No, summer ended a month ago.
Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and on today's episode we will be focusing again on American culture and day -to -day life here in the United States.
Specifically we will be talking about school schedules, summer break, and when back to school time is here in the United States.
A little bit about me in case you have not listened to previous episodes.
I am an English teacher teaching English as a second language and I'm also a public school teacher.
So, I teach high school here in California and recently in the past decade or two there has been a trend where summer break does not necessarily line up with summer time here in the United States.
Since we are in the northern hemisphere, summer is officially from June 22 to September 22.
Those are our hottest months of the year and what is considered summer time here where we are.
However, this does not mean that students are out of school during this time.
Traditionally in the past, anytime before the 1980s or early 1990s almost every school was out for summer break from June until September.
There is a holiday called Labor Day here in the United States which is always at the beginning of September and traditionally after Labor Day is when schools would start back and the new school year would begin.
However, recently there has been some trends where the beginning of the school year has moved up.
It has become earlier and earlier.
Again these are general trends.
This does not apply to every student but the majority of students here in the United States, about 88 % of public school students are in school in August.
The reason why it does not apply to everyone is that in the United States there is no federal regulation about when school has to start or when school has to stop in most cases.
Usually states and local governments and individual school districts are able to set their own schedule and decide for themselves when the beginning of the school year is and when the end of the school year is.
This means that depending where you live, what state you live in and even what city you live in, school schedules might be a little bit different.
For example, where I live, my school always starts the second week of August, but one of my friends teaches in a school district about 10 minutes away from me and he had students for the first day of school on July 31st.
Very early to have a first day of school.
When we look at the map of the United States, what we notice is that schools that are in the northeast, so New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, that area of the United States, they tend to start school later.
They tend to still traditionally start in September which would correlate more with the end of September.
In the South, so Florida and Oklahoma and Texas, they tend to start in August and then when you get to the west coast, you have schools that start in August and even some that start in July like in Arizona or in my case in the city that's right next to mine.
So the question becomes why?
Why is it that we have summer break or what we call summer break that ends in the middle of summer?
Why is it that our students no longer have June to September off, but are in school in July or August?
And like with most things, there's a number of reasons.
There's a number of factors.
So I'll talk about the most common ones and why they have had an impact on the shifting of our school schedules here in the US.
Now the number one reason at least I would say here in California is money.
In California and in a few other states around the country, public schools get their money based on how many days a student attends school.
So for example, every day that your students are at your school, your school gets a little bit of money.
But when your students are not in school, when they're absent for the day, your school does not get that money.
Because of this in California, schools want to make sure that they're open on the days when students are at their home and are willing to come to school, and that the school is closed on dates when students might be traveling with their family and missing school.
Because of this time around Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year's, spring break, those tend to be longer breaks because students tend to travel with their families more.
And when they're traveling with their family, they're not at school.
And so the schools would not get as much money if they were open on those days compared to on different days of the year.
So because of the need to extend certain breaks and have school days around different holidays, our beginning of our year has drifted earlier and earlier.
Like I said, my school district starts in August, the second week of August.
And I would say most school districts around me start either the beginning of August through maybe the third week of August.
Another reason why we've had this change is because of state standardized tests.
Now, I am a teacher, and I know that standardized tests are not the best way to determine if a student has learned something.
Teachers like myself know that it's not the best assessment of how much a student has learned in the year.
However, schools and the states take these scores very seriously.
There's a lot of pressure that's put on state standardized tests and how well students do on them and what their scores are.
Because of this and because the pressure that's tied to these test scores, schools want to prepare their students as much as possible ahead of our test time.
Usually, these tests are given in the spring around April or May.
And because of that, what schools will want to do is they want to maximize the amount of instruction time, the amount of time that students are in the classroom before these tests.
If school would start in August versus September, you can have an additional month before that test time.
You can have an additional month to prepare your students.
Or if you start in July, you could have maybe even an additional two months.
That's a lot of time.
That's a significant amount of hours.
That's a significant amount of learning that could occur in the classroom.
And theoretically, that would lead to higher test scores.
I say theoretically because, again, we as teachers know that doesn't always work out as planned, but that is the logic that schools are using when they're adjusting their schedules and wanting to start earlier in the year.
A third reason has to do with the way our school year is structured, at least at the high school level.
At the high school level, the year is split into two halves.
What happens is that you have a first half of the year where you have a set of classes and you get a grade.
And then you have a second half of the year where you have maybe slightly different classes, maybe the same, and you get another grade.
So students who are in high school usually get two grades for each class that they take, each course that they're taking.
And sometimes this applies to middle school and elementary.
Not always, but traditionally for sure in high school, this structure exists.
What happens is when you start your school year in September, usually the first half of your year ends sometime in January.
Now that sounds great at first until you realize that you have winter break in December.
You usually have schools closed around Christmas time through New Year so students can enjoy the holidays with their families.
Because of this, when students would return to the classroom in January right after New Year's, they would have to review, teachers would have to prepare them, and then they would have to take final exams.
If you've ever worked with teenagers, you know that they forget things.
Having two weeks off is not ideal if you're trying to get them to take a test immediately after you get back to school.
And so there was a lot of dead time.
There was a lot of time where teachers had to review material and prepare, and that was a little bit of a wasted instructional time.
By moving the beginning of the school year to August, the semester now ends in December.
And what happens is you have your course, your class that you're taking, students are in it from August through December, and then right before we go on vacation, right before that winter break, students take their final exams, they figure out what their grade is in the class, everything is entered
and finalized, and then we go on winter break.
This means that when we come back in January, it's a new course, it's a new grade set, and you're able to move on with new material instead of wasting time reviewing, preparing for final exams.
Those are probably the top three reasons why school has started earlier and earlier.
Now, one thing I get when I tell my students who live in other countries about our school schedule, they ask me, well, isn't it hot when you go back to school?
And my answer is definitely yes.
I live in Southern California.
It is hot here in the summertime.
It's warm, very warm.
When we go back to school, it's usually about 95 to 100 degrees when we start the school year, which of course is in Fahrenheit because I'm in the United States.
So that's around maybe 34 to 38 degrees Celsius.
It's warm, it's hot.
Hopefully your school, if you're in one of these classrooms, if you're in Southern California or in the south of the United States, hopefully it has really good air conditioning.
I can tell you from experience, I've been in classrooms that do not have very good air conditioning, which means that it is very uncomfortable to be in the class when it is that warm outside.
But there's nothing really we can do about it.
We just have to start school when the school district says and start the school year off, even though it is still summertime.
So that means that for my students, for example, our school year goes from August through June.
We get done in June and then they have their summer break, which lasts from about the middle of June to the middle of August.
Of course, this doesn't match up exactly with the summer season here in the Northern Hemisphere, but that is what we consider summer break to be.
And that means students usually go back to school shopping and start preparing for the school year about mid July or at least by the end of July, especially my friend who teaches at that school district that started on July 31st, his students were definitely getting ready for school in July and getting
ready to start the new year.
Well, I hope you learned a little bit about the American School Calendar here in the United States and why the start of the school year has been moved up earlier and earlier.
Even though we call it summer break, it doesn't necessarily correlate with summertime here in the Northern Hemisphere.
And our school year starts pretty much in the middle of summer now.
If you're watching on YouTube, please leave a comment in the comment section below and let me know when is summer break and when does the school year start in whatever country you are in.
I'd love to compare the differences and just see how school calendars are different around the world.
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And until then, keep learning English!
