Districts try their best to disguise summer school. They feature weekly field trips to Six Flags and Zoo Atlanta. They incorporate summertime activities from bike riding to sprinklers. They roast hot dogs and toast marshmallows.
Those disguises don’t always fool kids.
Children recognize school when they see it, even when it shifts to a recreation center or park. It may be that school scent of disinfectant, spilled milk and sweaty socks is hard to expunge. As one little boy told me years ago when I visited yet another reincarnation of summer school as a “fun” experience, “It’s alright, but we still have books and teachers.”
With academic performance still lagging from the pandemic’s disruptions, schools are again urging families to enroll struggling students in summer programs. Several metro Atlanta districts expanded their summer offerings to offset pandemic learning gaps, buoyed by K-12 COVID-19 relief funding from the federal government.
Senior policy researcher Catherine Augustine led one of the most comprehensive evaluations of summer school ever conducted, the Rand Corporation’s National Summer Learning Project. The ambitious project was a longitudinal, multidistrict randomized controlled trial that evaluated five-to-six-week full-day summer learning programs. Rand followed a cohort of more than 5,600 third graders from 2013 through 2017 in programs where enrollment was voluntary.
The trial found no causal evidence that the programs produced benefits in language arts, social emotional outcomes, or student attendance or grades during the next school year. The study did detect, however, a near-term benefit in mathematics.
However, when the study authors looked just at the students who attended at fairly high rates, they saw a different story. The programs did benefit the children who showed up for at least 20 days: They demonstrated improvements in both math and reading in the fall and on subsequent spring state exams. But, not all students attended at consistent rates. One of 5 enrolled never showed up.
Augustine, in a telephone interview, said summer schools have to offer different activities than the art and music students get during the school year. “I am not saying those are bad, but if kids get to do something they never do or can’t do during the school year, like playing water polo, they might value the program more.”
U.S. Census data reveals summer school is more common among lower-income families and those with less education. The federal Household Pulse survey in the fall of 2021 found children in homes where the adults had less than a high school diploma were more likely to participate in summer education activities (39%) than those in families where the adult completed some college or an associate’s degree (25%).
The survey also found participation differed by family income. The percentage of adults reporting children were in any summer education activities was greatest for those with household income of less than $25,000 (34%) and $25,000 to $49,999 (33%).
“I firmly believe summer is an opportunity for kids who get lost during the school year, who are behind, who don’t live in safe neighborhoods or who don’t have opportunities to be outdoors or go to local museums,” said Augustine.
Most district summer schools are free and provide transport and meals. “The programs provide an opportunity for parents who otherwise would not be able to afford a fancy summer program for their kids,” said Augustine. “In addition to addressing achievement gaps, districts want to address the opportunity gap and offer some approximation of these fancy camps by having field trips and offering opportunities like water polo, rock climbing, kayaking, and fencing.”
Augustine cautions districts not to oversell the fun part of summer school when an overarching purpose is academics. “Kids think they are going to a recreational camp and, when they show up on the first day, they are in math class,” she said. There has to be truth in advertising so neither parents nor kids feel misled.
The most effective summer school programs, in terms of getting students to attend regularly, created a sense of belonging, said Augustine. Arriving students were greeted warmly, perhaps by teachers with whom they may already have a relationship from school. (Familiar faces help keep kids coming back.)
One program maintained a social worker on staff who organized girls club lunches where the 11-year-old girls ate and talked. The social worker also visited the homes of students who were not showing up and sent food home with kids for the weekends. A behavior management specialist helped the frustrated or upset kids who sometimes needed to go outside to shoot hoops or take a walk about the block.
“If, on the first day, teachers and staff really made students feel they belonged, that they wanted the students there,” said Augustine, “those kids wanted to come back.”
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