rethinking summer school

The summer learning experiences we’re talking about now really need to be better than they ever were in the past.”  - U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, April 2021

I don’t think summer education as a quality educational experience has a great track record… We are too wedded to the notion that it has to be a continuation of what’s already happened in the school year.”  - Kenneth Gold, CUNY Dean of Education and author of School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools

On November 16, APS presented its annual monitoring report on summer school to the School Board. Summer school, district leaders shared, has been “regularly over budget” and has demonstrated “low efficacy” with “historically inconclusive student performance data.” This was true even before the difficult summer school session earlier this year. 

As I listened to this monitoring report, I was glad to hear that APS recognized it had a problem with summer school and this fall had gone through a process of talking with stakeholders--including parents and staff members--to improve summer school going forward.

However, I wonder if that group’s charge was ambitious enough, or if we are thinking boldly enough about what needs to be done to strengthen summer learning. The proposal for next summer looks like more of the same, in terms of what students will experience, with some administrative enhancements.

During my campaign I talked about “administrative return on investment,” a practice that some school districts use to evaluate and either improve or discontinue certain programs based on whether they contribute to student achievement. If we were to apply this practice to summer school in APS, I believe we’d conclude that summer school needs some major corrective, rather than cosmetic, surgery. I don’t know about others, but in my daily work I don’t get to continue projects or programs that are regularly over budget and don’t yield great results.
 
Summer School: What’s Reasonable to Expect?

There’s not a great deal of robust research on summer learning, but one study that stands out is the National Summer Learning Project by the RAND Corporation that followed nearly 6,000 students in five school districts from the end of third grade through the spring of seventh grade, comparing students selected to attend summer school to those who did not. 

Researchers found that summer school participants outperformed control-group students in mathematics on state assessments in both fall and spring the following school year.  What’s more, when the same students attended summer school for a second year, they improved in mathematics, language arts and social-emotional skills, with the outperformance over control group students persisting through the following spring in math and language arts. 

However, most of these programs engaged students over five or more weeks (APS’s summer session lasts four weeks) and the gains held true only for students who attended regularly. “Parents had vacations planned,” said Catherine Augustine, lead researcher on the RAND summer school study. “Or grandma was coming into town. Or the kids got sick. Or there was a football camp they wanted them to do for one week.”

Augustine also points to summer school as an equity issue, but not in the way you might think. “Why should [lower-income students] have to sit in a building and do math all day while their higher-income peers are off in some fancy camp?” 

This question has prompted many communities to reimagine what summer learning looks like and create fun, full-day experiences that blend summer school with summer camp. In one such program, San Francisco’s Aim High, research shows that ninth graders who participated in Aim High during middle school have higher rates of attendance, lower rates of disciplinary involvement, and higher fall semester GPAs compared to the average ninth grade student. Aim High participants also graduate high school at higher rates and with higher GPAs than the average SFUSD student.
 
What Can Summer Learning Look Like?

​Students attending the full-day Summer Dreamers Academy program in Pittsburgh work with teachers in the morning on math and language arts. The district partners with community groups like the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Venture Outdoors, Bike Pittsburgh, Union Project and more to lead small-group activities in the afternoon. 

In Boston, more than 300 schools and community institutions have partnered since 2005 to provide meaningful summer learning opportunities. “It began with a bold idea: use the whole city as a classroom for kids in the summer months,” says Chris Smith, the executive director of the nonprofit Boston After School & Beyond. “We and the Boston Public Schools incubated that concept with a group of partners who shared our vision, proved it was working with rigorous research, then facilitated its adoption citywide. Massachusetts has now funded other cities to follow our lead.” (Their brief report “Lessons from 10 Years of Boston Summer Learning” is a great read.)

The Boston example highlights the need for shared responsibility and collaboration among the school district, local government and community organizations, rather than expecting the school system to engineer an innovative solution alone. In the much smaller community of Rock Spring, Illinois, the Rock Island-Milan School District invited Spring Forward, a community nonprofit, to share space with the school district so that they could jointly plan and deliver summer programs. Students participating in the program enjoy summer-camp-like experiences alongside reading and math instruction, go on more than a dozen field trips, and attend a “summer learning pep rally” that Spring Forward organizes every summer at the local civic center, which brings together more than 1,000 children from 20 summer camps for a rock concert, enrichment activities, book giveaways and more.

What could summer learning in Arlington look like if we redesigned it along these lines? What if APS and the county government, working with local community groups, could join together to provide fun, real-world, academically-rich experiences like the ones available in some other communities?

This would be no small effort, but fortunately there are lots of great resources available to Arlington and other communities that want to reimagine summer learning. These resources include:

• The Wallace Foundation’s Summer Learning Toolkit, containing more than 50 practical, adaptable tools and sample planning resources from the five urban districts who formed the National Summer Learning Project
• Courses, training and consulting support from the National Summer Learning Association to help districts build their capacity to deliver high-impact summer experiences
• The National Academies of Sciences 2019 report Shaping Summertime Experiences: Opportunities to Promote Healthy Development and Well-being for Children and Youth
• “Summer School, Reimagined: Tulsa Returns 11,000 Students to Campus in July by Putting Fun Before Academics,” reported by The74 in July 2021.

Arlington’s educators would be one incredible resource to tap into if we want to develop a new summer learning approach. Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, shares, “When I engage my members in conversations about what [summer school] could be, a light came on in their eyes, and they were so full of ideas,” Pringle said. “When you give educators that space to create for their kids and they believe they have the power and authority to make it what it needs to be for them, it is quite amazing.”