As a teacher who has worked a 3-day Thanksgiving week AND a contract that gives the whole week off...I'll take the whole week off any day.
It's not like too much serious instruction happens during a 3-day week before a major holiday; this article doesn't mention the STUDENT absentee rate, which is also high enough that most teachers aren't introducing new concepts, or working on serious projects, during this week.
That doesn't mean, of course, that the time spent isn't quality time, as long as you aren't defining "quality" from a standards/proficiency-based perspective. We can do plenty of valuable, meaningful things on days when we know that the absentee rate is going to be high and the students more focused on the holiday than the learning. It's a great time to do much of the fun stuff that gets pushed aside the rest of the year in the quest to test. Just don't send the authorities in with their check lists, looking for standards and objectives to be posted and students to be drilling. They might be singing or dancing or drawing or painting or reading and writing poetry or studying the history of harvest festivals or having their own harvest festival or engaging in other things that actively engage the brain but leave behind the authoritarian mandates for what instruction is supposed to look like.
Still, if I can't move the regular program forward, when better to take my personal days? During prime-time instructional time? Or when the student absentee rate is high and attention is elsewhere?
If ""It is a tricky dilemma to balance the rights of employees to have personal days and sick days and the need to provide quality education to children every day of our already short school year," as Rosenberg said, then the nation, state, and district might want to consider funding a decent-length school year, whether or not they choose to take the whole week off for Thanksgiving.
They might look into a single-track year-round schedule, which provides shorter, more frequent breaks, drastically decreases burnout among staff and students, increases learning retention, and allows both staff and students' families to work in their personal time in more places during the year.
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