The Summertime Blues

A long-ago rock song said it first: “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

In the 1970s, Barbara Heyns (1978) discovered that over the summer, disadvantaged students lost a lot more of what they had learned in school than did advantaged students. Ever since then, educators have been trying to figure out how they could use time during the summer to help disadvantaged students catch up academically. I got interested in this recently because I have been trying to learn what kinds of educational interventions might be most impactful for the millions of students who have missed many months of school due to Covid-19 school closures. Along with tutoring and after school programs, summer school is routinely mentioned as a likely solution.

Along with colleagues Chen Xie, Alan Cheung, and Amanda Neitzel, I have been looking at the literature on summer programs for disadvantaged students.

There are two basic approaches to summer programs intended to help at-risk students. One of these, summer book reading, gives students reading assignments over the summer (e.g., Kim & Guryan, 2010). These generally have very small impacts, but on the other hand, they are relatively inexpensive.

Of greater interest to the quest for powerful interventions to overcome Covid-19 learning losses are summer school programs in reading and mathematics. Studies of most of the summer school programs found they made little difference in outcomes. For example, an evaluation of a 5-week, six hour a day remedial program for middle school students found no significant differences in reading or math (Somers et al., 2015). However, there was one category of summer school programs that had at least a glimmer of promise. All three involved intensive, phonics-focused programs for students in kindergarten or first grade. Schachter & Jo (2005) reported substantial impacts of such a program, with a mean effect size of +1.16 on fall reading measures. However, by the following spring, a follow-up test showed a non-significant difference of +0.18. Zvoch & Stevens (2013), using similar approaches, found effect sizes of +0.60 for kindergarten and +0.78 for first grade. However, no measure of maintenance was reported. Borman & Dowling (2006) provided first graders with a 7-week reading-focused summer school. There were substantial positive effects by fall, but these disappeared by spring. The same students qualified for a second summer school experience after second grade, and this once again showed positive effects that faded by the following spring. There was no cumulative effect.

Because these studies showed no lasting impact, one might consider them a failure. However, it is important to note the impressive initial impacts, which might suggest that intensive reading instruction could be a part of a comprehensive approach for struggling readers in the early grades, if these gains were followed up during the school year with effective interventions. What summertime offers is an opportunity to use time differently (i.e., intensive phonics for young students who need it). It would make more sense to build on the apparent potential of focused summer school, rather than abandoning it based on its lack of long-term impacts.

All by themselves, summer programs, based on the evidence we have so far “Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.” But in next week’s blog, I discuss some ideas about how short-term interventions with powerful impacts, such as tutoring, pre-kindergarten, and intensive phonics for students in grades K-1 in summer school, might be followed up with school-year interventions to produce long-term positive impacts. Perhaps summer school could be part of a cure for the school year blues.

References

Borman, G. D., & Dowling, Ν. M. (2006). Longitudinal achievement effects of multiyear summer school: Evidence from the Teach Baltimore randomized field trial. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 28, 25-48. doi:10.3102/01623737028001025

Heyns, B. (1978). Summer learning and the effect of schooling. New York: Academic Press.

Kim, J. S., & Guryan, J. (2010). The efficacy of a voluntary summer book reading intervention for low-income Latino children from language minority families. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 20-31. doi:10.1037/a0017270

Somers, M. A., Welbeck, R., Grossman, J. B., & Gooden, S. (2015). An analysis of the effects of an academic summer program for middle school students. Retrieved from ERIC website: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED558507.pdf

Schacter, J., & Jo, B. (2005). Learning when school is not in session: A reading summer day-camp intervention to improve the achievement of exiting first-grade students who are economically disadvantaged. Journal of Research in Reading, 28, 158-169. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2005.00260.x

Zvoch, K., & Stevens, J. J. (2013). Summer school effects in a randomized field trial. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(1), 24-32. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.05.002

_{Photo credit: American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action (CC BY-NC 4.0)}

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org.

