When it comes to news articles about the impact that summer has on student learning, the news is often bad.
For instance, The Economist proclaimed in 2018: ?Long summer holidays are bad for children, especially the poor.?
This headline is fairly typical of how summer loss is portrayed. Summer has come to be seen as a time when children lose as much as a month of school learning.
Nearly 50,000 media stories on summer learning ? such as the one by The Economist ? appeared in 2018. The message influences policy as well. Lawmakers introduced 293 state bills related to summer programming in 2017. These bills dealt with summer learning in a number of ways ? from a vetoed Maine bill that tried to establish a ?Summer Success Program Fund? to a California bill that enables up to 30% of funds for before and after school programs go to summer learning. Despite the seeming consensus that children lose learning during the summer, a 2017 report from the Brookings Institute showed that the research on summer learning is actually quite mixed.
Another 2018 analysis found evidence of learning loss every summer between second and ninth grade, but findings differ vastly from one study to the next.
This has lead some researchers ? like me ? to question if summer loss even occurs.
Using current, nationally representative data, I attempted to determine how big of an issue is summer learning loss. I focused on elementary school students.
Here?s what I found:
1. Most kids aren?t affected
My study u...