As district administrators know, there’s no one way to map the school calendar. Depending on where you live, the start of the school year may be set to coincide with the dog days of summer or the onset of fall. Across the districts in NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database (TCD), there are 39 days between when the earliest and latest school years begin. While the range of starting dates is interesting, what may be of more consequence, given the connection between learning time and outcomes, is that the length of the school year can vary by as many as 17 days for students, and there can be up to a 20-day difference in the number of teacher workdays (days on the job without students) throughout the year.
To further explore the makeup of academic years, this District Trendline looks at the 2023-2024 calendar for 146 of the largest school districts in the United States to provide a snapshot of what the school year looks like for both teachers and students.
The teacher school year
Before getting to the details, it’s important to define three categories of days for teachers: