By Jerome Kohlberg and Matthew Boulay
One of us started grade school in the 1930s while the other graduated high school in the 1980s and today has children in elementary school. If you think about America over the last eight decades, you're struck again and again by the determination and innovation of our country: We rose from the depths of the Depression to lead the fight against fascism, the post-war boom gave rise to the world's first middle class, astronauts and scientists flew us to the moon, our hospitals and research universities pioneered medical advances that heal people in every corner of the planet, and our proud, courageous citizens marched and sang and sacrificed until the civil rights laws of this country were changed forever.
Despite these incredible advances, one element of society has remained remarkably unchanged: the structure of the school calendar with its long summer break.
Forty years of educational research conclude that summer learning loss is one of the most important causes of the achievement gap in America. On average, most America students lose two months of math skills during the summer, and low-income students also lose an equally alarming amount of reading skills. Researchers from Johns Hopkins argue that up to two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap in reading between lower and higher income youth can be explained by summer learning loss during the elementary school years.
Beyond its deleterious impact on student achievement, summer learning loss has enormous negative consequences for school finances and efficiency. For nine months during the school year, we invest extraordinary time and resources into promoting student learning: On average, we spend approximately $10,000 per student per year on each of the 50 million public school students in this country. Across the nation, that comes to approximately $500 billion per year, roughly 4 percent of GDP. If we know that students lose two to three months of achievement every summer, then we also know that 20 to 30 percent of our annual investment is simply wasted during the summer months. In effect, we've created a wildly inefficient system in which school year gains are whittled away due to summer neglect.
Despite the scope of this problem, the issue of summer learning loss has few champions – it seems to be one of those problems that policymakers find easier to ignore than to deal with. At the federal level, there are no programs with dedicated funding for summer education. At the state and local level, funding constraints limit the number and size of summer programs.
You could even say that summer learning is missing entirely from the school reform agenda: Summer did not feature even once in the 96 conference sessions of five key recent education conferences; only four of the 10 largest education foundations in the U.S. have an explicit summer portfolio; in 2012, only 1.5 percent of the 51,004 grants in education philanthropy included summer learning.
Yet, innovative school districts, program providers and community-based organizations have shown that creative solutions abound. In places like Grand Rapids, Mich., Birmingham, Ala., and Newark, N.J., program leaders are working with school district officials, local funders and community partners to design new approaches to summer learning.
Evaluations of these programs and others have shown exciting results in boosting academic achievement. One recent study, for example, found that summer participants experienced significantly better math outcomes when compared with peers from similar demographics who did not participate, with average gains equivalent to 6.7 weeks of school-year math instruction. In short, programs such as these have effectively eliminated summer learning loss.
School reform in America faces a critical moment. Decades of new initiatives have yielded disappointing results. The achievement gap between students living in poverty and their better-off peers continues to grow, while American students continue to fall farther and farther behind students in other industrialized countries, including China and much of Europe.
Research – and common sense – tells us that high quality summer programs can engage students and protect the academic gains hard won during the school year. But until we as a nation prioritize summer learning, particularly for students from high-poverty backgrounds, our efforts to close the achievement gap and prepare American students to compete internationally will fall dramatically short.
Jerome Kohlberg is a founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a limited partner of the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company; Matthew Boulay, of Salem, is the chairman of the National Summer Learning Association.