The Summer Slide: Fact or Fiction?

One of the things that “everyone knows” from educational research is that while advantaged students gain in achievement over the summer, disadvantaged students decline. However, the rate of gain during school time, from fall to spring, is about the same for advantaged and disadvantaged students. This pattern has led researchers such as Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson (2007) and Allington & McGill-Franzen (2018) to conclude that differential gain/loss over the summer completely explains the gap in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Middle class students are reading, going to the zoo, and going to the library, while disadvantaged students are less likely to do these school-like things.

The “summer slide,” as it’s called, has come up a lot lately, because it is being used to predict the amount of loss disadvantaged students will experience as a result of Covid-19 school closures. If disadvantaged students lose so much ground over 2 ½ months of summer vacation, imagine how much they will lose after five or seven or nine months (to January, 2021)! Remarkably precise-looking estimates of how far behind students will be when school finally re-opens for all are circulating widely. These estimates are based on estimates of the losses due to “summer slide,” so they are naturally called “Covid slide.”

I am certain that most students, and especially disadvantaged students, are in fact losing substantial ground due to the long school closures. The months of school not attended, coupled with the apparent ineffectiveness of remote teaching for most students, do not bode well for a whole generation of children. But this is abnormal. Ordinary summer vacation is normal. Does ordinary summer vacation lead to enough “summer slide” to explain substantial gaps in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students?

I’m pretty sure it does not. In fact, let me put this in caps:

SUMMER SLIDE IS PROBABLY A MYTH.

Recent studies of summer slide, mostly using NWEA MAP data from millions of children, are finding results that call summer slide into question (Kuhfeld, 2019; Quinn et al., 2016) or agree that it happens but that summer losses are similar for advantaged and disadvantaged students (Atteberry & McEachin, 2020). However, hiding in plain sight is the most conclusive evidence of all: NWEA’s table of norms for the MAP, a benchmark assessment widely used to monitor student achievement. The MAP is usually given three times a year. In the chart below, calculated from raw data on the NWEA website (teach.mapnwea.org), I compute the gains from fall to winter, winter to spring, and spring to fall (the last being “summer”). These are for grades 1 to 5 reading.

Grade	Fall to winter	Winter to spring	Spring to fall (summer)
1	9.92	5.55	0.95
2	8.85	4.37	1.05
3	7.28	3.22	-0.47
4	5.83	2.33	-0.35
5	4.64	1.86	-0.81
Mean	7.30	3.47	0.07

NWEA’s chart is probably accurate. But it suggests something that cannot possibly be true. No, it’s not that students gain less in reading each year. That’s true. It is that students gain more than twice as much from fall to winter as they do from winter to spring. That cannot be true.Why would students gain so much more in the first semester than the second? One might argue that they are fresher in the fall, or something like that. But double the gain, in every elementary grade? That cannot be right.

Here is my explanation. The fall score is depressed.

The only logical explanation for extraordinary fall-to-winter gain is that many students score poorly on the September test, but rapidly recover.

I think most elementary teachers already know this. Their experience is that students score very low when they return from summer vacation, but this is not their true reading level. For three decades, we have noticed this in our Success for All program, and we routinely recommend that teachers place students in our reading sequence not where they score in September, but no lower than they scored last spring. (If students score higher in September than they did on a spring test, we do use the September score).

What is happening, I believe, is that students do not forget how to read, they just momentarily forget how to take tests. Or perhaps teachers do not invest time in preparing students to take a pretest, which has few if any consequences, but they do prepare them for winter and spring tests. I do not know for sure how it happens, but I do know for sure, from experience, that fall scores tend to understate students’ capabilities, often by quite a lot. And if the fall score is artificially or temporarily low, then the whole summer loss story is wrong.

