Why and How Communities ShouldFocus on Summer Learning BY RON FA IRCHILD

Public schools in the United States typically oper-ate on a standard 180-day school calendar that hasremained virtually unchanged for the past hundredyears. While many education reformers rightly cri-tique the public school calendar as a remnant froma bygone agricultural era, relatively few have suc-ceeded in systemically changing when and for howlong children attend public schools each year. Thecentral thesis of this article is that in order to suc-cessfully address the need to expand the amount andquality of time for learning, one must understand theorigins of the school calendar and the broader rela-tionships between summer and U.S. popular culture,business interests, and politics.

Specifically, this article analyzes the origins of theU.S. school calendars, why efforts to change schoolcalendars have failed, what risks young people faceduring the summer months, and how to expand timefor learning during the summer months cost effec-tively with widespread public support. Rather thanfighting battles over the school calendar, it is pos-sible for communities to extend choices and oppor-tunities to low-income students over the summer inorder to counteract well-documented setbacks. Thearticle concludes with recommendations for educa-tion policy makers, elected officials, and nongovern-mental organizations that seek practical solutionsand strategies for how to use the summer monthsto help close achievement gaps based on socioeco-nomic status and accelerate learning for all youngpeople.

Origins of the U.S. Public School Calendar

If you were to ask most Americans where the currentschool calendar comes from, they generally wouldrespond that the reason kids have long summerbreaks from public schools is because they were onceneeded to help with agricultural work. The typicalexplanation is that school calendars were createdduring an era when most of the U.S. population livedon farms and children were given a long summer

“vacation” ostensibly so that they could provide freelabor and assist their families. In a recent book, Dr.Kenneth Gold, a historian at the City University ofNew York, argues that this popular folklore on theorigins of the school calendar is not entirely accu-rate.

While it is certainly the case that children wereneeded as a source of agricultural labor, manyschools in rural communities prior to 1900 regu-larly closed during the spring for planting and thefall for harvesting. Rather than close schools forthe entire growing season, these rural schools fre-quently offered a “summer session.” Conversely,in large urban areas, particularly in the northeast-ern United States, it was common for schools toclose for a prolonged break every summer. At theturn of the twentieth century, there was a grow-ing desire, particularly among the more affluentmembers of society, to flee cities during the sum-mer months. The heat, threat of communicable dis-eases, and poor municipal sanitation during the early1900s helped drive residents out of cities during thesummer months, and city school calendars gener-ally accommodated the needs and desires of wealthyfamilies.

As compulsory public education grew, state andcounty officials gradually began to standardize theschool calendar to a 180-day, nine-month schoolyear that remains prevalent to this day. Althougheach state took a slightly different path, they allgenerally arrived at the same destination: a 180-dayschool calendar that met the needs of an increas-ingly urban and mobile population. Rural districtsgradually gave up their summer sessions and typi-cally added days to their calendars in order to pro-vide children with a continuous 180 days of school.Urban districts generally continued the practice ofhaving one long summer break. Arguably, the urbanelite and city dwellers had as much, if not more, im-pact on the development of the current U.S. schoolcalendar as rural farmers did.

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This abbreviated history of the school calendar of-fers a number of useful insights for modern educa-tion reformers and municipal officials interested inaddressing the need for summer learning. First andfundamentally, the school calendar should be prop-erly understood as a long-standing political con-struct that was created intentionally to meet theneeds of particular families during a particular his-torical era. The school calendar is not merely an acci-dental leftover from the agrarian era. Simply put, theschool calendar was not designed to meet the needsof farmers who needed childhood labor through thegrowing season.

Nor was the calendar designed to meet the needsof large numbers of factory workers in America’sgrowing cities. Ironically, the standardization of theschool calendar began at precisely the same timewhen the child care needs of factory workers duringthe summer months were the greatest. The passageof the first child labor laws in 1916 gave childrenfreedom from work during the summer but also leftthem with little else to do during their vacations. Inresponse, community leaders pushed for the devel-opment of “vacation schools” in cities during theearly twentieth century. These vacation schools fre-quently were run by churches, charity organizations,and women’s groups in major cities in the Northeastand Midwest. As these programs grew, they increas-ingly became financed and administered by publiceducation officials transforming them into credit-bearing summer school programs that continue inmany large urban school systems to this day.

