Summer Learning—A New School Reform Movement?

http://www.wypr.org/sites/default/files/podcast_audio/midday110620hr2.mp3

I heard a slice of this interview (the link above) on WYPR’s Midday with Dan Rodricks on Monday. The topic is summer leaning loss—the “brain drain,” the “summer slide,” call it what you will. Research shows that our students lose academic ground during the summer if they are not engaged in meaningful learning throughout June, July, and August.

The interview referred to “The Case Against Summer Vacation,” an article published in TIME last July. Much of the data in the article was collected by a group of Hopkins professors, including Marc Stein, who was one of the guests on Midday. In a nutshell, the research found that "while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to make progress during the summer, but disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind, and summer was the biggest culprit. By ninth grade, summer learning loss could be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups.” I find it hard to believe that summer is what causes 67% of the achievement gap in America, but the point is not lost. If our kids are sitting at home doing nothing productive all summer, they are going to fall behind their peers in the suburbs who attend science camps and arts programs and the like.

What I loved about these reports was the type of summer learning promoted. The guests on the show (including Ashley Steward of Baltimore’s Comprehensive Community Initiative to Advance Summer Learning and Monica Logan of the city’s “SuperKids”) promote extremely interactive, project-based, field-based, and FUN-based programs that keep kids sharp and engaged all summer. Summer shouldn’t be for remediation, they say, but for enrichment, and I completely agree.

The problem: how do we get our kids involved? How do we ensure that there are programs enough for all? The show indicated that last summer 16,000 BCPS kids were enrolled in some form of summer program—traditional summer school or enrichment. 16,000 sounds impressive, but that’s only about 20% of the district population. The TIME article posits that effectively selling summer learning as “the opposite of school” could make summer the “season of true educational reform.”

My question…where is the money? And the staff? Should this be City Schools funded? Or should we use this model to network with other organizations to close the achievement gap?

One more issue that was brought up in the interview: should we just extend the school year? Or have more numerous, shorter breaks instead of one long summer vacation? Stein noted that learning loss happens in equal proportions during those shorter breaks. Summer enrichment, then, truly seems the key.