Early-release days, I discovered, are common for elementary school students in the Boston area. Quincy, Newton, and Arlington have early-release days on Wednesdays. Brookline gets out early on Fridays. And towns from Braintree to Needham have their own crazy quilts of monthly time off.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I grew up about 45 minutes from Boston, and attended a school with half-days on Tuesdays. I remember that lots of kids took a bus to Nashoba Valley Ski Area on Tuesday afternoons in the winter. I wasn’t particularly good at skiing, but I went along and tried to do a medium-good job on not-too-steep slopes.
But that was in the 1980s and ’90s, when almost none of the moms in my town — at least as far as I remember — had a job. So when school required parents to pick up kids at lunchtime once a week, it was obvious who would wait in the line of station wagons.
The world in 2025 is different. For one thing, life in the Boston area has gotten frighteningly expensive. The median single-family home topped the million-dollar mark this summer and Boston’s median rent is well north of $3,000 per month. Many families need two (robust) incomes just to cover the basics. In the spring of 2025, nearly 78 percent of women 25-54 were in the American labor force, close to an all-time high (which was set in 2024).
I asked former Massachusetts secretary of education Paul Reville if our schools are set up to accommodate working families. “No,” he says. “They’re not.” Instead, Reville, who served under Deval Patrick from 2008 to 2013, argues, “They’re a legacy artifact” that was “set up in another era.”
After all, how many parents get more than 10 weeks of vacation each year? How many struggle to afford camp? (Which is not only expensive, but also competitive to get into, and — as I’ve discovered — often a pain in the neck to drive your kids to.)
For families, school schedules present two distinct problems. First, there’s that huge stretch of summer, which can make kids prone to backsliding in English, math, and foreign languages. Second, schools’ daily schedules are completely incompatible with holding down a job: It’s hard to imagine any working parent — whether a nurse or city bus driver or financial analyst or biotech executive — who would be able to handle regular 3 p.m. dismissals, along with frequent half-days and full days off.
Keri Rodrigues, a mom of five with two children in the Somerville Public Schools, says she has spent years “running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” trying to provide her children with supervision on half-days and professional days, as well as after school and during vacations. “It’s chaotic,” she says. “Can Auntie help? Can Mom get some time off of work?”
As a working parent — Rodrigues is the cofounder of the National Parents Union — she says you can find yourself earning just a little too much to qualify for subsidized care.
Which is exactly the problem that Ana Oliver, a mom of three in Brockton, has encountered. One year, when she was doing her taxes, she realized she was spending close to $6,000 for before and after care, but she made a little too much money — she works two jobs as a nurse — to qualify for vouchers.
Oliver has also had summers when she wanted to enroll her children in camp, but the math just didn’t work. Camps can range from about $300 a week for the East Boston YMCA to $1,000 a week for “Wild about Science” at Beaver Country Day School’s camp in Chestnut Hill. It is “so, so expensive,” Oliver says. “They just stayed home with my mom because I just couldn’t afford it.”
Parents I spoke with face a school schedule that’s hopelessly out of touch with their lives — a schedule that imposes a burden so great, they simply cannot be the caretakers or workers they want to be. And — notes Rodrigues — “I haven’t seen anybody doing much of anything about it.”
When my friend Sherry Tsai moved to Irvine, California, in 2020, her house was in an area that allowed her to choose between two public schools: one on a traditional schedule, and one on a year-round schedule. “ I really liked the idea of year-round schools,” she says. “I had read that they were better for kids because there’s less summer learning loss.”
But even in what sounds to me like nirvana, Tsai’s school is not actually year-round. Her kids finish up in early June and start back again at the end of July. And then there are smaller breaks scattered throughout the year. The fall break, she says, can be advantageous because vacations are generally less expensive. But for working parents who don’t have the option of travel, those breaks present a problem. Tsai notes that Irvine has a robust program to provide care — at a price — for most days that students aren’t in school.
