Every summer. U.S. school buildings stand idle while their value declines and interest on construction bonds piles higher. Teachers, in desperately short supply during the school year, take long vacations they cannot afford, or pad out undersized incomes with temporary jobs. Last week, as dozens of other cost-burdened school boards have done before, Tennessee's Davidson County board of education hacked through a knot of problems to what seemed at first a simple, one-stroke solution: run the school system twelve months a year on a four-quarter plan, with one-fourth of the children on vacation each quarter.
The advantages at first looked bright. Without...
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