Who Killed Summer? Why Some Schools Start in August and Others in September
3 Reasons So Many States Moved Up the First Day of Class and How Climate Change May Alter That Trend
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I’m spending time with my family in my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, this week, and yet again, I’m reminded of what may be the least-discussed-yet-most-consequential difference between North and South. I’m not talking about politics, religion, or college football prowess (Go Dawgs). I’m not even talking about eating habits, as exemplified by the culture-war skirmish that broke out last week when Cracker Barrell announced it was adding plant-based sausage to its menu, igniting charges of woke breakfast.
I’m talking about the first day of school.
Schools started in Georgia—and across much of the South—last week, in the opening hour of August. (In Arizona, the opening day was July 27th.) Schools start in New York City, checks calendar, four and a half weeks from now. That’s nearly as long as Noah was on the ark.
What could possibly explain this gap? And will rising temperatures across the country lead to rethinking this policy of sending children to school in the squelching weeks of August?
Let’s go back for a second. Children didn’t always have summers off. When public schools started in the latter 1880s, calendars varied, with urban schools clocking in at 240 days a year and rural schools taking large chunks of breaks to accommodate crop schedules. As Kenneth Gold, the author of School’s In, a history of summer vacation, told CNN, the primary reason for eliminating classes over the summer was “the ill effect of too much schooling on students’ and teachers’ health.”
The standard 180-day school year beginning around Labor Day and ending around Memorial Day became customary in the early 20th century.
That schedule stood in place for nearly a century and changed not because of shifts in the economy, political realignment, or the rise of air-conditioning, as members of my family guessed when I posed this question over dinner recently. But because of three factors:
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1. Standardized Testing
The biggest single reason is the rise of standardized testing as a way to evaluate both students and schools. As CNN reported, “An earlier start date gives teachers more instructional time before statewide assessment tests in the spring.” A number of high schools add that this extra time also helps high schoolers prepare for college entrance exams and AP tests.
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2. Christmas Vacation
Starting classes in August rather than September allows schools to finish the first semester before the Christmas break, thereby reducing stress of the holidays. John Deasy, who served as superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District when it moved the first day of school to August, told the Wall Street Journal that the new calendar lets students wrap up finals before the three-week winter break. "This was a purely academic decision for us," he said. He, too, brought up college, saying that the longer winter break gives high-school seniors more time to complete college applications.
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3. More Days Off
The final reason that comes up often is that starting school earlier in the year allows for more generous holidays during the year. The DeKalb and Cobb County districts around Atlanta cited this goal when they moved up their start date a few years. As the local public radio station, WABE reported, Cobb County Association of Educators President Connie Jackson said, “We have come to where we are happy and satisfied, and that’s important to us. And we’ve settled on Aug. 1.”
But for how long? No sooner has this new start time become settled practice than climate change is threatening to undermine it once again. The summer of 2022 has seen the warmest temperatures on record across the northern hemisphere. As the Washington Post reported in June, “Climate change is forcing schools to close early for ‘heat days.” With no air conditioning and no money to install it, districts are sending students home earlier in the year.
A study by the Government Accountability Office found that about 41 percent of public school districts in the United States need to update or replace the heating, cooling, and ventilation systems in at least half of their schools. That represents about 36,000 schools nationwide.
Even more trenchant, given the reasons for moving start dates earlier in the first place, R. Jinsung Park of UCLA, along with A. Patrick Behrer of Stanford and Joshua Goodman of Wheelock College, found in a study published last year in the journal Nature Human Behavior that for every day that students experience temperatures over 80 degrees, they do worse on standardized tests.
The same reasons that drove schools to start earlier in the summer may soon drive them to start later in the fall.
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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.
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