Year-round schooling, which gained popularity in the 1970s, avoids long summer vacations in which students can during the school year. Under the plan, students attend classes as part of a normal grading period most of the summer. Their school years aren’t much longer than with a traditional schedule, just spread out differently, with their lost summer vacation days added to other breaks during the school year.

Cleveland’s move comes as some states like South Carolina and Florida have recently embraced or are trying out the approach, along with districts hoping to address pandemic learning loss. The number of schools using year-round schedules nationally fell from about 6% in the 1970s to under 3% before the pandemic, researchers report.

In Cleveland, previous district leaders once considered year-round school a promising way to turn around the struggling district. But it caught on in just six of Cleveland’s high schools, and new school leaders now want all district schools on the same calendar and curriculum so students aren’t lost if they change schools.

Leaders also aren’t convinced year-round school is helping. Athis year with researchers from Cleveland State University and the American Institutes for Research showed the city’s year-round schools often have higher math and English scores than other high schools, but mostly because the schools have more gifted students and students who would do well with any schedule. Research nationally is also mixed.

District CEO Warren Morgan decided gains were not enough to justify the additional $2.6 million in teacher salaries year-round classes cost.

“There was no evidence that there was substantial, meaningful difference in the academic outcomes in our different calendar types,” Morgan said before the school board vote last week. “We also recognize and value the excellence of our many different schools …but there’s also other variables…that make them great.”

David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year Round Education, said the pandemic renewed interest in year-round school as a possible way to tackle COVID learning loss, as well as increasing interest in related strategies, like adding summer learning programs or extra school days to the start or end of the school year.

Hornak estimates about 4% of schools now have a year-round schedule, but the association has scaled back over the years and has no staff to track it.

He said students are less likely to forget lessons over a shorter summer vacation. Longer breaks during the year, often about three weeks long, give schools a chance to give struggling students targeted help catching up, rather than waiting until July for a summer school that feels like a punishment.

“I would love school leaders to consider summer as just another academic block of time,” he said.

Paul Von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas and prominent skeptic of year-round school, said he sees no difference in learning from just scheduling the same number of school days in different ways.

“Instead of having one long break where students forget a lot, you have a bunch of short breaks where students forget a little,” Von Hippel said. “The amount of forgetting adds up to be about the same.”

He added that though the pandemic prompted districts to consider year-round classes, he sees no evidence that they have caught on in a meaningful way. 

Teachers, parents and students of Cleveland’s six year-round schools, however, fought the district CEO and implored the district school board at two hearings to keep a schedule they say made their schools unique and offered students chances they wouldn’t have with a standard school year.

Students from one year-round school even protested the change outside district headquarters last month.

Xavier Avery, a junior at Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School who organized the protest, reminded the school board right before its vote April 29 that his school has received state awards and has better test scores than the district average. He also said that students spend part of school days in warmer months on boats and planes, both learning to operate them and studying Lake Erie as part of the school’s specialized focus.

“Our year-round calendar plays a huge role in this success,” he said. “It’s what makes our programs, internships and hands-on learning possible.”

Cleveland also cut other non-traditional schedules as part of its push to put all schools on the same schedule. Morgan and the school board also axed extended school years, which added extra days at 17 other schools, as well as extended days, running 30 minutes longer each day at six schools. Those cuts drew more fire from parents, who said that being able to choose schools that offer extra time keeps them in the district, rather than selling their homes and moving to suburban districts.

Year-round schools started gaining national attention in the 1970s, experts say, for two major reasons. In some cases, most notably fast-growing California where schools were too small to handle exploding enrollment, schools spread classes out over the whole year so they could stagger student schedules to accommodate all of them.

The other major draw, the one that appealed to Cleveland, was limiting “summer learning loss” or “summer slide,” where students forget much of what they learned during long vacations. 

A found mixed results, with Black, Hispanic and low-income students more likely to see gains and the staggered schedules in California more likely to show losses.

California stopped using that strategy after building new schools for all its students. 

The total also fell as cities like and dropped the approach several years ago after not seeing big academic gains. Post-pandemic data was not readily available.

Educators still see promise in the approach. and three school districts in Florida are now  

Other school districts in Dallas and Philadelphia are trying a related, though different, approach: simply adding voluntary days to the year to reduce summer slide and to help students who are behind catch up, whether from the pandemic or just needing more class time. Richmond, Virginia, has also added at a few struggling schools, though squashed attempts to do that for the whole district.

