Tuesday, October 22, 2019
An Achievement Gap Created by the Summer Slide Before Grade 9
An Achievement Gap Created by the Summer Slide Before Grade 9 By the time students in the United States enter grade 12, they will have spent 96 weeks, or the rough equivalent of 2 out 13 required academic years, in time designated as summer vacation. Researchers have been bemoaning the loss of this collective time as they point to the negative consequences of summer vacation up to and including high school..à Negative Impact of Summer Vacation Research A meta-analysis of 138 influences or ââ¬Å"what works in educationâ⬠was published (2009)à inà Influences And Effect Sizes Related To Student Achievementà by John Hattie and Greg Yates. Their results are posted on theirà Visible Learningà website. à They ranked the effects of completed studies (national and international), and using the data combined from these studies, they developed a rating where any influence greater than .04 was a contribution to student achievement. For their finding on summer vacation,à à 39 studiesà were usedà to rank the effect of summer vacation on student achievement. The findings using this data revealed summer vacation as havingà a negative effect (à -.09 effect) on education. In other words, summer vacation ranked at the bottom of what works in education, a dismal 134 out of 138 influences.. Many researchers refer to the achievement damage done during these months off as summer learning loss or the ââ¬Å"summer slideâ⬠à as described on the US Department of Educations blog Homeroom. A similar finding came fromà à ââ¬Å"The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-Analytic Reviewâ⬠à byà H. Cooper, et al. Their work updated the findings of a 1990 study that originally found: Summer learning loss is very real and has important repercussions in the lives of students, especially those with fewer financial resources. There were several key findings outlined in their updated 2004 report: At best, students showed little or no academic growth over the summer. At worst, students lost one to three months of learning.Summer learning loss was somewhat greater in math than reading.Summer learning loss was greatest in math computation and spelling.For disadvantaged students, reading scores were disproportionately affected and the achievement gap between rich and poor widened. This achievement gap between haves and have nots widens with summer learning loss. Socio-Economic Status and Summer Learning Loss Multiple studies have confirmed thatà students in low-income households develop an average two month reading gap during the summer. This gap is cumulative, and each summers two month gap contributes to a sizable learning loss, especially in reading, by the time a student reaches grade 9. Research published in the article Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap à byà Karl L. Alexander, et al, charted how a students socio-economic status (SES) plays a role is summer learning loss: We find that cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of childrens schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES-low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years. In addition, aà white paper commissioned by the Summer Reading Collective determined thatà two-thirds of the 9th grade achievement gap in reading could be between students from low-income households and their higher-income peers. Other important findings findings pointed out that access to books was critical to slowing summer learning loss. Neighborhoods in low income areas with public libraries for student access to reading materials hadà significantly more gains in reading scores from spring to fall than students from high-income households with access to books as well as those from low-income households without access to books at all. Finally, the Summer Reading Collective noted that socio-economic factors played a critical role in learning experiences (access to reading materials, travel, learning activities) stating: Differences in childrenââ¬â¢s summer learning experiences during their elementary school years can ultimately impact whether they earn a high school diploma and continue to college. With the considerable amount of research documenting the negative impact of summers off, one may wonder why the American public education system embraced summer vacation. History of Summer Vacation: The Agrarian Myth Dispelled Despite the widely held myth that the educational calendar followed farm calendars, the 178 day school year (national average) became standardized for an entirely different reason.à The adoption of summer vacation was the result of an industrial society that opted to let urban students out of the sweltering citiesà during the summer months. Kenneth Gold, a professor of education at the College of Staten Island, debunked the myth of an agrarian school year in his 2002 bookà Schoolââ¬â¢s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools.à à In the opening chapter,Gold notes that if schools were following a true agrarian school year, students would be more available during the summer months while cropsà were growing but unavailable during planting (late spring) and harvesting (early fall). à His research demonstratedà that before the standardized school year,à there were concerns that too much school was bad for the health of students and teachers: ââ¬Å"There was a whole medical theory that [people would get sick] from too much schooling and teachingâ⬠(25). Summer vacation was the solution to these medical concerns during theà mid-19th Century. à Asà cities expanded rapidly, concerns were raised about the moral and physical dangers that unsupervised summer posed to urban youth. Gold goes into great detail about theà Vacation Schools, urban opportunities that offered a wholesome alternative. The 1/2 dayà sessions in these vacation schools were attractive to participants and teachers were allowed to beà creative and more lax, addressing theà fears of [mental] overtaxation (125). By the end of World War I, à these vacation schools had become more in line with a growing academic bureaucracy. Gold notes, ...summer schools adopted a regular academic focus and a credit-bearing function, and they soon bore little resemblance to the vacation programs that preceded them (142). These academic summer schools were geared to allow students to gain extra credits, either to catch up or to accelerate, however, the creativity and innovations of these vacation schools diminished as the funding and staffing were in the hands of the administrative progressives that were overseeing the urban districts à Gold traces the standardization of education noting the growing body ofà research on the adverse impact of summer vacation, especially on economically disadvantaged students as a growing concern. His work on how American education served the needs of aà continuously growing ââ¬Å"summer leisure economyâ⬠clearly demonstratesà the stark contrast of mid-19th Centuryââ¬â¢s academic standards with the growing demands of 21st Century academic standards with their emphasis on college and career readiness. Stepping Away from Traditional Summer Vacation Schools K-12, and post-secondary experiences, from community college to graduate universities, are now experimentingà with a burgeoning market of opportunities for online learning. The opportunities bear names such as à Synchronous Distributed Course,à Web-Enhanced Course,à Blended Program, and others; they are allà forms of e-learning.à E-learning is rapidly changing the design of the traditional school year as it can be made available beyond the walls of a classroom at varying times. These new opportunities may make learning available through multiple platforms throughout the year. In addition, experiments with year-round learning are already well into their third decade. Over 2 million students participated (by 2007), and the research (Worthen 1994, à Cooper 2003)à on the effects of year round schools explained in à What Research Says About Year-Round Schooling (compiled byà Tracy A. Huebner) shows a positive impact: Students in year-round schools do as well or slightly better in terms of academic achievement than students in traditional schools;Year-round education may be particularly beneficial for students from low-income families;Students, parents, and teachers who participate in a year-round school tend to have positive attitudes about the experience. On more than one follow-up to these studies, the explanation for the positive impact is simple: The loss of retention of information that occurs during the three-month summer vacation is lessened by the shorter, more frequent vacations that characterize year-round calendars. Unfortunately, for those students without intellectual stimulation, enrichment, or reinforcement-whether they are economically disadvantaged or not- the long span of summer will culminate in an achievement gap. à Conclusion Theà artist Michelangelo is reputed to have said, I am still learning (Ancora Imparo)à at the age of 87, and while he never enjoyed the American public school summer vacation, it is unlikely he went for long periods without the intellectual stimulation that made him the man of the Renaissance. Perhaps his quote could inverted as a question if there are chances to change the design of school academic calendars. Educators could ask, Are they still learning during the summer?
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