Why Is the School Calendar So Difficult to Change?

Socioeconomic and cultural forces clearly played animportant role in the standardization of the schoolcalendar at the turn of the twentieth century. Dif-ferent expressions of those same forces continue toprovide a compelling explanation for why the 180-day calendar remains intractable, despite decades ofresearch about the deleterious effects of a prolongedbreak from school for children, particularly thoseliving in poverty.

First and foremost, there are substantial businessinterests that align with the current school cal-endar. Most notably, the International Associa-tion of Amusement Parks and Attractions supports

lobbying efforts to perpetuate the traditional schoolcalendar. This association has opposed legislationat the state level that would modify school cal-endars. In the past decade, it has been successfulin restricting the official start date of the schoolyear to September in over a dozen states. It hasfunded research on the relationship between Septem-ber start dates and increased profits within its indus-try and increased state revenues from taxes on traveland tourism-related businesses. The association alsofunds the Coalition for the Traditional SchoolCalendar, which fosters grassroots opposition tocalendar change by middle- and upper-income fam-ilies, who often view such efforts as government en-croachment on family time. From beach communi-ties to the travel industry, some businesses dependon children being on vacation during the summermonths in order to earn third-quarter profits.

In addition to opposition from business interests,deeply rooted cultural forces reinforce summer asan idyllic time for rest, relaxation, and vacation forchildren. Popular music and advertising reinforcessummer as a time for freedom from the stricturesof the school year routine. Most Americans havean image of summer as carefree, happy time when“kids can be kids” and enjoy experiences like tak-ing vacations, relaxing at the pool, and spendingtime with family. Efforts to change the school calen-dar that are framed as “taking vacations away fromchildren and families” run counter to this culturalnorm and often engender popular opposition. Par-ent groups have organized advocacy campaigns to“save our summers” that have largely succeeded inkeeping the traditional school calendar intact.

The sheer cost involved in adding a significant num-ber of instructional days to the calendar has been amajor barrier for districts that are inclined to pursuesuch a course of action.

Last, and perhaps most important, the sheer costinvolved in adding a significant number of instruc-tional days to the calendar has been a major bar-rier for districts that are inclined to pursue sucha course of action. The expenses associated withadding 30 days to the calendar as some advocates

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suggest would be staggering. For example, the aver-age per-pupil expenditure for an entire 180 days ofschool in Boston in 2009–2010 was $16,666. Usingthat figure as a basis for analysis, the addition of sixweeks of school in the summer would cost taxpayersan additional $2,778 per student. With more than56,000 students in the district, such an effort wouldcost more than $155 million in total. In a time ofshrinking state and local education budgets, it is un-realistic to expect local school districts to add daysto the school calendar at this cost.

Economic and political needs of adults rather thanthe educational needs of children drove the con-struction of the standardized 180-day calendar.

As a result of these factors, no major school dis-trict in the United States has significantly added in-structional days to the standard 180-day calendarin the past thirty years, according to the NationalEducational Commission on Time and Learning. Insome states, there have been modifications to theschool calendar, but such efforts typically involvemerely the redistribution of school days rather thanthe addition of more time for learning. So-calledmodified school calendars or year-round schoolingis especially popular in districts where there is agreat need for additional school space and class-rooms because it can increase the number of stu-dents a particular school facility can accommodate.In the school year 2004–2005, over 2.28 millionstudents in forty-seven states attended over 3,200schools that operated on such schedules. The stateswith the largest number of students in modifiedcalendar schools were Arizona, California, Hawaii,Kentucky, and Nevada—states that were also expe-riencing the largest population growth rates in thecountry.