Cleveland’s experiment with year-round school started in 2009 at a specialized STEM school created as a magnet for the city’s top students. Former Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon soon after considered moving the entire district to year-round schedules. 

In launching a district turnaround plan in 2012, he jokingly dismissed the traditional school year as an “agrarian calendar we currently use so that all of my students are free to bring in the harvest every summer.”

Gordon said the district could close half the gap between his students and higher-performing suburban students by eliminating the accumulation of 12 years of summer slides before graduation. 

But attempts to use a year-round calendar at one large neighborhood high school failed after parents objected to students losing summer breaks and its effect on family vacations, summer jobs and school schedules of siblings on regular schedules.

A lack of air conditioning in some old schools and parent objections to a much-smaller change — starting the school year earlier in August than before — put plans to use the schedule at more schools on hold.

The year-round schedule ended up at no neighborhood schools and just six schools the district created with alternative class styles — a school based in a hospital or one focused on learning through digital art projects — that families could pick, but not be assigned to.

Upon becoming mayor of Philadelphia, that she will establish a working group on full-day and year-round schooling – an idea she had supported . The group will develop a strategy to keep Philadelphia public schools open for longer hours during the week, from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., as well as over the summer, and to provide “meaningful, instructive out-of-school programming and job opportunities for students.”

Below, education expert answers five questions about year-round schooling in Philadelphia.

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What do we know about the mayor’s plan?

Parker is proposing to keep Philadelphia public school buildings open longer hours and more days throughout the year. According to Superintendent Tony Watlington’s strategic plan, a year-round and extended-day school calendar will be piloted in up to 10 schools, with the goal of increasing student academic achievement. It does not state how many days or hours will be added to the 180 days Philadelphia currently requires.

This is different from what’s commonly known as , which doesn’t add extra school days but simply moves the existing days around so that there are multiple short breaks instead of a long summer break. For example, students might have 45 school days followed by 15 days of break, or 60 school days followed by 20 days of break.

The Philadelphia school district plan aligns with a recommendation made over 40 years ago, in 1983, in the report commissioned by the Department of Education. The report suggested that the school year should be increased to 200 to 220 days.

How prevalent is year-round schooling?

The length of the school day and year varies around the world. Japan and Australia have school for almost the entire year, while the U.S. has school for only about nine months. In contrast, countries like Finland, Iceland and Ireland have shorter school days and years than the U.S. France has a longer school year but similar total hours per year as the U.S. get a two-hour lunch and do not attend school on Wednesdays.

In Philadelphia, have added a summer extension program. But they still maintain traditional school hours during the school year.

Several states are participating in an initiative this year called the . This three-year initiative involves 40 schools that will add 300 hours to their existing school calendar by having either longer days, longer school years or both.

Can the mayor legally do this?

The current minimum number of days that Pennsylvania schools are required to be open is 180 – similar to . Districts can decide when they start and finish. The Philadelphia mayor can certainly extend the school day and the school hours since she , who in turn control who is hired or fired as superintendent. And, most importantly, the new superintendent is supportive of the mayor’s plan.

A more important question is: Should the mayor do this?

Parker has said that she wants to catch kids up academically to grade level. Only about in Philadelphia public schools score at or above the proficient level on standardized reading tests, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But what are the additional costs? In addition to possible increased student and teacher fatigue and stress, the main cost is money. Keeping schools open and staffed longer requires more dollars.

Despite the hope that longer school days or years will lead to gains in student achievement, there’s .

If Philly does in fact adopt a longer school day or year, even with just 10 schools on a voluntary basis, it could prove difficult to evaluate the effects.

Foremost among these challenges is . Schools that have support to opt in are likely different from schools that do not.

A better evaluation plan would be to first solicit applications for the pilot program from the more than 200 Philadelphia schools. Then, from those schools who volunteer to participate, randomly choose 10 for the pilot and then, at the end of the school year, measure the outcomes and compare them to the schools that weren’t chosen.

What are the potential gains?

The Accelerate Philly plan cites , which suggests that “summer and after-school programming can be effective in accelerating learning.”

Adding additional hours for before-school and after-school enrichment, and for more days during the school year, supports parents by providing free and convenient child care. It makes it easier for them to drop off and pick up kids on their way to and from work.

It also provides kids a safe and supportive environment for more hours. Keeping kids at school longer during the day and for more days during the year can . More time in school can mean less time on the streets.

There is still no decision on whether student participation will be mandatory. If it is not, some kids who might benefit may not get their parents’ consent to go to school earlier, stay longer and go for more days over the summer.

