Summer Learning, Summer Losses

It’s summer: School’s out, the sun is shining, and millions of young children are without childcare. Of the more than 25 million children aged 6 to 12 who are beginning their summer vacation, one third are in organized care programs, such as summer school, recreation programs or a day camp. Another third are in the care of relatives. And 11 percent are left on their own. Not surprisingly, children from wealthier families are more likely to be in a high-quality program, while many low- and middle- income parents are left scrambling to find care that is both safe and will support their child’s educational growth.

The arrival of summer also reminds us that the lack of focused learning time during the summer vacation months can exacerbate student achievement gaps. Studies show that students can loose a month or more of learning during the summer, requiring teachers to waste valuable learning time in the fall reviewing content that children learned the previous year but lost over the summer. Low-income, minority, and English language learner children are at the greatest risk of summer learning loss. One study even attributes the entire growth in the achievement gap between low-income and more affluent children to differences in summer learning activities!

Some researchers describe this loss using a “faucet” analogy: During the school year the faucet is on, and all children are receiving instruction. But during the summer, when school is out, the faucet switches off for low-income children, whose parents aren’t able to make up for the educational resources children were getting at school, while it keeps flowing for more affluent children, whose parents invest in summer learning activities or provide educational stimulation at home.

No Child Left Behind’s pressure to improve student achievement has put summer learning, and its role in exacerbating achievement gaps, under the microscope. There are a variety of ways to address this problem, while also helping stressed out parents deal with the summer childcare crunch:

Year-Round School: Rearranging the school calendar has been gaining popularity as a way to combat the learning deficit and prevent teacher and student burnout. Some schools, including the KIPP network of charter schools, have opted for extending the school year further into the summer, significantly expanding learning time for students. But that can be costly. Others school systems have implemented year-round schooling without increasing the amount of learning time, by replacing summer vacation with shorter breaks several times throughout the school year. While the number of students in in year-round schools has risen 400 percent in the last 12 years, the results of these changes are mixed. Researchers stress that the benefit comes not as much from how many days children are in class but how that class time is used.

Summer Scholarships: Another possible way to reduce summer learning loss is by creating grants for low-income children to attend high-quality summer programs. These proposals have political appeal on both the left and the right. More liberal folks tend to like these programs because they address achievement gaps and help low-income families with summer child care, while conservatives like them because the “scholarships” function like vouchers, giving parents choice among public and private providers. Last year Congress passed Sen. Barack Obama’s proposal to give kids in grades K-3 who qualify for free school lunch a $1,600 scholarship to attend a summer program that emphasizes math and science. Unfortunately, they did not fund the program, which is too bad, because studies show that programs like this work. A 3-year longitudinal study of the Teach Baltimore Summer Academy found that students who attended the multi-year summer intervention gained close to half a year in vocabulary and reading comprehension skills.

All time is learning time, especially summer. Early Ed Watch would like to wish students a happy summer and hope that they make the most of it. We hope that policymakers will work to ensure that all students have access to high-quality summer learning environments so that they will be ready to start again in the fall.