One thing that is abundantly clear from the analy-sis of the origins of the school calendar is that theeconomic and political needs of adults rather thanthe educational needs of children drove the con-struction of the standardized 180-day calendar. Itis hard to imagine that anyone designing a new ed-ucation system from scratch would use the current

U.S. school calendar to schedule when teaching andlearning would occur. Yet the school calendar per-sists and continues to contribute to a host of negativeoutcomes for U.S. schoolchildren, particularly thosewho face the greatest risks.

Risks Young People Face During the Summer

The reality of what millions of children in the UnitedStates encounter during the summer months is vastlydifferent from our popular mythology about the joyof summer. Whereas wealthier children and youthtypically access a wide variety of resources that helpthem grow both academically and developmentallyover the summer, poor children often lack access tosimilar types of experiences. When the school doorsclose, many youth across the United States enteran environment lacking educational opportunities,healthy meals, and adequate supervision from caringadults. From a resources perspective, summer breakin the United States has traditionally been a timewhen the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Research spanning a hundred years has proven thatstudents lose ground academically when they areout of school for the summer. The problem is par-ticularly acute among low-income students, wholose an average of more than two months in read-ing achievement each summer from kindergartento third grade. These setbacks slow progress to-ward reaching the goal of reading at the proficientlevel by the third grade, a leading predictor of latereducational success. Summer learning loss exacer-bates the achievement gap because middle-class stu-dents, who are more likely to be in enrichment pro-grams or reading at home, actually make slight gainsover the summer. In fact, Johns Hopkins Univer-sity researchers Karl Alexander, Doris Entwistle,and Linda Olson attribute as much as two-thirdsof the achievement gap in reading to unequal sum-mer learning opportunities in the elementary schoolyears. By the end of fifth grade, disadvantaged chil-dren are nearly three grade equivalents behind theirmore affluent peers in reading. This ultimately canaffect whether the student will earn a high schooldiploma or go to college.

In the mid-1990s, Harris Cooper, BarbaraNye, Kelly Charlton, James Lindsey, and ScottGreathouse synthesized research on the effects of

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summer vacation on student achievement. On aver-age, achievement test scores of children were aboutone month lower when they returned to school in fallthan when they left in the spring, and summer losswas more profound for math computation skills andspelling than for other tested skill areas. All students,regardless of family economics, lost roughly equalamounts of math skills over the summer, but differ-ences in summer learning loss for reading were re-lated to resources in the home. While students frommiddle-socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds ac-tually showed gains in reading achievement oversummer, children from low-SES families showedlosses.

Longitudinal data from the Beginning School Study,collected by Karl Alexander and his colleagues atJohns Hopkins University, suggest that summerlearning deficits of low-SES children accumulateover the elementary school years. By middle school,these summer reading differences plus a relativelysmall initial achievement gap at the beginning offirst grade produced a cumulative gap of two years inreading achievement. Because the data also suggestthat lower- and higher-SES children learned at es-sentially the same rate while in school, the wideningof the gaps is explained almost entirely by the com-pounded deficits that results from these SES-basedsummer learning differences.

Beyond substantial academic setbacks, lower-SESyouth are also at risk of experiencing setbacks intheir overall health and nutrition over the summermonths, and these setbacks can influence learning aswell as overall well-being. Food scarcity during thesummer months is a significant health issue for low-SES children in the United States. The Food Researchand Action Center found that only one in seven chil-dren who participated in federally subsidized mealsduring the 2010 school year also participated in suchprograms over the summer months. In addition, dur-ing the summer when many children typically lackaccess to a nutrition program similar to the one theyparticipated in during the regular school year, theytend to regress on measure of health, such as percentof body fat and body mass index (BMI). Paul T. vonHippel and collaborators reported in the AmericanJournal of Public Health that the BMI of childrengrew faster and more variably during summer va-cation than during the kindergarten and first-grade

school years. Furthermore, the difference betweenschool and summer growth rates was especially largefor three at-risk subgroups: African American chil-dren, Hispanic children, and children who were al-ready overweight at the beginning of kindergarten.This research suggests that while schools’ diet andexercise policies may be less than ideal, summer va-cation may play more of a role than school environ-ments in contributing to early childhood obesity.

