Flashcards and comics

Poor Elijah was a Superman fan. He devoured D.C. Comics and raced full tilt through the neighborhood with his arms out in front of him and a makeshift cape flapping from his neck. He also had a serious crush on Supergirl’s secret identity.

One summer we set up a comic lending library. Business was slow. We finally bullied Poor Elijah’s sister into spending a dime. Except first we had to give her the dime.

Not everybody was lucky enough to peddle comics in July. Some kids with lingering arithmetic uncertainties had to practice the times tables with flashcards. You remember the times tables. Those were the math facts students had to memorize before calculators were invented, and schools became obsessed with “problem solving,” and the bottom dropped out of math scores.

For a tormented few there was summer school. Summer school was similar to Purgatory. Eventually you got to move on to a better place, like seventh grade

Back at the turn of the millennium one third of the nation’s districts required summer classes for students who failed. In the nation’s capital, nearly one third of the city’s students were attending remedial summer programs. New York City summer schools hosted a quarter of a million students. Detroit spent twelve million dollars reteaching thirty-five thousand of its children before regular classes began in the fall.

The summer school boom was partly a response to “social promotion,” the common practice that assigned students to the next grade even though everybody recognized they hadn’t learned enough to succeed in their current grade.

It doesn’t take a degree in education – in fact, it’s apparently helpful not to have one – to deduce that students who didn’t master fourth grade probably won’t do that well in fifth. Reasonable parents recognize that an eightyear-old’s self-esteem doesn’t matter as much in the long run as an eighteen-year-old’s inability to read.

Unfortunately, this pits them against the wisdom that has long prevailed in education’s looking glass land. For example, when President Clinton condemned social promotion at an education summit, the president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals vigorously disagreed. She responded that “research shows that kids who are retained are more likely to drop out of school.”

Terrific. Let’s just keep moving them on. They may not know much, but at least they’ll graduate.

In an education world that mandates “universal proficiency,” summer school is billed as a remedy for low achievement that eliminates social promotion without keeping anybody back. Sometimes it works. If I’m otherwise doing fine but just couldn’t pass geography or figure out fractions, some extra work and concentration over the summer could make a significant difference and enable me to move on with my classmates in the fall.

The trouble is summer school candidates are frequently students whose skills are so deficit or whose motivation is so absent that they’ve failed most or all of their courses, and failed them egregiously.

There’s a limit to what any teacher and course can accomplish. Yes, several hours a day over a month can accomplish a great deal. But a month of half-days can’t generally make up for an entire year of instruction.

Even less plausibly, a trending summer fraud known as “credit recovery” purports to empower students to somehow replace an entire year of failure by taking “quickie courses,” often online and even unsupervised at home, where they can “simply Google the answers” and “fill in the blanks.” Proponents tout credit recovery as a “useful tool” that enables “at-risk students” to “complete an entire class in just a week.” As one participating student put it, “It was a shocker to learn what I could get done in a day.”

I bet it was. Who could’ve imagined covering one fifth of a year’s work on Tuesday?

Summer learning programs include enrichment activities like “forays into swimming, ceramics, judo, and even fencing.” Students can also take “bridge” classes to prepare for honors and Advanced Placement courses. Advocates justify summer school on the grounds that low-income students in particular suffer “summer learning loss” when they’re not in school. These students also often suffer the loss of breakfast and lunch available to them during the school year.

Feeding hungry children is a legitimate social services objective, but it shouldn’t be a pretext for summer school. Regarding summer learning programs as a whole, despite experts’ obsession with “data,” an Education Commission of the States official concedes that there’s little “real data about who goes, what’s being taught, and whether the programs are working.” As to whether “kids actually gain from [summer] programs,” a RAND analyst concurs that “the answer to that is kind of unclear.”

While summer programs overall are expanding, districts are requiring fewer students to attend classes in order to be promoted. Yes, while we never say the words, social promotion is back, if it ever left us. Bear this in mind when you hear your school officials ballyhooing “proficiency.” The simplest, tidiest remedy for students who aren’t proficient is to promote them anyway.

Summer school offers undeniable benefits. For some students it can make a genuine academic difference and allow them to move on.

We need to be careful, though, that summer school doesn’t become yet another education charade. Despite the upbeat rhetoric, schools can’t do everything. And nothing fixes everything at school.

No matter what the season.

The trouble is summer school candidates are frequently students whose skills are so deficit or whose motivation is so absent that they’ve failed most or all of their courses, and failed them egregiously.