I read the results of the summer school program in New York City with a growing sense of dismay, in part because so many kids gained so little from the experience, but also because I had predicted this would happen in a New York Times op-ed a year ago, when the school system rashly threatened to send 325,000 kids to summer school. My guess at that time was that the system 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.
Improvements were greatest among the youngest children, especially children in third and fourth grades. Average reading scores actually dropped for eighth graders, both last year as well as this one.
Nearly three-quarters of the eighth graders scored in the lowest level of performance in reading and math at summer's end, which means that these students do not have the literacy or computational skills for high school work.
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.
The newspaper accounts have blamed truancy as the culprit in student failure, and no doubt this is right. However, more should be learned from this petri dish experiment in concentrated learning. If a student spends four or five weeks trying to improve in reading or math, the school system should be able to document more (or something) about "what works" and what doesn't.
Next time around, summer school should be planned with a strong research and evaluation component. We need to know what methods teachers were using; whether certain practices were more effective than others; what professional preparation teachers need to be successful with the low-performing students who are assigned to go to summer school. We need to learn more about the causes of success and failure among different age groups.
In addition to being a learning opportunity for kids who have fallen behind, summer school should also be a learning experience for educators, an opportunity to identify what the most successful teachers are doing and to identify the approaches that work best for the kids who need the most help. And frankly this would be a good opportunity to contract out some of the classes to companies that have a lot of experience in teaching reading and math.