Viable, Research-Based Solutions

Summer SchoolAlthough keeping children and adolescents off thestreet provided the initial impetus for summerschool, by the 1950s, educators began to realize thatsummer school could furnish opportunities to re-mediate learning deficits. Because the wealthy wereable to hire tutors for their children or send themto camp, the educational summer programs madeavailable through schools largely served studentsfrom disadvantaged backgrounds. Such programswere often framed in punitive terms and designedas remedial in focus.

Using reports published from 1963 to 1995, Har-ris Cooper, Jeffrey Valentine, Kelly Charleton, andApril Melson found that summer school programsthat focused on lessening or removing learning de-ficiencies had a positive impact on the knowledgeand skills of participants. Overall, students com-pleting remedial summer programs were shown tohave scored about one-fifth of a standard devia-tion higher than the control group on outcomemeasures. Cooper and his collaborators also foundthat programs focusing on acceleration of learn-ing or on nonremedial goals had a positive impactroughly equal to programs that focused on reme-diation; that programs with larger effects typicallyserved middle-SES students in smaller communi-ties or school districts with class sizes no largerthan twenty students; and that programs focusedon the early grades and those that underwent care-ful scrutiny for treatment fidelity had larger effectsthan unmonitored programs.

The major findings from this study were laterconfirmed by Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowl-ing, who conducted a three-year study on the suc-cess of a multiyear summer school program, Teach

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Baltimore, in preventing losses and promoting lon-gitudinal achievement growth. Their results suggestthat when such summer learning programs are be-gun early, before disadvantaged students have hadthe opportunity to fall so far behind, they can helpprevent the anticipated growth in the achievementgap attributable to summer.

One notable aspect of the Teach Baltimore programwas that it involved a partnership between the Bal-timore City Public School System and Johns Hop-kins University operating as an alternative to thetraditional model of summer school in the city. Inthe past ten years in the United States, there hasbeen significant growth in the number and qualityof such summer learning programs that involve part-nerships among school districts, universities, andother community-based organizations.

Summer Learning ProgramsIncreasingly, quality summer learning programs of-fered by nonprofit, community-based organizationsare combining elements of academic learning withenrichment activities that traditionally take placeat summer camps. In response to such innovations,many major school districts such as Pittsburgh, De-troit, Baltimore, and Cincinnati are revamping sum-mer school programs and pursuing a great degree ofcollaboration between and among public agenciesand nongovernmental organizations. Brief descrip-tions of the most notable and largest-scale examplesof this approach in the United States are presentednext.

Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL, www.experiencebell.org) operates summer learning pro-grams for low-income kindergarten to sixth-gradechildren in partnership with school districts in Bal-timore, Boston, New York City, Springfield (Mas-sachusetts), and Detroit. A recent study of the BELLsummer program by Duncan Chaplin and JeffreyCapizzano found that children in the BELL treat-ment group gained about a month’s worth of read-ing skills more than their counterparts in the com-parison group during the summer. The study alsoreported positive impact on the degree to which par-ents encouraged their children to read.

Summer Advantage USA (www.summeradvantage.org) operates summer learning programs for over

four thousand low-income young people through-out the state of Indiana and in the city of Chicago.The program focuses on academics and enrichment.Summer Advantage aims to provide children accessto a well-rounded summer program that helps themsucceed in school, stimulates their dreams for thefuture, and helps them develop as leaders in theircommunities. On average, students who participatein the program experience academic gains of morethan two months in reading performance. In addi-tion, the program has shown impact on the state-wide achievement test, the ISTEP, for third-gradersat Lynwood Elementary, the poorest school in De-catur Township, Indiana. Test scores improved six-teen percentage points in language arts and nearlytwelve percentage points in math from 2009 to thisyear. Don Stinson, the superintendent of schools, at-tributes much of that improvement to the presenceof Summer Advantage in the district.

