Not Vacation: Summer Learning Programs Crucial

For many students and teachers, summer vacation was more like summer term.

Reading lists. Science camps. Portfolio development. The to-do list for kids and teachers sound remarkably alike. Schools are on the hook to improve student performance on high-stakes tests, administrators are eyeing more science and technology instruction, and parents are demanding more for their children.

Some studies suggest students lose as much as two months of knowledge over the summer. Advocates say educators can't expect their students to succeed if they, too, spend the summer months poolside.

"Summer learning space is time for innovation," said Gary Huggins, chief executive officer of the National Summer Learning Association. "Innovation doesn't flow easily into the school year."

That's why summer programs used the past few months to try new things.

Teachers in one of Chicago's struggling elementary schools huddled for two months this summer to retool the reading curriculum for first- and second-graders.

Elsewhere, more than 4,000 teachers turned to a weeklong lesson on water purification to see if parts of it could work during the school year.

In New York City's Harlem neighborhood, students spent six weeks flipping through books on everything from hip-hop to Depression-era toys in an effort to spark an interest in reading and narrow the gap between the scores of rich and poor students.



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All were fresh approaches that could make their way into the school-year classrooms. Think of summer programs as a test drive for some lessons without the pressure, a chance to try something without consequences.

If things don't work out, the side effect is that maybe students don't forget so much as they learned last year.

"There's been all this work done and investment made over the last nine months and then that investment stops," said Pam Allyn, executive director of LitWorld, a literacy nonprofit. "For every kid — no matter where they live — out of school time is really problematic."

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