Tom Sawyer watch out! An interesting article is gracing the front page of Time Magazine this week, ?The Case Against Summer Vacation? calling for increased learning over the summer months to combat the growing K-12 achievement gap.? The article highlights the summer learning regression of low-income students in comparison to their more advantaged peers. Instead of requesting longer school years, or more summer school, the article proposes using a national grassroots effort to combat summer learning loss.
Here's the hard part: if summer enrichment is the innovative cost-effective answer to one of the?nation's?thorniest problems? How do we increase participation and raise standards without crushing creativity and imposing?bureaucracy?? If ever there was a movement suited to local experiments, informal innovations and seat-of-the-pants efforts, surely it's the campaign to squeeze more from summer.
This trend is supported by our 2001 Gadfly editorial that argues against state sponsored summer school because of its lack of creativity and accountability.
My guess at that time was that the [New York City Department of Education] was incapable of managing a tightly targeted summer remediation effort. For the sake of the kids, I hoped I was wrong; I was not. Some 72,000 kids were ordered to attend summer school because of their academic deficiencies. Of that number, 8,000 did not go. Some showed up irregularly. Most students who went to summer school failed their end-of-course exams in reading and math, but were promoted anyway. Two-thirds showed little or no improvement in math, and nearly 60 percent failed to improve in reading?It would be interesting and probably depressing to calculate how much was gained for the $175 million that the summer session cost. One is tempted to think that more might have been gained per pupil if each student had an individual tutor.
-Saul Spady, Fordham Intern