Why Do American Schools Have Such Long Summer Breaks?
Why do American schools have such long summer breaks? The dominant myth is that the school calendar emerged to accommodate 19th-century farmers’ kids who had to spend summer months toiling in the fields. Given that farm hands are most needed for spring planting and fall harvesting, that story never made much sense. In reality, the origins of school letting out for summer can be found in cities, not rural areas.
The American school calendar took shape in the early 20th century in response to the urban bourgeois’ rising prosperity. Well-off urbanites wanted their kids educated, but they also wanted a summer holiday away from the heat of city homes, schools, and other buildings in the days before air conditioning.
In the 21st century, however, this basis has been turned upside down. Air conditioning has made time indoors more comfortable during the summer months and a warming climate has made summer outdoors less pleasant. The seaside vacations that the wealthy were able to enjoy a century ago, meanwhile, remain out of reach for most. The result is that urban children today are out of school for months at a time each summer without much to show for it. In northern cities, where residential air conditioning is not yet universal, this is a real problem.
New York City’s average temperature is now 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in 1900—and projected to climb another few degrees by midcentury. Urban heat islands exacerbate the effects of warming and make life without A/C nearly unbearable in the city’s most built-up areas. At last tabulation, 9 percent of city households did not have A/C, including 14 percent in the Bronx and 10 percent in Brooklyn; in Manhattan’s Central Harlem neighborhood, 12 percent of households didn’t. These are some of the areas where households with children under 18 are most likely to reside. When their homes are stifling, New York City schools could offer these kids respite.
This energy and climate inversion is reason alone to consider scrapping extended summer breaks, but other reasons abound.
Considering the education system’s core purpose of transmitting knowledge and skills, the chief argument against summer is that it yields learning loss. Academics have regularly confirmed what any teacher or parent could tell you: kids forget quite a bit over the summer. Brookings Institution Megan Kuhfeld and Karyn Lewis analyzed summer slide research in 2023, finding that “a long line of research on learning and cognition has shown that procedural skills and those that involve a number of steps tend to rapidly deteriorate in the absence of practice or other reinforcement.” They note that learning loss is especially detectable in the span from 3rd grade through 8th grade.
Another argument against summer break is that while it may not have emerged to meet the needs of the bygone agricultural era, our economic and social structures have indeed changed dramatically and made summer less practical than it once was.
In the 1920s just 20 percent of American women were "gainful workers," to use the term of that epoch, and the majority of those working women were young and unmarried. Just 5 percent of married women were in the workforce. What that obviously meant was that during the summer months there was someone home to tend to the kids when school was out. Today, more than 70 percent of mothers are in the workforce. Most families these days (mine included) find themselves in a lurch each summer when school lets out. The ancillary, often-unspoken, role that school plays is childcare. During the large portion of the year it isn’t there, parents are more likely to be stressing over day camp pickup than decompressing on the beach.
By adopting a year-round school calendar, we resolve each of these issues: kids can enjoy air conditioning during the months when it’s most needed, lessons can be better retained, and families can be better served. Manhattan Institute education policy director Raymond Domanico sees the wisdom in moving toward the year-round model. “It’s common sense; practical; and, cost-effective compared to the union-based advocates to maintain budgets in the face of enrollment decline,” he told me. “It’s also consistent with parental needs in the current moment.” One trial he points to in Virginia involved two Richmond-area elementary schools adding just 20 days to the standard 180-day slate beginning in July 2023. After one year both schools improved their reading metrics—from 61 percent early-literacy proficiency at Fairfield Court Elementary to 81 percent, and from 53 percent to 58 percent at Cardinal Elementary. More surprisingly, they both saw improvements in their average attendance, too.
While summer retains a hold on our collective imagination, nostalgia shouldn’t keep us from a model that better meets our modern needs.
