A Teacher's Case Against Summer Vacation

—David Jakes/David Adam Kess/Ross Brenneman

• Ed Week

With so many huge education-reform ideas under discussion, why isn't altering summer vacation on the table?

I often feel as if I’m teaching in an age of uncertainty. Schools open and close in my urban district, bureaucracies reshuffle ad infinitum, and every few months this year I've gotten new information about how I’ll be evaluated this June. Yet one thing has stayed conspicuously out of the conversation—altering the long-held tradition of summer vacation.

The data around summer learning loss are clear. Students,especially low-income students without access to enriching activities stand to lose meaningful knowledge and skills in the eight weeks each year that they’re away from instruction. Given how popular it is to claim to be data driven, why aren't more states acting on this data? Equally in vogue is decrying how an industrial model of schools isn't fit to produce 21st century thinkers for a globalized economy. Yet the status quo on summer vacation don’t match up to either data-driven decision-making or the urge to bring our system in line with its global competitors.

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