Horizons National (www.horizonsnational.org) of-fers a six-week, full-day educational enrich-ment summer session for low-income K–8 publicschool students with a broad range of academicabilities. Horizons National blends high-quality aca-demics with arts, sports, cultural enrichment, andconfidence-building activities. All Horizons studentslearn to swim, which leads to enormous gains in self-confidence that spill over into the classroom. High-lights of an evaluation of the program conducted in2007 included:

� Students performing below grade level during theschool year gained an average of four months ofreading skills during the six-week summer pro-gram. Many gained as much as a full year.

� Horizons provides an opportunity for children tomaintain and often advance their academic andnonacademic skill set in ways that will ultimatelyincrease a child’s likelihood of lifetime success.

� Horizons Affiliate Programs maintain fidelity tothe original model while allowing for local flexi-bility in implementation.

These examples of quality summer learning pro-grams demonstrate the efficacy of adding time forlearning in nontraditional ways and from sourcesother than just public schools. It should be notedthat these programs cost far less than the estimatequoted earlier of $2,778 per pupil for adding thirty

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instructional days to the school calendar in a majorU.S. city. The programs just cited range in cost from$1,000 to $2,000 per pupil. They each involve sig-nificant public–private partnerships between publicschools and private funders, such as foundations,corporations, and individual contributors.

In a time of tight school budgets, districts often areable to stretch their summer school dollars fartherby working in partnership with organizations suchas those just described. In cases where districts havefunding only for a three-hour, four-week remedialsummer school program, they can use those dollarsin combination with private funds secured by suchorganizations to offer longer, more comprehensive,and higher-quality summer programs.

Alternatives to the Traditional School CalendarTwo forms of calendar change could serve as solu-tions to the summer learning loss problem: extend-ing and modifying the school calendar. Extendingthe school year, while costly, would produce no-ticeable changes in student achievement if substan-tially more days were added. In their report, “Cost

Effectiveness of Alternative Year Schooling,” JaredHazelton, Craig Blakely, and Jon Denton suggestthat approximately thirty-five extra days would beneeded to produce significant achievement gains. Bycontrast, adding only five or six days to the cur-rent calendar would increase the actual task timeavailable to students and teachers only marginallyand have little impact on predictable summer learn-ing losses. One of the nation’s leading advocates forexpanding learning time, the National EducationalCommission on Time and Learning, suggests thatonly the combination of both increased time and afocus on how time actually gets spent would dra-matically improve student performance.

Merely modifying the school calendar by redistribut-ing the current vacation and eliminating the longsummer break has not produced significant achieve-ment gains for districts. The cumulative effects ofmodified school calendars or so-called year-roundschools on academic achievement are very small,according to the 2003 research synthesis by HarrisCooper and his collaborators. Such calendar modi-fications also tend to produce significant oppositionfrom groups mentioned earlier in this article. Thus,many have concluded that such a strategy is notworth the fight if significant achievement gains arenot the likely result.

How Should Education Policy Makers Proceed?

These findings have a number of implications foreducation policy makers. First, those policy makerswho make decisions about the structure of publicschools in the United States may choose to continueto accept summer learning loss as a necessary, al-beit unfortunate, by-product of the nation’s educa-tion system. Rather than focusing on expanding timefor learning, such policy makers could continue ef-forts to improve the quality of instruction during thestandard 180 days. In recent years, there have beeninnumerable attempts to reform the way time is ac-tually used in schools. Education policy makers haveexperimented with new pedagogical approaches,curricula, school governance models, facility ar-rangements, school leadership, staffing patterns, ageconfigurations, and technology. In short, reformershave sought to change nearly every possible vari-able in the educational process with the exceptionof time.

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Those who continue to accept the current school cal-endar as a given and favor further tinkering withinthe standard school day and year face a considerablechallenge in providing a compelling rationale andjustification for such efforts. Arguably, no other en-terprise on earth expected to deliver consistent, year-over-year results would be structured like U.S. publicschools—with all expenditures and operations be-ing limited to nine months and with everyone com-pletely ignoring the other three months. Similarly, itis difficult to imagine any athlete, musician, or artistsystematically taking off three months each year andexpecting to maintain a professional level of perfor-mance.