In California, having year-round calendars doesn’t generally mean that students have more days in class — though you could argue that it should. While Americans spend relatively few weeks in school — just under 36 — lots of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (which represents 38 countries that are mostly high-income democracies) spend more. In both Japan and Australia, for example, students are in school for more than 40 weeks a year. And no shock: In both countries, average student test scores are much higher than those in the United States.
In America, “year-round” schools mostly reshuffle in-class time, eliminating a two-month gap that parents have to fill. That, in itself, may have some real upsides: Reville believes that summer “slippage” is “more likely to have a profound effect on low income [students] than on others.” Indeed, research shows that the testing gap “grows during most summers and shrinks during most school years.”
Even the year-round school Tsai sends her kids to has an early-release day every Wednesday, so she remains a prisoner of the misalignment of school and work schedules. There’s afterschool care, but it’s expensive. “I’m constantly bewildered at how all of these other families somehow manage to make their lives work,” she says.
For families, dealing with the pastiche of half-days, days off, and vacation can be a nightmare. Even if a working parent wanted to use vacation every time their child was out of school, most kids get double or triple the vacation their parents get.
And for many women, that nightmare can be life-altering. Sometimes those women are single moms with retail jobs. Other times, they’re white collar women hoping to climb the corporate ladder.
Catherine Brown coauthored a 2016 Center for American Progress report called “Workin’ 9 to 5: How School Schedules Make Life Harder for Working Parents,” which argues that “large numbers of working parents must split their time between being a committed parent and being a committed working professional.” She wrote it in part because of her own experiences. “I had two little kids and a husband with a demanding job,” she recalls. “And it just felt like every other week there was another reason the school schedule couldn’t be counted on. There were just so many half-days, professional development days.”
So she took the hit. She juggled her children on the random days off. She picked them up at strange times. And her husband “leaned in” at work.
Harvard economist Claudia Goldin — who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics — has highlighted the travails of people like Brown. When I interviewed Goldin in 2021, she noted that the earnings gap between men and women over the course of a career was “greater for higher-income individuals, greater for higher-education individuals.”
Children are needy, says Goldin. And so, often, are jobs. So spouses tend to divide and conquer. One takes the needy children, and one takes the needy job. One aims to become a partner at a big-time law firm; the other takes on just a few clients so that she has time to help with the children. The thing is: most families divide the gender roles the same way.
“I think what often happens is you take sick days, and then you just kind of test the patience of your supervisors,” says Brown. “It leads women almost to sometimes self-censor how ambitious they are. Because they know they don’t have the time to put into the 60-hour-a-week jobs. And so they feel like maybe they don’t deserve to be in the C suite.”
Even if we should be moving in the direction of more time spent at schools, don’t hold your breath. Increasingly, public school systems are embracing four-day weeks.
In Colorado, most districts had adopted four-day weeks by early 2024. The approach has also been used by schools in Missouri, Indiana, Arizona, and other states. Oregon State University economics professor Paul Thompson tracks four-day weeks across the country, and says they’re currently being used by 900 schools in 26 states. Even if that seems unthinkable in Massachusetts, the trend nationally seems to be toward less school, not more.
That doesn’t bode well for a country already backsliding when it comes to educational attainment. Consider the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given every two years to American students. In 2024, fourth- and eighth-graders scored lower on both math and English than they had a decade ago, and 40 percent of fourth-graders scored at a “below basic” level in reading. The right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute called the scores “a five-alarm fire.” (It’s a slide that began before the pandemic — but continued through it.)
Of course, many of the cuts are born of necessity. Jess O’Connor, a partner at Education Resource Strategies in Watertown who has worked with public school systems across the country on scheduling and strategy, says more districts are asking: “How can we shorten the day? Shorten the year?”
But in Massachusetts, at least, money exists to address this issue. “We have very high spending on education,” O’Connor says. “That is a great thing” that could create opportunities for change, she says. By reallocating resources we already have — or, in some cases, adding a small amount of additional funding — she argues that extended school time could lead to different models for paying teachers, “commensurate with their contribution and their experience.” It could also introduce more co-teaching, in which different teachers work different days, some teachers work earlier shifts, and some teachers get a chance to work with students after school.
