Summer school makes modest dent in learning loss, research suggests

While summer school may be more popular than ever among educators trying to address unprecedented declines in student learning, the impact may be modest, as Chalkbeat reported.

With the help of COVID relief money, schools across the country have expanded learning opportunities over multiple summers. Officials say summer school is no longer just for kids who need to make up classes to move up a grade, but for a broader swath of students who have fallen behind since the pandemic began. The question arises: Does summer school work as a learning loss recovery strategy? 

A new study, perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date of pandemic-era summer learning, says the answer may be underwhelming. Students who attended school over the summer of 2022 saw their math scores improve, according to the research. This offers some of the first concrete evidence that a key learning loss strategy is working. However, those gains were modest, and there were no improvements in reading. Since only a fraction of students went to summer school, it barely made a dent in total learning loss. 

Overall, this latest research suggests that some catch-up efforts are paying off, but may be insufficient to return students to their pre-pandemic trajectories.

“It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story,” said Dan Goldhaber, coauthor of the study and a professor at the University of Washington, as Chalkbeat reported. While summer school had a positive impact, he said, “only a small slice of the damage that was done from the pandemic is recovered from summer school.”