Jersey Jazzman: More "Teachers Get Summers Off" Nonsense

Jersey Jazzman: More "Teachers Get Summers Off" Nonsense:

More "Teachers Get Summers Off" Nonsense

It's one of my favorite reformy memes: "Teachers get summers off!" Today's version comes to us via Matt Yglesias:

There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation. It's a cheap way of doing something nice for teachers, but summer vacation is a disaster for poor children and their parents, creating massive avoidable inequities in life outcomes and seriously undereducating the population. [emphasis mine]

The frustrating thing here is that a lot of Yglesias's column makes sense. There is no doubt that poor children suffer in comparison to wealthier children in their learning outcomes due to variations in their summer experiences (a great argument, by the way, for not using test-based teacher evaluations, since we have no clue how students with varying summer activities are distributed across teachers). I think we need to be careful about how we develop summer programs, and we're going to have a hard time addressing whether such programs should be mandatory, especially for more affluent families and communities that