What hurdles might year-round schooling face in Philly?

Funding will be a big hurdle. Keeping school buildings open longer requires more energy. Many Philly public schools to be open throughout the hot summer months.

More importantly, this plan requires more personnel – particularly teachers who can stay more hours. A January 2024 report from Penn State University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis found that Philadelphia teachers are leaving the profession at “” – considerably higher than the rest of Pennsylvania. More Philadelphia teachers are quitting or retiring than those who are being newly trained, according to the report.

It is not clear yet how the to year-round schooling throughout the district or how all the additional hours and programming would fit into the .

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

And yet, folks, be careful what you wish for. Converting “education” into a top-tier political issue doesn’t mean that voters will automatically, enthusiastically gravitate to the , productive education policy issues that wonky advocates would prefer. Voters in didn’t embrace thoughtful, nuanced debates about how to fund schools more fairly or ensure that they are transparent about how children are performing academically. 

No, a handful of prominent campaigns used mostly imaginary allegations under the banner of critical race theory to inflame a very real culture war (and spark an smokescreen of a conversation about American history and racial injustice). 

Can anyone thread the needle — impactful education policy idea that’s also politically potent? For instance, my colleague here at ����Ӱ��, Jo Napolitano, reported recently about districts across the country reconsidering the traditional 180-day calendar. It’s one of those rare wonky education policy ideas that seems to be attracting some political attention. As part of his since-abandoned run for governor, former offered a proposal for year-round school with extended school days. All New York children would have been eligible — and the $5.4 billion in new staff and operational costs would be paid for via increased income taxes on those making more than a million dollars annually. 

“This is how we give at life, give working parents peace of mind, and reduce inequality in New York State,” the former mayor said.

Start with economic inequality, where there’s no longer . American democracy cannot long sustain with growing gaps between wealthy and poor — and stagnating economic mobility. Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how to curb inequality, but it’s not difficult to make a case for raising taxes on people making seven- or eight-digit annual incomes — particularly in New York, (the highest share of any state). 

Year-round schooling also seems pretty well-aligned to the second goal: as far as supporting families goes, this is a slam dunk. As I’ve written in the past, U.S. school schedules work terribly for many families. School days rarely cover the standard 9 to 5 work window. So millions of families (including mine!) muddle through, scrambling together child care to fill the gaps, tacking on afterschool programming and/or summer camps — often at significant expense. For most of us, it’s an incoherent patchwork. If we align the school calendar to better match more families’ work schedules, we’ll save them time, energy and resources. 

: school schedules aren’t designed for working families. Before COVID, it was pretty rare to talk about mandatory, universal K-12 education in terms of what it means for the labor market or for working parents. When we argue about schools, we usually argue about how to make them work better for kids. But now, after many of us spent the better part of 22 months juggling full-time work and child care … the time is ripe for refitting schools to better meet families’ schedule needs. 

It’s the third goal — improving outcomes for kids — where the case for a year-long school calendar and longer school days is less clear cut. To start, the evidentiary case for more learning time is more complicated than you might think. Yes, more hours can help kids do better, but it’s not a simple addition problem. Indeed, , for extended learning programs, “The weakest outcomes were generally found among programs whose duration was on the extreme ends of the spectrum — programs that were among those offering the fewest or greatest number of hours.” That is, while more time can help students succeed, after a certain point, there are diminishing returns to simply staying longer at school.

As usual, it’s not just a matter of quantity — the quality of extra learning hours also matters. And that, naturally, runs smack into the central education policy design problem for U.S. schools: they’re profoundly inequitable in terms of resources and quality, and those inequities fall along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines. As such, extending and expanding that system without intentionally addressing these injustices isn’t going to help kids who need it the most. That is, in under-resourced, segregated, and/or dysfunctional schools aren’t going to see dramatic, world-beating academic or developmental gains if they get extra time in those same settings. Predictably, meanwhile, most of their privileged peers will be spending their late afternoons and midsummers in high-quality learning environments, compounding their opportunities and advantages. 

It’s not super complicated to figure out how to keep kids safe and at school all year so that working families can stay on track. But figuring out how to expand and significantly change the school year in ways that actually serve kids’ best interests … that’s much harder. There are endless and complex questions to be settled in the planning and design. Would the additional time at school be spent continuing and accelerating what teachers and students were doing during the standard school day and year? Or would it be spent on new and different learning activities? Would enrichment be concentrated in the summer months or spread across the new schedule? Who will teach these programs — will credential requirements from the standard school calendar be a must, or will there be different expectations? To what degree would the answers to these sorts of questions fall under state control vs how much flexibility would local school districts get? How much of this will need to be worked out in collective bargaining — and how smooth will that process be? 

