Credit: Alison Yin for EdSource TodayData released today from a national poll show that a third of families with school-age children had enrolled at least one child in a summer program in 2013. That is an increase from five years earlier when only a quarter of families had enrolled their children in summer programs.
Shugoll Research conducted the survey for the Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for expanded learning programs. The data were collected this past spring as part of a survey to determine how many households with school-age children had them in after-school programs. A full report on the data will be released in the fall.
“In many communities, after-school programs morph into summer learning programs at the end of the school year,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, in a press release. “That helps give the programs both an infrastructure and a solid pedagogical grounding as they work to combat summer learning loss.”
Studies have shown that children who are not in summer programs lose about a month’s worth of learning, with low-income children suffering even higher losses because their families lack the resources to involve them in enrichment activities, such as trips to national parks or museums.
Thirteen percent of the families surveyed said their children were enrolled in a free program. The average cost of a summer program was $250 a week, making it difficult for the typical family to afford, the Alliance said. In 2013, the median weekly income for a full-time worker was $776, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets the benchmark for affordable child care at 10 percent of family income.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey found that when parents were asked if they favored or opposed public funding for summer programs, 86 percent said they did, a 3 percentage point increase from five years ago.
Shugoll Research conducted in-depth interviews via an online survey in spring 2014 with 13,709 households with school-age children, with the goal of at least 200 completed interviews in each state and the District of Columbia. Where that goal wasn’t reached, the researchers phoned randomly selected households with school-age children.
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Zep 10 years ago10 years ago
While there are certainly advantages to having a safe space for kids during the summer break, let's think logically about this concept of summer loss. Did these kids receive a blow to the head? If they really learned a concept or content during the school year would they really lose that knowledge? As a test, jump on a bike after 20 years of not riding, did you forget? You may be a bit rusty but … Read More
While there are certainly advantages to having a safe space for kids during the summer break, let’s think logically about this concept of summer loss. Did these kids receive a blow to the head? If they really learned a concept or content during the school year would they really lose that knowledge? As a test, jump on a bike after 20 years of not riding, did you forget? You may be a bit rusty but I’ll bet you can still ride. Try the same test by jumping into a pool after not swimming for a decade or more. “Children who are not in summer programs lose about a month’s worth of learning”; really? Perhaps the real issue here is the relevance of what we are teaching, if the kids really learned it, because it was actually of some use to them, I’m willing to bet that “summer loss” would magically disappear.
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Paul Muench 10 years ago10 years ago
Another analogy is fitness. Consider a bicycle race, once you get dropped from the pack it’s near impossible to catch up and you keep falling further and further behind. I think kids can still read and do math at the end of the summer, but if they’ve gotten out of shape they can fall behind. And classes have to maintain a pace to complete all the material for a year.