Why Are Kids in the U.S. Still Going to School Like It’s 1965?
And how is it related to women's paid labor participation rate stalling in the 1990s?
When we talk about the challenges and costs that come with care for children, we often think of babies and toddlers. And that makes sense – care for babies and preschool age children is the most labor-intensive and therefore the most expensive.
But many parents discover that the “free” care that comes when children enroll in public school also comes with a whole new set of costs and logistical challenges.
The current school system was created during a time when the assumption was that mothers could – and should – provide children with care and supervision. School’s purpose was only to educate.
As women’s participation in the paid labor force increased between 1970 and 1990, school districts made no meaningful changes to how they organized the school day or the school year. And it’s therefore not surprising that women’s workforce participation actually stalled in the 1990s. After jumping by 25 points from 1970 to 1993, the rate of women working for pay went up by only 2 points between 1993 and 2023.
A big reason for that stall is lack of support for affordable care for children of all ages. Most states require students to be in school for 180 days. By contrast there are about 260 weekdays in a year. That leaves parents scrambling for four months of coverage!
But it’s worse than that, of course. Those four months don’t happen all at once – it’s a week off here, a few days there. (The New York City public school calendar is so complicated we don’t even have space for snow days!) Many parents will tell you that summer is a unique hell, but also sometimes easier (if more expensive) to solve. There are camps and other kinds of programs. Some are even subsidized. There’s not the same for holidays, professional development days, or middle-of-the-year vacation weeks. In NYC this year schools were closed for 10 days in April — nearly half of the month’s 22 weekdays. Some, though not all, of those days came in a big chunk for spring break.
It’s important to understand that all of this is true in a country where employers are not required to give employees any time off – paid or unpaid – including for federal holidays. Many low-income workers can lose their job if they miss a shift. It’s popular to imagine that mothers who don’t work for pay are rich, pampered ladies who play tennis and shop. (And therefore it’s easy to deride the need to subsidize care for their children.) But most SAHM are poor — they can’t get a job that will either give them the time off they need to care for their kids or pay them enough to afford care when school isn’t in session. (See Jessica Calarco’s great book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net for more on the poverty of SAHMs.)
And then there’s the time after school. A typical school day is 8 am to 3pm, meaning parents working 9am to 5pm scramble to find care for those afternoon hours. Some school districts offer aftercare – but it’s often expensive and can be difficult to access and doesn’t always cover the need. Many families (read: mothers) scramble to cobble together a patchwork of different solutions, sometimes varying day by day or week by week. Not only is this expensive and stressful to set up, the stress never really ends for many families. A mishmash of care has many points of potential failure. The chance that something will go wrong increases with each new variable. In most families it’s the Mom who picks up the slack when a ball gets dropped. This can push women — at all income levels — out of the workforce.
It’s not hard to imagine a better way. Given how much learning loss we know happens over the summer, an extended school year would provide a lot of educational benefits, in addition to easing the burden on working families. An extended day – which wouldn’t necessarily need to include more instruction, but could instead focus on the kinds of enrichment that often get shoved aside to accommodate the needs of mandated testing – would benefit families and could provide kids much-needed opportunities to socialize.
This isn’t to say that we should turn teachers into round-the-clock, round-the-year babysitters. I understand why teachers, and the unions who support and defend them, have pushed back on the idea that they should provide care. Teachers want to be treated like education professionals, and they should be. But I fear they inadvertently play into the hands of conservative activists who are fighting to make sure that care continues to be seen as something families – and especially women – fund privately, either with their own time or their own money.
A longer school day and an extended school year would require additional funding, in more teachers to provide more instructional time and in other professionals to provide care, community, and cultural enrichment.
But let’s not pretend there aren’t costs to the current system. A huge cost is women’s time and, in some cases, their livelihood. There’s the cost that comes in the form of family stress as parents juggle a variety of solutions, especially when kids are young. And of course one of the biggest – and least talked about – costs is children’s mental health and academic achievements. Shaping the school calendar to support the reality of family’s lives in 2024 would be simpler than what we do now, which is to provide for these other needs in a patchwork fashion that is much more costly and still leaves a lot of gaps.
The problem is that, like many costs in America, the costs of a broken school calendar are being borne individually and therefore unequally. Families who can afford to buy their way around the problem generally do all right. It’s not easy but it works well enough. Affluent families do better than all right, with plenty of time for vacations and the ability to provide accelerated academic programs after school and during the summer. Poor families disproportionately pay the highest price in the form of lost income, summer learning loss, and extra stress.
And that is the part of the system that is working exactly as designed.