Summer’s Damaging Effect on Learning
Is the long summer vacation a harmful throwback to an agrarian era that is well past its shelf-life? That’s Time magazine’s argument in “The Case Against Summer Vacation.” The article calls the lengthy summer hiatus a “luxury we can’t afford.”
Those three months off result in summer learning loss, a.k.a, the summer slide, a malady that disproportionally hits low-income students who typically spend much of the summer bored, and with few productive activities to engage them. But in a global economy, Time notes, even kids from well-off families are losing ground over summer to their international peers, who remain in school an extra four weeks. It cites a recent Johns Hopkins University study that found that the summer-slide effect compounds over time. By the time low-income students reach ninth grade, fully two-thirds of the learning gap that separates richer and poorer students is attributable to summer learning loss. To be sure, a national reworking of the K-12 school calendar seems unlikely. But Time says savvy school districts can mitigate the harm with summer programs aimed at underprivileged students. It points to smart programs in districts ranging from Cleveland to Houston to Corbin, KY. Ron Fairchild, head of the Baltimore nonprofit, National Summer Learning Association, tells Time that the term “summer school” gets a bad rap. “We need to push school districts to frame summer school as a good thing, something extra — not a punishment.”
In a related article in the Afro-American, William R. Roberts, president of Verizon in Maryland and Washington, D.C., notes that studies find, on average, that students lose around two months of grade-level mathematical computational skills over summer. Roberts suggests that parents type “summer learning resources” into a search engine to find a plethora of online materials that kids will find fun, but will also keep their brains active.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
