Summer school not always the answer for ‘learning decay’

There is not much doubt that being away from school for a summer vacation of 10 weeks or so creates what educators call a “learning decay.”

One review of 39 studies suggested that achievement test scores do decline over summer vacation and that the summer “loss” was generally more detrimental to math and reading skills, and specifically most detrimental to math computation and spelling.

Research suggests that it takes four to six weeks for teachers to get some, but not all, students caught up in September.

Many countries, with summer vacation times varying from a month to 12 weeks, run summer schools. Parents, if not teachers, believe they will make up for an end-of-school-year learning deficit.

To be fair, there’s not much doubt that a session of “summer school” will, temporarily at least, improve a student’s scores on a standardized achievement test — especially in math and maybe even with reading scores. But whether or not summer school produces any long-term effect in a student’s commitment to learning, attitude toward school or overall scholastic success remains unclear, and there are no reliable data to shed any light on that question.

“Can kids actually gain from those programs? Can they come back in the fall, even with more skills and abilities?” Jennifer McCombs, associate director of education at the non-profit thinktank RAND Corp., said to National Public Radio. “The answer to that is kind of unclear.”

Other researchers say it’s still an under-researched topic, and while local districts are spending significant amounts on summer schools, there are not enough data about what makes it effective.

Parents might find themselves spending much of their summer essentially doing what they might have been doing all year long — monitoring homework and progress on weekly tests, staying in contact with their child’s teacher and generally seeing to it that they are participating actively in their child’s education by encouraging a reasonable split between reading time and TV or technology time.

But what about the summer schools themselves?

In some cases, school districts run summer sessions, and in other cases, summer school is a privately run business opportunity for education entrepreneurs.

Parents considering summer school for their offspring should ask some questions before signing up a child who maybe wasn’t too keen on school to begin with.

What is the instructional purpose of the program? That’s a critical question and one that assumes that somebody has a clear understanding of exactly where the child is in a particular program by the end of the school year.

Are enrichment activities offered? Components of quality summer programs should include smaller class sizes, individualized instruction and innovative instruction that does not just consist of drills and “more of the same.”

What did not work well for a child during the year will not work any better in summer school, unless the teacher has done some preliminary work becoming familiar with your child’s style and rate of learning and whether or not the child has any unique blocks to understanding certain concepts.

Will it be necessary, for example, to begin Grade 8 math all over again, or were there just fundamental topics in the program that were never clearly understood and that resulted in poor overall final test results?

Was there a useful analysis of the end-of-year test results to identify specific areas needing more attention?

Who will deliver the services? Will the instruction be provided by experienced teachers, university-student teachers-in-training or primarily para-professionals who are supervised by teachers?

Will the teachers be familiar and experienced with the grade level and course in which the child is enrolled?

How frequently does the program meet? Is it daily? A full day? A half-day? Does it meet all summer, or just for a few weeks?

Where does the program meet? Is it at your child’s school, or another school in the district? Children are creatures of habit, and enrolling a child in unfamiliar surroundings might mean lost time as the child overcomes anxiety about strange surroundings.

Will there be transportation? Will you, as a parent, be the daily transportation? School districts usually do not run bus routes during the summer.

Finally, have you considered finding a qualified tutor for the two weeks right before the school year opens to help your child “relearn” some skills or knowledge he or she might have forgotten over the summer?

The right tutor might even provide a jump-start on what comes next and foster some confidence about next year’s work before “I can’t keep up” begins again.