Inside the summer program boosting skills and confidence for 40,000 kids

When Reneta Johnson, head of a small charter network in Birmingham, Alabama, asked students how they wanted to spend this summer, they said they liked to make TikTok videos.

That gave her an idea.

The staff at Legacy Prep built a three-week summer schedule around the theme of “Lights, Camera, Action,” blending drama, music and dance, culminating in a final performance. But between learning choreography and exploring careers related to content creation, this June, students spent three hours a day polishing the math and reading skills they’ll need for next school year.

After three years of the program, Johnson sees more confidence in kids when they come back in the fall and considers it one of the reasons why Legacy Prep’s elementary school went from a D to a B last year on the state report card.

“Our test scores were in the tank,” she told The 74. During summer school, “our kids have more time to talk to the teacher. They know what they need to focus on,” she added.

It’s a model that prevents what’s known as the summer slide, not just at Legacy Prep but at nearly 460 charter schools in seven cities. Standardized assessments show that over 39,000 students in Summer Boost gained, on average, nearly a month more learning in math and 2 1/2 extra weeks in English language arts, according to a new study. While the growth is significant, the fact that the study found improvement across so many sites makes the findings stand out even more, said Geoffrey Borman, a researcher at Arizona State University who led the study.

“A key thing to keep in mind is the scale at which these impacts are being made,” he said. “We’re talking, in this case, about tens of thousands of students per year.”

In education research, he added, there are examples of small, “one-off efforts” that produced “groundbreaking impacts.” But those effects often fade when a program — high-dosage tutoring, for example — expands to more students and locations.

Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent $50 million to launch Summer Boost in 2022 to help students recover from academic decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program served over 16,000 students that year in New York City and has since spread to six more cities, including Baltimore; Nashville, Tennessee; and San Antonio.

Students retained the skills and material they learned into the next school year, even though they often didn’t take follow-up tests, either i-Ready or NWEA’s MAP tests, until months after the summer program ended.

“These kids are going back to school better prepared to engage in instruction and benefit from it,” Borman said.

The study design didn’t include a comparison group, but the researchers looked at whether scores were higher than what they would have predicted if students hadn’t attended the program.

The positive effects in math are similar to those found by the Rand Corp. in a study of summer learning programs in five urban districts, several years before the pandemic. The Rand sample, however, was much smaller — about 5,000 kids — and the researchers found no improvement in reading, attendance or social-emotional skills.

In another study, after the COVID-era school closures, a team from Harvard, NWEA and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examined the use of federal relief funds for summer learning in 10 districts, serving nearly 450,000 students. Students gained two to three weeks of learning in math on MAP tests, but as with the Rand study, the researchers saw no impact on students’ reading skills.

In the Arizona State study, Borman noted that because students often lose more math than reading skills when they’re out of school, a summer program can have a bigger impact in math.

The expectation that sites prioritize phonics-based instruction, a shift that has picked up momentum since the pandemic, may help explain why students in Summer Boost made gains in reading when the earlier studies didn’t find impacts on literacy, said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser on the Summer Boost study.

Small classes also contributed to the reading gains, Borman wrote. The results were weaker when class sizes exceeded 21 students.

Consistent student attendance, a rate of at least 70%, matters as well. It’s a principle Summer Boost reinforces by holding back 30% of the funding to sites until the program is over. Students exceeded the target with a 75% rate last year.

“The more kids attend, clearly, the better they perform,” Borman said. “This is something that has been a problem with a lot of summer school programming in the past.”

‘The big question’

The findings clarify what it takes to run an effective summer learning program. But districts no longer have federal COVID funds to spend on summer school. Foundation funds, like those for Summer Boost, are limited.

“The big question is how to sustain summer learning programs now that the federal [relief] funding has lapsed,” Kane said.

One source will likely be the new federal education tax credit, he said. Advocacy organizations like the Afterschool Alliance are encouraging nonprofits to form scholarship-granting organizations that focus on public school students.

In Alabama, districts are already required under state law to offer summer instruction for students who are significantly behind in reading and math. But the $29,000 Legacy Prep received from the state would have only been enough to pay three teachers, Johnson said. Without the $200,000 Summer Boost grant from Bloomberg, she would have had to narrow the focus of the program to third graders who needed to pass the state reading test to advance to fourth grade.

She found, however, that just reaching proficiency by the end of third grade doesn’t mean kids are strong enough readers and writers to tackle challenging material. The Bloomberg grant allowed the school to hire 12 teachers.

On a Thursday morning earlier in June, the school was busy with activity as younger students worked on reading and math skills while middle schoolers danced to a hip-hop beat in the gym. After lunch, they switched.

Using a curriculum that’s specially designed for a compressed summer schedule, teacher JaMeshia Moore worked with rising first graders on words they should learn by sight. She wrote “because” on the board, carefully demonstrating where each lowercase letter should fit on the lined pages in their workbooks. In math, students worked out subtraction problems by hand, using small strips of paper that represent hundreds, tens and ones.

Before opening enrollment to all Legacy Prep families, Johnson prioritizes students who are significantly behind and often need one-on-one instruction to catch up. The research showed that students who often fall below grade level — English learners, those from families with low income and kids with disabilities — benefited the most from the program. They gained over four weeks of learning in math, compared to 3 1/2 weeks for the overall sample.

At Legacy Prep, the staff works just as hard to make sure students attend as they do during the regular school year. They call students if they’re absent, and for the first time this year, Johnson offered door-to-door bus service if students needed it. Some students come from as far as Huntsville, roughly an hour and a half away.

Daniel Runner, a rising eighth grader, said he hoped to get some extra help on percentages, while Malaysia Speight said she didn’t have a lot of choice over whether to attend.

“My aunt said that me and my sister were not going to be sitting around in the house all summer,” she said.

But she was drawn to the lineup of activities, like learning how a storyboard illustrates the scenes that make up a film and the chance to work with professional musicians. The Summer Boost grant paid for the artists’ involvement as well as special T-shirts, a field trip to a local theater and a red carpet awards show.

The academic and attendance requirements combined with the flexibility for schools to design an engaging program are why Bloomberg Philanthropies has seen a positive return on its investment, said Sunny Larson, who leads K-12 programs for the foundation.

“We really need to do everything we can to catch back up to where we need to be,” she said. “Beyond that, we didn’t want to be too prescriptive. We really wanted to leave a lot of flexibility, creativity and ingenuity up to those individual schools.”

This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.