The debate over summer school exposes how we are trapped within failed bureaucratic approaches to universal public education. These include the traditional nine-month school calendar based on scripted goals, testing and labeling students, and mechanistic concepts like “remediation” and “enrichment.”

Summer school can be cost effective only if we eliminate it by replacing our traditional nine-month academic year with a year-round calendar. The prolonged summer gap contributes to the greatest failure of our much maligned education system: public school policies too often tend to perpetuate the inequities of our society instead of confronting and overcoming them.

The dominant influences on student achievement remainout-of-school factors, not school, curriculum or teacher quality, but that reality does not absolve us of the need to reform schools.

One place we can ensure that children experience equity is within the walls of schools, meaning we need to adopt year-round academic calendars with adequate but brief holidays throughout the year that are cost effective not in the raw dollars spent over 12 months (which will be more expensive in immediate costs than the nine-month system used now) but against the costly consequences of continuing traditional practices that we know fail our students by labeling and stratifying them.

Bureaucratic schooling that focuses on standards and tests instead of children, that labels children to support inequitable school experiences (remediation and enrichment), thatensures a widening of the achievement gap reflecting the equity gap (suspending formal schooling for months at a time) and that allows the education of children to remain the political pawn of state budgets and economic downturns — that is the schooling that will continue to fail children regardless of a well-crafted summer school program, fully funded or not.