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Multiyear Summer School

May 2007

Geoffrey Borman

The large and persistent achievement gap between minority poor students and white middle class students is an enduring national problem. But that can be changed. What children do during summer break has tremendous implications for understanding and addressing the achievement gap.

In a 3-year study of the Teach Baltimore Summer Academy, UW-Madison education professor Geoffrey Borman and colleagues measured how much a multiyear summer school program counteracts the cumulative effect of the “summer slide” on reading achievement of students from low-SES families—the drop in students’ performance that occurs over the summer.

The Teach Baltimore program enrolls students in kindergarten—before they have the opportunity to fall far behind. It offers disadvantaged students continuing opportunities, summer after summer. The summer slide has a disproportionate impact on children from low-SES families. Baltimore City public school students suffer a considerable disadvantage, where 86% of the students at Teach Baltimore sites were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch during the 1999-2000 school year, compared with 75% of the students in Baltimore City and only 35% of students across Maryland.

Baltimore students, like students from other urban centers, also perform at considerably lower academic levels. For example, only 15% of third-grade students at Teach Baltimore sites performed satisfactorily on the 1999-2000 reading section of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, compared to 19% in Baltimore City and 39% statewide.

Using a randomized field trial, and selecting students from 10 high-poverty urban schools, Borman and colleagues studied the effectiveness of the summer learning program. The study compared a treatment group of 438 students to a no-treatment ‘control’ group of 248 children.

Consistent with previous research on the summer achievement slide, this study showed that essentially no learning – as measured by reading achievement tests – takes place over the summer for early elementary school students from high-poverty urban neighborhoods.

However, after the third year of the program, students who reliably attended each summer returned to school in the fall with achievement scores of approximately one-half of one standard deviation higher than those of their similar peers from a control group. This improvement translates into 50 percent of one grade level in vocabulary, 40 percent of one grade level in comprehension, and 41 percent of one grade level on total reading.

Long-term differences in student learning among enrolled students were associated with differences in parent education levels among families from within the high-poverty neighborhoods. Children from lower-SES families learned less across the 3-year period, and this disadvantage was explained by a combination of summer learning differences and school-year learning differences.

Although summer school programs can help prevent students from falling behind, the mere assignment of the students to the program is not enough. It’s important to encourage and sustain students’ long-term participation in the program across the 3 years. Maintaining contact with school personnel and with participating students and their parents likely helped improve attendance.

Aligning the content of the summer program with the regular school-year materials and instruction helped convince parents, teachers, and principals of the importance of the Summer Academy for students’ success during the school year. Weekly field trips and the daily recreational activities also seemed to maintain students’ interest.

Developing a better understanding of how parents and schools in high-poverty communities can work together to improve participation in summer school could prove to be a highly productive research and policy initiative for addressing the social inequalities associated with seasonal learning differences.

Research funding: Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U..S. Department of Education; Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk; the Smith Richardson Foundation, Children and Families at Risk Program; and the U.S. Department of Education Comprehensive Center VI.

Adapted from “Longitudinal Achievement Effects of Multiyear Summer School: Evidence From the Teach Baltimore Randomized Field Trial,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Spring 2006, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 25-48.

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