Moreover, there is mounting evidence to demon-strate that the current school calendar actuallycreates systemic, preventable inequities in the U.S.public education. Policy makers may soon be inthe position of having to legally justify a schoolcalendar that is disproportionately harmful to low-income students. If there are cost-effective means ofexpanding learning opportunities during the sum-mer months, districts should dedicate funds to makethem available to low-SES families during thosemonths. There is a compelling need for compen-satory, equity-focused federal funding streams, suchas Title I, to be dedicated to expanding summerlearning opportunities.

There are also clear implications for those who di-rect and fund various types of summer learning pro-grams based on the just-described analysis of theschool calendar, its impact on student achievement,and the research on various solutions to these prob-lems. Specifically, this article recommends the nextprinciples to guide the future development of sum-mer learning programs:

Serve students from low-SES families in the earlygrades first.Underscore the need for comprehensive, qualityprogramming for a minimum of six weeks.Motivate and offer incentives for students andparents to participate.Mobilize community partnerships and supportbeyond public schools.Emphasize the prevention of losses in reading per-formance, not retrospective remediation.

Reimagine traditional approaches to teachingand learning.Sustain investments over time.

This examination of the origins of the school cal-endar and its effects on achievement suggests thatstrategic investments in quality summer learningprograms are necessary to address the problem ofeducational inequity in the United States. Ratherthan simply adding days to the school calendar,reformers should carefully examine how to buildpopular support for targeted programs that offerlow-SES children similar choices and opportunitiesas those available to their more affluent peers. Themodels presented—BELL, Summer Advantage, andHorizons—provide the type of fun, enriching sum-mer that every child should have. They also meetthe critical academic needs of children who other-wise would not have access to learning experiencesduring the summer. The research on the impactof these programs provides the footnotes for com-mon sense: Children who participate in such pro-grams return to school with advantages rather thandeficits. This is precisely the impact desired for morelow-income young people in communities across theUnited States.

ReferencesAlexander, K. L., Entwisle, D. R., and Olson, L. S. “Sum-mer Learning and Its Implications: Insights from the Begin-ning School Study.” New Directions for Youth Development,2007, 114, 11–32.

Borman, G. D., and Dowling, N. M. “The LongitudinalAchievement Effects of Multi-year Summer School: Evidencefrom the Teach Baltimore Randomized Field Trial.” Educa-tional Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 2006, 28, 25–48.

Chaplin, D., and Capizzano, J. Impacts of a SummerLearning Program: A Random Assignment Study of Build-ing Educated Leaders for Life (BELL). Washington, D.C.:The Urban Institute, 2006. Retrieved Sept. 21, 2011, fromhttp://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=411350.

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., andGreathouse, S. “The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achieve-ment Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-analytic Review.”Review of Educational Research, 1996, 66, 227–268.

Cooper, H., Valentine, J. C., Charlton, K., and Melson,A. “The Effects of Modified School Calendars on StudentAchievement and on School and Community Attitudes: A

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Research Synthesis.” Review of Educational Research, 2003,73, 1–52.

Food Research and Action Center. “Hunger Doesn’t Take aVacation: Summer Nutrition Status Report 2011.” Wash-ington, D.C., June 2011. Retrieved Sept. 21, 2011, fromhttp://www. frac.org/pdf/summer report 2011.pdf.

Hazelton, J. E., Blakely, C., and Denton, J. Cost Effectivenessof Alternative Year Schooling. Austin: Educational EconomicPolicy Center, University of Texas, Austin, 1992.

National Educational Commission on Time andLearning. “Prisoners of Time: Schools and ProgramsMaking Time Work for Students and Teachers.”

Washington, D.C., 1994. Retrieved Sept. 21, 2011, fromhttp://www2.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/index.html.

Von Hippel, P. T., Powell, B., Downey, D. B., andRowland, N. “The Effect of School on Overweight in Child-hood: Gain in Children’s Body Mass Index During the SchoolYear and During Summer Vacation.” American Journal ofPublic Health, 2007, 97, 796–802.

Ron Fairchild is president and chief executive officer ofSmarter Learning Group and senior consultant to the Cam-paign for Grade-Level Reading.

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