We need to think about the logistics here: schools are sticky, slow institutions. Leadership can’t simply flip a switch and make major changes to how they do things. Their processes and traditions have old roots snaking deep into their daily and yearly calendars. Teachers have lesson plans built around curricula that are designed for the current, standard, 180-day school year. It’s no simple thing to — BOOM — imagine year-round school into existence and make it effective and equitable for kids. 

In other words, expanding the school schedule is a serious, nuanced idea that requires lots of careful policy design and implementation. It’s the stuff of white papers and think tank panel discussions. Also, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t have the necessary political juice to spark a political movement. Parents — that is, potential education voters — activated about banning books in their children’s schools aren’t likely to switch their activism over to a technocratic discussion of how to make year-round school work for everyone. Indeed, year-round school was no balm for de Blasio’s gubernatorial ambitions: he abandoned his run .

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Find him on Twitter . The views expressed here are his alone. 

An earlier start date, a later end date and numerous, elongated breaks throughout the year could allow more timely remediation for children in need — and enrichment for those who are not.

New York City’s new schools chancellor , has proposed that children in the nation’s largest district report to class on Saturday and during the summer. In neighboring Connecticut, Hartford Public Schools have already started opening several buildings on Saturdays, offering some 800 students who have fallen behind a chance to accelerate their learning.

Such thinking has received at least tacit support from . “Why do we go back to the same system that gives kids two months without engagement in the summer?” he asked in November. “We need to rethink that.”

The suggestion comes as the fast-spreading Omicron variant is again forcing Even before the latest surge hit, districts had begun — moving to four days of instruction per week and adding days off to their calendars — in an effort to curb .

While any change to the school calendar typically involves negotiation — and possibly opposition — from the teachers union, Banks said he’d gladly employ members of the community if New York City’s United Federation of Teachers pushes back. 

“People think that means 300-plus school days. That is not the case.”
—David G. Hornak, National Association for Year-Round Education executive director

Schools throughout the rest of the country are considering their options: An influx of federal dollars meant to address long-standing achievement and opportunity gaps could bring about real change.  Meanwhile, a less-rigid calendar might lead to greater flexibility for COVID-related emergencies, allowing districts to more easily consider closing for a week or two to quell an outbreak, knowing they could make up the time later.

Harris M. Cooper, Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said it’s too early to make predictions about whether more schools will switch to balanced or modified calendars. But the chaos of the last two years might make it more attractive to families that have already weathered major shifts in scheduling, he said. 

“They’ll say, ‘Hey, the kids were home in the wintertime and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing,’” Cooper said.

Still, a fundamental shakeup to the traditional calendar might be a tough sell. David G. Hornak, superintendent of Holt Public Schools in Michigan and executive director of the , said many who are new to the concept are left with the wrong impression.

“People think that means 300-plus school days,” he said. “That is not the case.”

Instead, most districts that implement the program still operate on a 180-day schedule. The additional or elongated breaks, called “intersessions,” are optional: Districts can’t mandate that children return to the classroom — nor can they demand teachers lead these lessons. All are invited to participate, but some will no doubt choose to stay home. 

is so taken by the prospect of curbing learning loss by modifying the school calendar that it’s offering grants of up to $75,000 to districts to examine its feasibility. So far, 22 have been awarded pilot funding, using the money to in their community, organize stakeholder groups, conduct surveys and visit campuses that already have the plan in place.

“COVID gave us a chance to think outside the box, to look for different ways to reach students, moving away from the cookie-cutter approach,” said Jon Ram Mishra, assistant superintendent of elementary education, early learning, special programs and federal accountability for the Washington state education department.

A former special education teacher, Mishra believes all children would benefit from the type of individualized learning plans he once crafted for his own students. A balanced calendar, one with built-in flexibility in how it rolls out the typical 180 days of instruction, allows kids an opportunity to spend more time in the classroom if needed, offering them a more tailored experience than the traditional model, he said.

Kevin Chase, superintendent of Educational Service District 105 in Washington’s Yakima County, which serves some 66,000 children, points to yet another benefit: He said the plan allows schools to provide remediation closer to the time when a student first struggles, rather than months later during a summer session.

“This is my 30th year in education,” he said. “I know the need for intervention is for it to be timely.”

