March 12th, 2025

Dear Readers,

It’s spring break here in Texas, and it has me thinking about the schedule of the school year and how long students (and teachers) should really be in school.

No surprise that the profession of teaching (usually) has built-in vacations, such as spring break, winter break, the occasional fall break or thanksgiving break, and the granddaddy of them all, summer break.

While, of course, I love and benefit from these breaks, I’ve been contemplating the idea of a year-long school schedule.

Here’s a question: Why does the school year start in August? Wouldn’t it make more sense if it began in January with the new year?

That, along with many other things in public education, has always perplexed me.

By no means am I suggesting that more school be added to the instructional calendar; if anything, I'm suggesting less. I am merely saying that the school year should be laid out differently.

Instead, the school year should begin at the beginning or middle of January. This would have students graduating or moving on to the next grade in December, which makes the most sense. The new year means new beginnings, so it only makes sense that you should be moving on to the next grade, too.

Breaking the school year into two halves is not beneficial to learning. Asking students to give all of their effort for eighteen weeks at a time with only a handful of “breaks” or holidays is just not realistic and (from my experience) futile.

Therefore, by breaking up the year into quadmesters, students (and teachers) can give full effort for nine or so weeks with the welcome break of four weeks. While this would take away from the almost three-month-long summer break, it would create more breaks throughout the school year.

If you ask any teacher or student, this is a fantastic trade-off.

Not only does a year-long academic calendar benefit the learning and teaching, but it also translates to the “grown-up” world in a much more accurate way. Very few jobs have a schedule that gives you multiple months off at a time, so if students can acclimate to the type of schedule that they will most likely be following for the rest of their lives, they will benefit from it.