Tired Excuses for Avoiding Calendar Reform

School Administrator, March, 1994 by Charles Ballinger

Despite consensus in the education community that summer learning loss is a reality for most students and that the long summer vacation cannot be justified instructionally, educators continue to trot out old myths to avoid changing the school calendar.

Let's look at a few of the reasons they offer.

* There are no data to show that changing the school calendar will enhance student achievement.

A growing number of studies indicate students in year-round schools achieved better after the calendar was modified. Other studies confirm students experience learning loss over the long summer, a fact teachers have recognized for decades. Why else would teachers spend the first four to six weeks of each new year reviewing the previous year's lessons?

* Athletics and extracurricular activities will suffer in a year-round school.

This frequently stated opposition to school calendar change reminds us that many educators and parents have forgotten the primary mission of the school: to help students learn the most they can.

Experience from the more than 2,000 schools that already have implemented a modified calendar demonstrates clearly that student activities are not harmed. Athletic teams win and lose as before. The German and drama clubs continue to meet. Students participate in scouting, sports leagues, and other youth activities. Young people continue to act as young people ordinarily do.

The fear of change is seldom expressed more earnestly, and more irrationally, than in this myth.

* The public is not yet ready for such a radical change.

Some parents and community members may not be open to the idea, but many are. The goal for educational leaders is to provide options for those who are ready.

There will always be some public resistance to change, no matter how appealing the proposal. To some extent, that initial opposition helps to refine the change.

Nevertheless, educational leaders need to remember the generalizations of change: 1) the opponents always will be louder and more aggressive than proponents; 2) change does not come without controversy; 3) failure to encourage gradual change, in reality, encourages stagnation; and 4) good ideas may be delayed, but rarely derailed.

Some boards of education require local communities to vote favorably at levels as high as 80 percent before they will sanction a calendar change. Such actions are mystifying. Surely these board members know how nearly impossible it is to get 80 percent public approval on any policy idea.

* If this were such a good idea, it would have been implemented more widely, faster.

This is one of the easier arguments to handle, by alluding to other issues. If democracy (or Christianity or capitalism) is such a good idea, why hasn't it been adopted more widely and quickly? Conversely, if slavery in the United States was such a repugnant idea, why did it take 200 years and a civil war to dispose of it?

The education profession is sometimes prone to fads. Important ideas root, grow, and remain. Since calendar change can help young people learn, it will happen on a wider scale than is now the case.

* Abolishing the nine-month calendar will not allow schools to do necessary maintenance and deep cleaning.

This is another easy one. Hospitals, hotels, service stations, and countless other community enterprises maintain and clean their facilities on a continuous basis. Schools are one of the few community institutions afforded the luxury of closing for up to three months annually.

All that is needed to maintain and clean schools continuously is some fresh thinking, some learning from other community enterprises, and, indeed, some renegotiated labor contracts.

It is time for school districts to rethink the school calendar. I like to frame the question this way: If year-round education were the traditional school calendar and had been so for 100 years and then someone came along to suggest a new calendar in which students were to be educated formally for only nine months of the year, would the American public allow, or even consider, such a calendar?