"When kids return to school in the fall, on average they’ve slipped by about a month from where they were in the spring," (...both low-income and high-income children lose ground in math over the summer during the elementary school years) said Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, and co-author of a report released last year on summer learning programs. [How summer increases the achievement gap - HechingerEd] 
"Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children’s Learning" -
In June, July and August, many students forget some of what they learned over the previous school year. This major RAND study also finds evidence that summer programs can help, identifies obstacles to providing them, analyzes costs, and offers recommendations.Summer learning programs have the potential to help children and youth improve their
academic and other outcomes.
...summer learning programs are often an afterthought of school districts
or not offered at all, especially in restrictive funding environments.
To focus attention on the potential of such programs, this monograph reviews the
literature on summer learning loss and the effectiveness of summer learning programs,
determines key cost drivers of and available funds for summer programs, and gathers
information about how such programs operate in district and city contexts, including
facilitators and challenges.
The findings should be of interest to policymakers and practitioners involved in
improving the performance of and expanding opportunities for low-income and lowachieving
students, including school district and city leaders, the National Summer
Learning Association, the Council of the Great City Schools, the U.S. Department
of Education, funders of summer learning programs, state departments of education,
state legislators, and the education research community.
This research was conducted by RAND Education, a unit of the RAND Corporation,
and sponsored by The Wallace Foundation, which seeks to support and
share effective ideas and practices to improve learning and enrichment opportunities
for children.
To review the full report -
Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children’s Learning
Author(s) : Jennifer Sloan McCombs, Catherine H. Augustine, Heather L. Schwartz et al.
Publishing Organization : RAND Corporation
Topics : Summer and Extended Learning Time, Summer Learning, After School, Coordinating After-School Resources
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