Another indicator that fall scores are, shall we say, a bit squirrely, is the finding by both Kuhfield (2019) and Atteberry & McEachin (2020) that there is a consistent negative correlation between school year gain and summer loss. That is, the students who gain the most from fall to spring lose the most from spring to fall. How can that be? What must be going on is just that students who get fall scores far below their actual ability quickly recover, and then make what appear to be fabulous gains from fall to spring. But that same temporarily low fall score gives them a summer loss. So of course there is a negative correlation, but it does not have any practical meaning.

So far, I’ve only been talking about whether there is a summer slide at all, for all students taken together. It may still be true, as found in the Heyns (1978) and Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson (2007) studies, that disadvantaged students are not gaining as much as advantaged students do over the summer. Recent studies by Atteberry & McEachin (2020) and Kuhfeld (2019) do not find much differential summer gain/loss according to social class. One the other hand, it could be that disadvantaged students are more susceptible to forgetting how to take tests. Or perhaps disadvantaged students are more likely to attend schools that put little emphasis on doing well on a September test that has no consequences for the students or the school. But it is unlikely they are truly forgetting how to read. The key point is that if fall tests are unreliable indicators of students’ actual skills, if they are just temporary dips that do not indicate what students can do, then taking them seriously in determining whether or not “summer slide” exists is not sensible.

By the way, before you begin thinking that while summer slide may not happen in reading but it must exist in math or other subjects, prepare to be disappointed again. The NWEA MAP scores for math, science, and language usage follow very similar patterns to those in reading.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but if I am, then we’d better start finding out about the amazing fall-to-winter surge, and see how we can make winter-to-spring gains that large! But if you don’t have a powerful substantive explanation for the fall-to-winter surge, you’re going to have to accept that summer slide isn’t a major factor in student achievement.

References

Alexander, K. L., Entwisle, D. R., & Olson, L. S. (2007). Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. American Sociological Review, 72(2), 167-180. doi:10.1177/000312240707200202

Allington, R. L., & McGill-Franzen, A. (Eds.). (2018). Summer reading: Closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Atteberry, A., & McEachin, A. (2020). School’s out: The role of summers in understanding achievement disparities. American Educational Research Journal https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831220937285

Heyns, B. (1978). Summer learning and the effect of schooling. New York: Academic Press.

Kuhfeld, M (2019). Surprising new evidence on summer learning loss. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (11), 25-29.

Quinn, D., Cook, N., McIntyre, J., & Gomez, C. J. (2016). Seasonal dynamics of academic achievement inequality by socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity: Updating and extending past research with new national data. Educational Researcher, 45 (8), 443-453.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org.

Could Intensive Education Rescue Struggling Readers?

Long, long ago, I heard about a really crazy idea. Apparently, a few private high schools were trying a scheduling plan in which instead of having students take all of their subjects every day, they would take one subject at a time for a month or six weeks. The idea was that with a total concentration on one subject, with no time lost in changing classes, students could make astonishing progress. At the end of each week, they could see the progress they’d made, and really feel learning happening.

Algebra? Solved!

French? Accompli!

Of course, I could not talk anyone into trying this. I almost got a Catholic school to try it, but when they realized that kids would have to take religion all day, that was that.

However, in these awful days, with schools nationwide closing for months due to Covid, I was thinking about a way to use a similar concept with students who have fallen far behind, or actually with any students who are far behind grade level for any reason.

What happens now with students who are far behind in, say, reading, is that they get a daily period of remedial instruction, or special education. For most of them, despite the very best efforts of dedicated teachers, this is not very effective. Day after day after day, they get instruction that at best moves them forward at a slow, steady pace. But after a while, students lose any hope of truly catching up, and when you lose hope, you lose motivation, and no one learns without motivation.

