 annual investment is simply wasted during the summer months. In effect, we've created a wildly inefficient system in which school year gains are whittled away due to summer neglect.
Despite the scope of this problem, the issue of summer learning loss has few champions – it seems to be one of those problems that policymakers find easier to ignore than to deal with. At the federal level, there are no programs with dedicated funding for summer education. At the state and local level, funding constraints limit the number and size of summer programs.
You could even say that summer learning is missing entirely from the school reform agenda: Summer did not feature even once in the 96 conference sessions of five key recent education conferences; only four of the 10 largest education foundations in the U.S. have an explicit summer portfolio; in 2012, only 1.5 percent of the 51,004 grants in education philanthropy included summer learning.
Yet, innovative school districts, program providers and community-based organizations have shown that creative solutions abound. In places like Grand Rapids, Mich., Birmingham, Ala., and Newark, N.J., program leaders are working with school district officials, local funders and community partners to design new approaches to summer learning.
Evaluations of these programs and others have shown exciting results in boosting academic achievement. One recent study, for example, found that summer participants experienced significantly better math outcomes when compared with peers from similar demographics who did not participate, with average gains equivalent to 6.7 weeks of school-year math instruction. In short, programs such as these have effectively eliminated summer learning loss.
School reform in America faces a critical moment. Decades of new initiatives have yielded disappointing results. The achievement gap between students living in poverty and their better-off peers continues to grow, while American students continue to fall farther and farther behind students in other industrialized countries, including China and much of Europe.
Research – and common sense – tells us that high quality summer programs can engage students and protect the academic gains hard won during the school year. But until we as a nation prioritize summer learning, particularly for students from high-poverty backgrounds, our efforts to close the achievement gap and prepare American students to compete internationally will fall dramatically short.
Jerome Kohlberg is a founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a limited partner of the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company; Matthew Boulay, of Salem, is the chairman of the National Summer Learning Association.