Out in Fairfax County, Virginia, the school district recently asked parents a telling question. A survey floated several ways to wring more instructional days out of the year, and one option was eliminating the holidays that mark religious and cultural observances — Christmas, Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, and Rosh Hashanah among them — to free up class time.
Christmas and Easter have shaped the Western calendar for centuries, and the winter and spring breaks built around them have anchored American school years for as long as there have been public schools. A single survey question doesn't erase that, but it shows you where some agenda-driven people would like to steer it.
We've seen a version of this closer to home. When a sitting Upper Arlington school board member mailed her supporters a letter last spring, the thing she lingered on wasn't test scores or the budget. It was the calendar, and the new vocabulary she wanted the community to adopt along with it.
Really? That's your focus as a sitting school board member — the calendar and what to call Easter?
Trimming days off and eliminating traditional holidays gets sold as efficiency, but in some districts, the calendar becomes something else entirely. Rename a break, drop an observance, and the year quietly loses what made it yours. What gets called housekeeping is really a change in heritage.
Your heritage. But don't worry — just comply, and it'll be fine.
The timing of this attack on vocabulary and holidays is maddening. American students are sliding in reading and math and losing ground to their peers overseas, and the energy goes to the names on the calendar rather than the achievement gap.
If a district truly needs more time on task, the honest fix is in plain sight: the pile of teacher workdays, planning days, and scattered half-days that chop the week to pieces. Even Fairfax parents pushing for more school said the holidays were never the real problem.
Let's repeat that: the holidays were never the real problem.
So keep an eye on your own calendar this year and watch for when changes are floated. But know this, too: you are not stuck. The parochial school down the road isn't holding a survey on whether to keep Christmas. It knows its mission and the families it serves, and it spends its days teaching them.
If your district would rather rewrite the calendar than raise the scores, there is a door — and nothing says you have to keep your children on the wrong side of it.
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