Public-school students across our coverage area are returning to class for the 2024-25 academic year, and one of the duties of their teachers in coming weeks will be to help jog their memories on things they had learned the preceding year but forgotten over summer break.
That’s not just us saying it – a survey of Arlington students, covered on these pages last week, revealed that a large percentage of them expected they would face a hard time retaining material over the long summer layoff.
Which leads to the inevitable, and in our case perennial, question: Why in the world are we sticking with a 19th-century education calendar in a 21st-century world?
Last time we checked, Northern Virginia students did not need the summer off in order to tend to the family farm. (They can handle their backyard or basement marijuana plants in their spare time.) Yet we still schedule school years based on such outdated notions.
Seems it would be much more effective to run school year-round with reasonable breaks of a week or two several times per year. Much better academic outcomes, we’d bet.
Of course, educators – or, more likely, the unions that allegedly represent them – wouldn’t want to give up one of the big perks of the job, summers off (or the chance to earn extra bucks doing ancillary work). Many parents, too, probably would balk at having their routine changed. So we’d imagine any school district trying to lead the charge on this would come out bruised and bloodied.
But the fact is, we either want students to have the best chance at academic success, or we don’t. The current calendar suggests we don’t.
