Summer draws to a close and school begins. The familiar pattern of the educational calendar begins to unfold for yet another year. Fall, winter, spring—ten months of learning still structured in most of our communities to fit the agrarian needs of past generations for harvesting and planting crops, with a long summer break for work in fields and gardens.

Culturally, the summer break from school still does impact family time. For some families, the break connects them to traditional vacations. For others, it adds stress as they struggle to find adequate care and appropriate activities for their children. A relatively small number of school districts have adopted some form of a year-round school schedule, with mixed research findings on the effectiveness of such a schedule. Some states, such as Utah, have seen the number of year-round schools actually decrease significantly in recent years.

Many educators believe that expanding school learning time is essential to school success. They’ve lengthened the school day in charter schools and in some grant-funded programs. Other educators focus on the learning loss due to the summer gap. They urge traditional schools to expand summer program opportunites. No single answer has been found to be most helpful in school scheduling.

Recently, a teacher colleague related a conversation she had with her elementary-school-age daughter at the end of the last school year. From that conversation came what seems to me a golden nugget of an idea about this troublesome subject of the school calendar. It’s hard to imagine an adult coming up with an idea like this because immediately mental roadblocks thwart further thinking. But listen to what Emma has to say on the subject.

As she was finishing her third grade year, Emma told her mom that she thought you should start school after the break for the winter holidays, not in August. She said that by December every year, she really had the hang of school—knew the routines and what she was doing, felt like a good student. It would be a good time to start a new grade with a new teacher.

When Emma’s mom told me this story, it was one of those extraordinary learning moments for me. WHAT IF you got your new class in January, taught them for five and a half months, and then got them back again at the end of August for another four months? What impact might such a structure have on summer learning loss? Teachers who have looped with their students for two years certainly have answers to this question. But looping happens only in a small percentage of schools. Why not a wholesale change to a calender year school schedule? Colleges and universities have long ago shifted their thinking to make January entrances and graduations commonplace.

Before your mind shifts to the reasons this would never work, imagine, just for a moment, all the gains Emma’s idea might provide for students (and teachers and families). In my next post I’ll talk about the social and cognitve theory that I believe underlies Emma’s sparkling and wonderful idea and some of the benefits I keep thinking about.

Thanks, Emma!