So here is my proposal. What if students who were far behind could enroll in a six-week intensive service designed to teach them to read, no matter what? They would attend an intensive class, perhaps all day, in which they receive a promise: this time, you’ll make it. No excuses. This is the best chance you’ll ever have. Students would be carefully assessed, including their vision and hearing as well as their reading levels. They would be assigned to one-to-small group or, if necessary, one-to-one instruction for much of the day. There might be music or sports or other activities between sessions, but imagine that students got three 40-minute tutoring sessions a day, on content exactly appropriate to their needs. The idea, as in intensive education, would be to enable the students to feel the thrill of learning, to see unmistakable gains in a day, extraordinary gains in a week. The tutoring could be to groups of four for most students, but students with the most difficult, most unusual problems could receive one-to-one tutoring.

The ideal time to do this intensive tutoring would be summer school. Actually, this has been done in a few studies. Schacter & Jo (2005) provided intensive phonics instruction to students after first grade in three disadvantaged schools in Los Angeles. The seven-week experience increased their test scores by an effect size of +1.16, compared to similar students who did not have the opportunity to attend summer school. Zvoch & Stevens (2015) also provided intensive phonics instruction in small groups in a 5-week reading summer school. The students were disadvantaged kindergartners and first graders in a medium-sized city in the Pacific Northwest. The effect sizes were +0.60 for kindergarten, +0.78 for first grade.

Summer is not the only good time for intensive reading instruction. Reading is so important that it would be arguably worthwhile to provide intensive six-week instruction (with time out for mathematics) and breaks for, say, sports and music, during the school year.

If intensive education were as effective as ordinary 40-minute daily tutoring, it might be no more expensive. A usual course of tutoring is 20 weeks, so triple tutoring sessions for six weeks would cost almost the same as 18 weeks of ordinary tutoring. In other words, if intensive tutoring is more effective than ordinary tutoring, then the additional benefits might cost little or nothing.

Intensive tutoring would make particular sense to try during summer, 2021, when millions of students will still be far behind in reading because of the lengthy school closures they will have experienced. I have no idea whether intensive tutoring will be more or less effective than ordinary one-to-small group tutoring (which is very, very effective; see here and here). Planfully concentrating tutoring during an intensive period of time certainly seems worth a try!

References

Zvoch, K., & Stevens, J. J. (2013). Summer school effects in a randomized field trial. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(1), 24-32. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.05.002

Photo credit: American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org.

COVID-19 and School Closures: Could Summer Help?

If there is one educational benefit of the otherwise dismal experience of closing virtually all of America’s schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is this: I’ll bet parents are developing a lot of respect for teachers. I’m hearing a lot about parents finding out that online lessons are no substitute for capable, in-person teachers.

Because of the essential health need to reduce contacts among students and school personnel, schools all over the U.S. have closed. School leaders are scrambling to provide on-line coursework. It is difficult everywhere to go from zero to online in a very short time, but in schools in high-poverty areas, where many or most students lack home computers or reliable internet access, it is well-nigh impossible. But even if every student had a working computer and internet access, there seems to be widespread use of computerized worksheets, and other uninspiring content. In some schools and districts, in which online work is already well used and computers are universally available, the situation is surely better, but even there, online all day every day is no substitute for in-person teaching. Very conscientious and self-motivated students, the kind who already use Khan Academy just for fun, are probably thriving, but such students constitute a small minority, even in the finest schools.

School closures are likely to extend into May, leaving little if any of the regular school year for things to return to normal. Two states, Kansas and Virginia, have already announced that schools will not re-open before the end of the year, and others will surely follow.

The Summer Solution

In light of the realities we face, I think most schools are struggling to teach all of their children during the school closures. Parents are doing their best, as are some students, but nationwide, trying to keep schools going as they always have, except online, is not a satisfying solution.

I have an alternative solution. It has two simple steps.

As soon as feasible, declare schools to be on break. Instant vacation.
When it is safe to open schools, do so. Hold an in-person two-month session, starting (let’s say) on June 1 and running through the end of July.

