the most classroom time in August tend to have some of the worst student performance metrics.  

Mid-August is summer and mid-May is not, particularly in the Midwest.  It's one of the most inconvenient times on the calendar to force young people to be in classrooms, yet the schools absolutely will not stop doing so.  And they mostly seem to be winning the war.  It's not fair to everybody else.  I'm typically someone who defends public education in the US, but the list of reasons why kids should not be in school in August vastly exceeds the list of reasons they should, and educators who insist on bullying their way to the front of the line should be ashamed.