What They Did Last Summer

Photo by CREATAS

By Gerald W. Bracey

"Pupils Lose Ground in City Schools: the Longer Children Stay in the System, the More They Fall Behind." The Baltimore Sun carried this particular headline, but it could be from most any city newspaper. Obviously, the schools are failing the kids. Teachers teach poor children less every year.

A little thought, though, reveals that the "failing schools" hypothesis doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We know from various studies that poor students arrive at school behind their more affluent peers. Why should we think that whatever left these kids behind at the starting gate suddenly stops or that the school, which has the kids for five or six hours a day, 180 days a year, can fully compensate for those influences? Said one group of researchers, "The drag of poverty, family stress, and community decay doesn't turn off when children reach age 6 and the school's influence begins to weigh in."

If the failing schools hypothesis fails the test of logic, it also fails the test of fact. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University tracked low, middle, and high socioeconomic status (SES) kids from first grade through fifth. When the researchers looked at test scores each spring, they found that, indeed, the poor kids started behind and fell further back.

These researchers, though, tested students in both fall and spring. When they looked at fall-to-spring test results, they found that the three groups gained pretty much the same. Over the summers, poor students lost some of their gains in both reading and math. Middle class kids held their own in math and gained in reading. High SES kids gained in both. The low-income kids fell further and further back because of what happened--or didn't--in June, July, and August.

These results would be less convincing if they came from only the one study. But they don't. Researchers first noticed summer loss in 1904. Results from studies since then have been mixed, but as studies became more sophisticated, the results came more in line with the Hopkins study just described.

Summer loss findings take on immense importance in the wake of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA, as we all know, requires schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Schools that fail to do so suffer increasingly harsh sanctions. But the phenomenon of summer loss indicates that many impoverished urban schools will show AYP during the school year, but get labeled as failures because of what happens when the kids are not in school.

Many factors act to produce summer loss. For one thing, low-income parents use far fewer words and speak less often to their children. The Hopkins researchers found that better off children "more often went to city and state parks, museums, science centers, and zoos; and more often went to the library in summer." They also played more and more organized sports, which can teach some arithmetic, rules, sequencing, etc. In other words, the summers of middle- and higher- income kids are filled with what we might generically call "enrichment." This is important because it means that the solution to summer loss is not necessarily more school--although that is the call from the year-round-school advocates.

Poor kids have fewer out-of-school opportunities to read: their homes contain fewer books, their neighborhoods contain only one third as many stores carrying children's titles, and those stores carry far fewer children's books than stores in middle class neighborhoods. The volume of summer reading is the single best predictor of summer loss or gain so, again, low-income kids lose out.

The role of family and community in sustaining school learning has long been realized and was stated well 10 years ago:

"We have placed too much confidence in school reforms that affected only six hours a day of a child's life .... In the face of many negative influences on our children that come from outside the school, we have done well to maintain our high school completion rate and our level of performance on achievement measures .... We have foolishly concluded that any problems with the levels of academic achievement have been caused by faulty schools staffed by inept teachers. School leaders and others must turn increasingly to the parents, homes and communities."

Alas, those words reflected a change of heart by the man principally responsible for the foolish conclusion he mentions, Terrel Bell. As Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, Bell established the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which produced 1983's golden treasury of selected, slanted, and spun statistics, A Nation At Risk. Bell's words above appeared in Phi Delta Kappan in April 1993, Risk's 10th anniversary.

Too late.

Gerald W. Bracey is the author of On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools (Heinemann) and the revised Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About American Public Education (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). Every October, Phi Delta Kappan publishes the "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education." He is affiliated with George Mason University, the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, and the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

A Parent's Guide

The research on "summer loss" highlighted by Gerald Bracey points up the importance of the parent's role in helping children learn. NEA recently published a series of brochures you can give to parents, explaining in clear language and with specific examples some of the ways they can help.

There are guides to helping children learn to read, helping with math, and raising scientifically literate children. These are mostly for parents of younger children.

Another set, published in cooperation with the National PTA, gives parents advice on how to get involved in their child's school and how to make sense of the new mandated testing programs. Most are available in both English and Spanish.

Check out the brochure texts on the NEA Web site at www.nea.org/parents/. For up to five copies, call Montr? Dupree at NEA headquarters, 202-822-7116, or e-mail mdupree@nea.org. For more than five, or to customize a brochure with the name of your local Association, go to http://flyers.nea.org/.