The state’s investment in education is a testament to our values and our commitment to giving kids a fair shot. But we’ve failed to recognize how something as basic as school schedules dramatically disadvantages working parents, along with those who can’t afford the mountain of out-of-school costs these schedules impose.
O’Connor says that, as a working parent, she would embrace “an extended day, extended year” for her own children. She said she currently spends between $10,000 and $12,000 on before and after care for her kids.
Like many other experts, though, O’Connor’s most pressing concern when it comes to the misalignment of parent and student schedules, is that lower-income students are at a tremendous disadvantage. “Anytime you’re adding more time to kids’ learning opportunities and less big breaks, you see better outcomes.” She says that’s especially true for low-income families with “kids who would otherwise not be in a highly enriching summer school experience or summer camp.”
Other countries have shown that a better way does, in fact, exist. In Finland, the government requires municipalities to partner with schools to provide free music and sports activities after school, according to a recent report from the National Center on Education and the Economy. Lead author Jackie Kraemer says that England and Ireland are working to create universal before and aftercare for students that is highly subsidized by the government.
It has always been surprising to researcher Ulrich Boser, an expert on learning who collaborated with Brown on the “Workin’ 9 to 5” report, that more politicians here don’t raise the topic of school schedules. Plenty of constituents would embrace it, he argues. “More than any policy report that I have worked on, this really resonates with individuals.” And yet, “It’s not like we’ve seen any presidential candidates run on school being nine to five.”
Reville, who founded the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EdRedesign Lab, says that change is often devilishly difficult to enact. Those who like the system will seek to protect it.
Some parents — particularly, Reville says, affluent parents — vehemently resist changes to school calendars, especially if they want to enroll their children in certain afterschool activities or camps, or if they’ve got vacation plans: “ I’ve got my time-share in Florida in the February vacation. You’re not changing that.” Meanwhile, teachers unions often agree on specific schedules in their agreements with districts, making those schedules difficult to alter.
And then there’s the business community. Reville remembers talking to a top education official in Florida who was thinking about year-round schooling. She “would have corporate interests hounding her,” he says, “because they didn’t want Florida to adopt legislation that would get in the way of summer activities and summer employment.” Something similar could happen here: restaurants, ice cream parlors, and hotels all depend on high school students as employees. But that, he says, “ is how the status quo gets locked in, right?”
All of which makes Reville skeptical about our ability to increase the amount of time that students spend in schools. In the early 2000s, Massachusetts made just such a push, with the backing of then-Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The state set aside more than $6 million for the effort, which could be applied toward longer school days or longer school years. But lots of schools weren’t even interested in applying for the money. “Particularly in suburban communities, particularly among the more affluent,” Reville recalls. They felt like they had built their lives around the schedule as it was.
“ The problem is human nature being what it is, we tend to adapt to whatever is the status quo. And then there’s great reluctance, however dysfunctional the status quo might be, to shift it around.”
Like all of the other parents I talked to at the mermaid party, I was able to solve my working-parents problem with money. We applied to three afterschool programs (I was told that it was tough to land a spot), and, fortunately, got a place in one that runs till 6 p.m.
What will we do about the 14 weeks of vacation that my son gets this school year? Like everyone else, we’ve got two choices: Spend more, or work less. And I expect we’ll sit down some night, get out calendars, argue a little, and ultimately settle on some unsatisfying combination of the two.
Though it might be an issue that few politicians care about, there are enormous advantages to adopting a school schedule that looks a little more like a work schedule. Change could come gradually. In a city, you could imagine creating just one year-round elementary school — ideally with longer days and more school days per year. Being a student there would be purely voluntary. Teachers who opt in would get paid more for their additional work.
We would start small, and see if children and adults embraced the advantages: more learning time — and less summer slippage — for students. Less guilt and angst for parents who don’t know what to do with children who get so much time off. And a chance for a country that often doesn’t serve its children well academically to improve our competitiveness — and maybe even start to level the playing field.