With school ending this week, thousands of students statewide will spend their summers losing a lot of the reading and math skills they learned.
By fifth grade, this summer slide causes low-income children to fall as much as 2 1/2 years behind their richer peers in reading, Johns Hopkins researchers found.
Teachers then have to spend four to six weeks in the fall reteaching forgotten material.
“If kids aren?t engaged in learning activities, they lose ground academically,” said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. “The hard-fought victories teachers achieve during the school year erode during the summer months.”
Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander and his colleagues tracked the academic progress of nearly 800 Baltimore students from first grade until age 22.
They found that 65 percent of the achievement gap between poor ninth-graders and their more advantaged peers was due to wasted summers that lacked stimulation and learning.
Forty percent of the children in the study left high school without diplomas, Alexander said. “These early patterns of out-of-school learning have profoundly important repercussions that echo throughout the years,” he said.
Still, successful summer programs do exist, like the SuperKids Camp, a daylong camp run by Parks and People, a nonprofit that supports Baltimore recreational and environmental programs.
Over the past decade, about 14,000 public elementary school students have participated in the camp, which pairs literacy lessons with field trips to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, museums and the Downtown Sailing Center.
“We fool kids into learning by having a lot of fun,” said Jean DuBose, development and promotion director.
“We go to Centerstage, where they write and perform plays, all the while focusing on key words.”
Blending fun with literacy lessons appears to work: An independent researcher found that by the end of the $40 six-week camp, kids were prepared for the next grade level and demonstrated growth on reading tests.