During the instant vacation, provide parents and students with a menu of engaging activities that are fun, engage students’ energies and curiosity, and optional. These could focus on science, social studies, writing, art, music, and other subjects often given short shrift during the school year. These would be facilitated by teachers; in my experience, every school and district has many teachers who are crazy about one or more topics that they rarely get to talk about in school. Teachers may be Civil War reenactors, world travelers, art experts, amateur musicians, or published writers, even if those are not the topics they teach. In three days, max, any school district could find extraordinary people with fierce passions for something they want to share with kids. Students might be given a choice of activities, and they might choose to do none at all. It’s vacation, after all. The reason to have these activities is to give students shut in at home useful and interesting things to do. I’m sure there are loads of great online activities already out there that are rarely used because of the lack of time for such activities in the regular school year. Imagine any of the following, facilitated by teachers who love these topics:

Online trips to faraway places or to periods of history
Online book clubs in which students could choose topics they’d like to read about and then discuss age-appropriate books on them with others from all over their school, district, or state.
Science clubs, in which students could explore topics of their choice in groups from all over. One interesting topic: epidemiology. Science clubs could find out everything there is to know about space travel, or the science of music, or the science of sports.
Writer’s workshops, in which kids from all over could enroll in groups working on writing their own mystery stories, fantasy stories, sports stories, or biographies of famous people. That’s how the Bronte sisters learned to write, shut in in small-town Yorkshire, surrounded by poverty and disease. They wrote stories with and for each other, throughout their childhoods.
Art or music appreciation, history, or techniques
How students can get jobs and internships (in normal times)
Post-secondary options for secondary students

I think you get the idea. Trying to cover all the usual school subjects in the usual way, but online, is sure to be boring and ineffective for most students. But on vacation, shut in students could select learning activities to do not for a grade, not under pressure from parents or teachers, but to satisfy their own curiosity.

When the crisis is over, presumably in the summer, students could return to school and resume their usual lessons, with in-person teachers. I’m sure there would be practical difficulties, but I’m willing to bet that this could work, perhaps in some places, perhaps in many. At least it seems worth a try!

Photo credit: zhizhou deng / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org.

Reading by Third Grade – Or Else

Is it possible to legislate reading proficiency? An increasing number of states seem to think so. A recent article in the New York Times reported on laws in effect in 14 states (so far) requiring that third graders be reading at grade level or be retained. The article was about a six-week summer school program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, for students at risk for retention. About 1,500 third graders are taking summer school, or one in eight of Charlotte’s third grade population.

The problem of education reform is not a lack of good ideas, but a lack of good ideas sensibly implemented. Ensuring that virtually all children read by third grade is an essential and attainable goal. Reading by third grade is indeed a key predictor of high school graduation. I understand and sympathize with the state legislators who passed these laws. They were justifiably impatient with the continuing failure of school systems to solve the early reading problem. Sad to say, however, the strategies being used in the states with mandatory retention laws are misguided.

First, as the article notes, most of the summer school children are far behind, and six weeks of summer school will not bring them to grade level. Every educator knows that the struggling children needed help from pre-kindergarten to grade 3, not just summer school at the end of three years of failure. Other than Florida, the original mandatory retention state, other states have provided few resources to help children meet the standards for promotion.

Second, retention is rarely an effective or necessary policy. It looks good for a while because the retained children are a year older than their (new) classmates. For example, a ten-year-old in fourth grade immediately gains in apparent performance if transferred to the third grade — the score doesn’t change, but the reference group does. However, these apparent benefits wear off in a few years. This result has been found in many studies over the years, and the article reported that Florida, which has had a mandatory retention policy since 2002, reported retained children performing better than similar (but younger) non-retained children for several years, but by eighth grade the differences had faded away.

Third, both summer school and retention are incredibly expensive solutions. Retention means giving children one more year of elementary school, at a cost of roughly $10,000 per child, using national average per-pupil costs. Summer school is also an expensive solution, as it requires six more weeks to employ teachers and keep schools open. Further, the evidence for the effectiveness of summer school is weak.

