The traditional school calendar and summer vacation trace roots back to over 100 years ago. In the United States today, the majority of schools average about 180 days, from the end of August to the beginning of June. There is the occasional holiday break or in-service day, but students typically go to school every weekday until summer break comes along.

The traditional school schedule is referred to as the ‘agrarian’ school calendar as its origin is commonly attributed to the large farming regions in the US where kids would be needed to perform labor on their family farms. 

However, in a PBS article, historian Kenneth Gold stated that a more realistic agrarian school calendar would have “a short winter term and a short summer term” with breaks in between. This better correlates with the farming season, allowing families the extra labor from their kids to plant crops in the spring and harvest during the fall. Attending school during the most important months for a farm would significantly reduce labor and could be detrimental to the success of a family-run farm. 

During the mid-1800s, city schools were known to have 11 or even 12-month long school calendars while their more rural school counterparts would be lucky to be open for half that amount of time. The “financial state of the district determined how long the school was open during the year” and keeping a school open the entire year was deemed too expensive. Buildings at this time did not have air conditioning and schools provided a two-week break during the hottest months of the year to prevent students from overheating. This break was extended to four weeks because of poor student attendance during the summer, which eventually became the summer vacation students know today. 

In an effort to standardize school calendars and increase student attendance across the country, the summer break from the urban schools and the first half of the fall break in rural schools were combined to create the allotted time off from school. The amount of time that schools were required to be open was also changed to about six months with some discrepancies between different school districts for the exact number of days. 

One argument used against the traditional school schedule is that the long break in the summer leaves a lot of time for kids to forget almost everything they learned over the year. This leads to a considerable amount of time spent reviewing each year, especially for science and math classes where the information builds upon itself. Last year, Paul T. von Hippel, a professor at the University of Texas, tried to replicate the 1980s study that created the basis for the idea of the “summer slide”. While replicating the study, von Hippel and his colleagues “found that the testing methods used three decades ago tended to distort student scores” with the difficulty of the questions creating an achievement gap. 

Additionally, the agrarian background and reasoning for the modern school calendar is no longer relevant. The number of farmworkers has dropped from nearly 14 million in the early 1900s to less than 4 million by the year 2000. The truth is that kids just aren’t needed as labor on farms anymore. But, changing a school’s calendar is easier said than done. 

Although switching to a year-round calendar is often justified by saying that the change is to improve education, the effects are still questionable. Benefits from adopting a year-round school calendar are shown in elementary and middle schools, but there is not very much evidence of improvement at the high school level. The disruption that comes from changing such a long-standing system is not currently worth it with the lack of information on high school performance. Concerns about the additional costs of keeping school buildings open all year is still a considerable factor for the school calendar, but it’s no longer because of heating problems. Teacher salaries, electricity bills, and keeping the cafeteria stocked are just a few areas of interest, not to mention the changes in the community due to teen summer job vacancies left vacant because students now have to attend school year-round. 

The busy, packed schedules that students, especially those in high school, have during the school year limits the amount of free time they have. Instead of taking kids out of school for vacation, families can just wait until the summer when schedules are looser and their kids won’t miss any important lessons. Many families also travel around the country for college visits during summer break. Being forced to take these trips during the school year could lead to a reduced college list and less time to consider each campus. 

Even though the agrarian school calendar may be old and outdated, it is still an integral part of American culture.