And, Chase said, longer breaks throughout the year — many participating districts shave six or seven weeks off of the typical 12- to 13-week summer vacation — help teachers recharge. They also allow families to spend more time together during the holidays, with, oftentimes, a full week off for Thanksgiving.

Hornak estimates 4 percent of the nation’s roughly 50 million public schoolchildren attend so-called “balanced calendar” schools. Several campuses within the Dallas system operate under this model, as do those in and .  Other schools around the nation are considering the idea, including those in , and

Hornak said the approach has many merits, including that it cuts down on the amount of time teachers spend reteaching the previous year’s curriculum, which, using a traditional calendar, could take up to 40 days.

The cost of remediation in grades K-12 can bleed into a student’s future: Those who graduate unprepared for college for remedial courses covering topics they should have already mastered.

The balanced calendar is particularly helpful for economically disadvantaged students who suffer mightily during the summer with few opportunities to learn, Hornak said. It also allows those educators who choose to participate a chance to make additional cash — and student teachers to sharpen their skills.

But not everyone seems eager to make the switch: 66 percent of 1,500 parents nationwide in November said they did not support a longer school year. Seventy-three percent opposed longer school days and 67 percent spoke out against a shorter summer vacation. San Diego, which had 134 traditional and 39 year-round schools, paid millions in recent years to its year-round campuses to a traditional calendar, citing, among other factors, scheduling conflicts for families with children in different schools with differing breaks.

“My sense of both our data and other people’s data is that parents pretty much just want things to be normal,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, who co-directed the study. “They felt like the school calendar worked for them and their kids.”

Polikoff attributed parents’ attitude to a lack of understanding and awareness about learning loss: Many schools lowered standards and suspended letter grades and testing during the shutdowns, so they didn’t see evidence that their children had fallen behind. A full 84 percent of parents in that same survey said they were not at all concerned or only a little concerned about the amount of time their child spent learning.

“If that is the case, why would they support a radical change in the school calendar?” he asked.

Still, he said, he believes extending the time a child spends learning is greatly beneficial, especially after a year of staggering loss. According to one study, students in majority-Black schools are now a full year behind those in mostly white schools, widening an already persistent achievement gap by a third, according to by McKinsey & Co.

“The more time kids are in class, the better,” Polikoff said, adding that schools that have a also tend to see losses in terms of student achievement.

“Teachers said the intersession provided a break for people who needed it. Others worked the intersession and felt a passion again for teaching.”
—Mark Anderson, Highland School District 203 schools superintendent

Highland School District 203 in Cowiche, Washington, roughly 150 miles southeast of Seattle, implemented a modified calendar for the first time this school year. More than 50 percent of its 1,200 students participated in the Oct. 25-29  intersession with kindergarteners building catapults to launch mini-pumpkins, first and second graders constructing weight-bearing bridges and high schoolers working on coding and robotics.

School Superintendent Mark Anderson said the program is off to a strong start: It scored high among participants in a recent survey earning a 4.5 out of 5.

“Teachers said the intersession provided a break for people who needed it,” he said. “Others worked the intersession and felt a passion again for teaching.”

But the cost — approximately $300,000 per year — remains a concern in a district with a roughly $20 million annual budget. The superintendent hopes the state will continue to fund the plan long after COVID dollars dry up.

“We would hate to see that this is a success and we can’t continue it,” he said.

Vanessa Williams, a high school English teacher who has been with the district for 27 years, said she feels less burned out now as compared to this same time period in years past — even though she taught during intersession.

She said the current model is better for children — it gives them a sense of control after nearly two years of disruption — and teachers. And she doesn’t speak only for herself: She’s head of the teachers union.

“Since intersession did not add days to the teachers beyond what was contracted, and because it allowed teachers to make extra money … the union was on board,” she said, adding, “it helps that they had a say in what the balanced calendar was going to look like.”

Melissa Benicio Jimenez said her 6-year-old took part in the October session and relished the opportunity to learn in a more creative and relaxed setting. Her high school-aged children were not as enthusiastic.  

“I chose to stay home because I still wasn’t adjusted to the new schedule and I didn’t like it at the time,” said 15-year-old Andrew.

But, he said, he’ll likely attend the January intersession because it will give him a chance to visit area colleges in preparation for a possible career in law enforcement.

“Now that I’m used to it and I see how it helps,” he said, “I kind of like it.”

Lead Image: Elementary students at Highland School District 203 in Cowiche, Washington, work on STEM-related projects during an October break in which children were invited to class to continue their education. (Mindy Schultz)