School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities

• In Event: 52.044 - Recent Research Insights Into Summer Learning Losses and Gains

Abstract

One of the most important questions in education policy today is why some students seem to get so much more from their schooling experiences than others. We are particularly concerned when these differences fall along social divides like race or socioeconomic status, especially when the income achievement gap is larger now than it was in the 1960s (Reardon, 2011).

When examining why achievement gaps grow over the course of school years, we often overlook the fact that children spend much of their school-age years outside of school. Much of this time is concentrated in the summer months—a time when schools play no direct role in the organization of children’s time use and activities. Instead, children return to full-time care of their families during the summer, and families have vastly different options and preferences around how children spend this time. It is possible that student achievement gaps grow primarily during these summer months, when child experiences are probably most diverse.

The role of summers in achievement gaps has been understudied primarily because most large-scale student achievement datasets only assess students once per year, typically in the spring. As a result, one cannot determine at what points in the calendar year students are gain or lose ground. We use student achievement data from the NorthWest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress assessment. This unique dataset contains both fall and spring test scores for millions of students in grades 2 through 9 from eleven states during the 2007-8 to 2011-12 school years. We use a set of multi-level models to explore the differential patterns of student achievement growth trajectories in both the school year and summer period across student, school, district, and state characteristics.

The use of this unique dataset extends the research on summer setback in a number of ways. First, we often lose sight of the fact that foundational research on summer setback relied on data from a relatively small sample of students from one city (Baltimore) in the 1980s (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2001, 2007). The findings from these studies are oft-cited as the definitive word on summer setback, however it is unclear whether the results would generalize outside of Baltimore and to the vastly different educational landscape nearly forty years later. A handful of newer studies have used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class (e.g., Downey et al., 2004), however this dataset only covers one summer between kindergarten and first grade in 1999. Neither of these data sets provide information about summer setback during the mid-to-late 2000s—a time period with a significant amount of experimentation with teacher and school policies (e.g., high stakes accountability)—nor do they cover students later elementary and middle school grades. Finally, our data allows us to estimate the variation across geographic locations and states—a first for this research question. Put together our data set has the potential to shed new understanding on the different impacts of summer setback across students, schools, and locations.

Authors

• Allison C. Atteberry, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Andrew McEachin, RAND Corporation