Shared Cause identified summer learning as a powerful tool for closing the achievement gap. We were part of the planning team for the Boston Summer Learning Project, now the Fifth Quarter of Learning.

The Challenge

Any teacher will tell you that “Summer Slide” is a real thing.  Over the traditional 10-week or so break, most children lose math skills, as well some of their accumulated mastery of school norms and behavior.  When researchers, though, drilled down to get a better understanding of summer slide, they made a startling discovery. Children from lower-income families — whose parents couldn’t afford or find enriching summer activities — experienced a much steeper skills slide, especially in reading, than more affluent peers who did attend camp or other experiential summer programs.

Even more dramatic, children who miss out on summer learning lose more than two months in reading skills, permanently.  The losses pile up, putting these grade-schoolers almost three years behind their more affluent classmates.  By high school summer slide accounts for more than half of the achievement gap between lower-income and higher income students.

As part of the planning for the Boston Opportunity Agenda, summer learning and enrichment for all Boston Public School students became an important strategy for the Agenda’s mission to improve each section of the education pipeline.  Shared Cause identified summer learning as a powerful tool for closing the achievement gap.

Finding the Solution

The idea was to erect an entirely new system for doing summer school.  It signaled a move away from remediation and toward inspiration.  There was an urgency to getting a pilot up as soon as possible so we wouldn’t miss a whole summer cycle.   Our planning team had just nine months to pull it off.

Changing course for an entire school system bound by years of tradition and practice takes buy-in from the top.  The BPS superintendent was already tuned into the dearth of out-of-school and summer enrichment for all of the city’s children. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get her on board.  She assigned some of her top administrators to join the summer learning planning effort.

Boston After School & Beyond (BASB) was a ready and able community partner tapped to serve as the “backbone” organization.  BASB was already innovating in the out-of-school-time arena with a web-based, easy to use and vetted clearinghouse of afterschool and summer enrichment for parents and children to access.  Leading philanthropies drawn from the Opportunity Agenda joined in for planning and resource support.  Those players, and Shared Cause, formed the core planning group. Then the call went out to youth-serving organizations throughout the city to join us in the re-imagining of summer school.  Participants represented sports, arts and music, outdoor exploration, and more.

A breakthrough tenet arose from the intersection of the schools and the youth-serving non-profits working closely together.  BPS brought its focus on academic performance, while the non-profits mixed in their track record for helping young people explore their interests, develop their social and emotional strengths, and just plain have fun. Collaboratively, they forged a framework called ACT (achieve, connect, thrive) that every participant organization was required to adopt and bring to life in their summer learning programming.

The “achievement” component aimed to ensure that students were acquiring knowledge to enhance their academic performance and bolster their self-discipline and love of learning.  The “connect” part related to their ability to develop strong supportive relationships with peers and adults.  And the “thrive” aspect related to having a positive vision for their future and to build the resilience they would need to overcome obstacles.

Another crucial point of intersection was hiring BPS teachers to co-develop and co-deliver integrated academic and enrichment programming.  In practical terms it defused BPS teachers’ concerns about lost summer school jobs, but more important it made the idea of year long learning and engagement much more seamless.  It also gave teachers and students a whole new context for their interactions.

The pilot Boston Summer Learning Project launched in time for summer break in 2010 supported by the Boston Opportunity Agenda.  The first cohort was 232 students enrolled among five school-community partnerships.  The programs ran five days a week over six weeks.  Participation by the students was, and still is, voluntary. 

Under the direction of Boston After School & Beyond, the initiative created the capacity to measure student impact related to the ACT framework.  The initial purpose wasn’t to examine the effect on learning loss (that came later), but to see if there was evidence of whether students were experiencing changes that would set them on a path for academic and life success.  The early results were very favorable.  Perhaps most telling, school principals reported that students who were challenging the previous academic year returned in the fall as some of their most enthusiastic learners.  Principals also noted that participating teachers returned with new energy and insights.  Word got out that the Summer Learning Project was a winner and more schools wanted in.  Year Two saw almost 1,500 students participating among 33 partnering organizations.

Going forward, the Opportunity Agenda and BPS leadership asked BASB to develop an ongoing reporting system to monitor progress and flag refinements as the Summer Learning Project began to scale up.  BASB also determined a per-student cost ($2,000), which not only allowed an accurate way to forecast the budget for growth, but also underscored the value.  For its part, Boston Public Schools altered its practice and began testing students returning in the fall to assess summer learning loss or gain.  This was an innovation for BPS assessment tools and cycles.

“This year, the Boston Summer Learning Project will celebrate its 10th anniversary, serving more than 14,000 kids.  The first two years were critical in building something that would endure for the next 10.  Early on, it was easy to feel uncertain about what we were doing in creating an entirely new educational approach – nothing was given.  But Shared Cause was able to ask the right questions, keep the right people at the table and get the most out of our efforts.  They provided a comforting, guiding hand on the process for change.  They made sure that we always were thinking big, but didn’t let us get head of ourselves, always probing at the right things to help us determine our next steps.  Along the way, we went beyond programmatic thinking and developed a sustainable system that serves kids on a large scale.”

Chris Smith
Executive Director, Boston After School and Beyond

The Result

  • In 10 years, the Summer Learning Project has expanded to 145 programs serving 12,552 students in the summer of 2018. The number of students for 2019 was projected at more than 14,000.
  • Boston Public Schools formally adopted the Summer Learning model to apply to all its school-year partnerships. It uses the ACT framework for social-emotional assessment.
  • The Summer Learning Project achieved a blended funding formula with $2.25 million in 2018 from the city and $500,000 from the state budget. Boston is also one of five cities in the $50 million National Summer Learning Project funded by The Wallace Foundation and evaluated by RAND.
  • In 2014, the largest, most rigorous national study on summer learning, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and carried out by RAND, demonstrated steady gains against summer slide. It found that third graders from the Summer Learning Project performed 30% better on math than students who did not attend the program. And in literacy, third graders who attended for two consecutive summers performed 25% better than their non-participating peers. Of significance is that these gains lasted into the school year.
  • The Summer Learning Project has been studied by school systems and cities around the country. The Massachusetts legislature is considering making it a statewide model.
  • https://bostonbeyond.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Summer-For-All-Lessons-Learned-Report-1.pdf