Finally, and most importantly, there are much more effective strategies for ensuring that virtually all children are reading by third grade. In fact, I counted 28 separate elementary reading programs with data accepted by the What Works Clearinghouse. These programs all meet the U. S. Department of Education’s EDGAR standards for “strong” or “moderate” evidence of effectiveness. All are being actively disseminated today. The programs include one-to-one tutoring by teachers or paraprofessionals, one-to-small-group programs, classroom programs, technology approaches, and whole-school reform approaches, including our Success for All program. There were no summer school or after school programs that made the list.

Besides their evidence of effectiveness, these approaches have several important benefits. They are designed to be replicated and are ready to go. Also, they use staff already in the school, which both adds greatly to cost-effectiveness and improves the skills of the participating staff for all aspects of their jobs.

Amazingly, there are states during difficult economic times that are willing to spend an additional $10,000 per child to retain thousands of children, not to mention costs of summer school and other last-minute remediation. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use these resources instead on proven and replicable approaches that could actually solve the problem on a scale that would matter? Early reading is perhaps the one area in which proven programs of all sorts are most available. Given the well-founded concern about third grade reading, you’d imagine that policymakers would be rushing to implement proven approaches. But the reality is otherwise.

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Summer: The Missing Link in Education Reform

By Gary Huggins, Chief Executive Officer, National Summer Learning Association

Research has long documented the phenomenon of summer learning loss. Over the three-month summer vacation, children forget some of what they have learned during the previous school year. It’s an unfortunate, unintended consequence of the ideal of a lazy, fun-filled summer.

Most youth lose about two months in grade equivalents in math computational skills over the summer. Low-income youth lose more than two months in reading achievement while their middle-income peers make slight gains.

Worse, these losses are cumulative, contributing to a widening achievement gap. A study by Johns Hopkins University’s Karl Alexander found that summer learning loss in the elementary school years results in low-income students being as much as 2.5 years behind their higher-income peers by the end of 5th grade. It also leads to placement in less rigorous high school courses, higher high school dropout rates, and lower college attendance. Further, when students lose hard-won skills over the summer, teachers waste time re-teaching at the beginning of every school year.

The learning losses, and the wasted time, are preventable.

There is evidence that students who attend high-quality summer programs can avoid summer losses, but what makes a high-quality program? Not surprisingly, such programs offer strong, individualized instruction, have parents who are involved, and feature small class sizes and engaging activities, according to the RAND Corporation’s 2011 report Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children’s Learning. They’re typically full-day programs that run from five to six weeks.

There are examples of successful summer learning programs in school districts and communities throughout the country. These high-quality programs effectively blend academics and enrichment activities to help students avoid learning losses, and even experience gains. These have nothing in common with the punitive summer schools I recall from my childhood. Rather, this new vision for summer school has kids reading in the morning and visiting museums in the afternoon. Math lessons are followed by art and music – subjects often squeezed out of the strained school day.

Outcomes are impressive. As part of the Smarter Summers initiative the National Summer Learning Association launched in 10 cities last year with support from the Walmart Foundation, middle school students attending Summer Advantage USA in Chicago and Indianapolis gained an average of 2.1 months in grade equivalents in literacy and math skills.

In Oakland, Calif., more than half of 1,000 elementary students who attended a summer program were found by the district to be performing at or above the benchmark in English/language arts scores after the program, compared with 36 percent in the spring. In Baltimore’s expanded summer learning program, elementary school students registered double-digit percentage-point gains in language arts and math tests from spring to fall 2010. Recently, Baltimore City Schools CEO Andres Alonso said that summer school is no longer just for children who are failing, but an important part of his strategy for helping all students to succeed.

Research is now underway on wide scale implementation and on sustained gains. The reality is that if we ever hope to close the persistent academic achievement gap, districts need to consider summer learning as part of their school improvement strategies. Summer school shouldn’t be seen as punitive, and shouldn’t be the first sacrifice in a tight budget year. It’s a link in the chain that’s been broken for far too long.