Stemming the Summer Slide

In Charles County, more than 2,100 students just finished four-week voluntary summer academies, programs offered across the grades and centered on reading and math. Launched in 1998, the academies offer a camp-like setting in elementary grades, with an emphasis on technology in middle school and on the High School Assessment exit exams in the upper grades.

Three schools with high poverty levels in St. Mary's County offer a four-week Eleven Month School Program, now in its fourth year. The program offers full-day instruction to 360 students in reading, math and enrichment activities.

Enrollment in the Montgomery summer session is 4,666, or a little more than half of the 9,109 students attending the eligible schools. The $2.5 million program is offered at all schools covered by the Title I federal poverty program, which offers extra money to Montgomery elementary schools where at least 56 percent of students qualify for meal subsidies. Classes started July 9 and end Friday.

The summer program has become so routine that some parents have come to consider it the official start of the school year, an impression school officials do not discourage. Kindergartners and their parents don their finest clothes for the start of classes.

"We had criers the first few days," said Richardson, who administers the program.

Teachers who go back far enough to remember the years before the summer program say the youngest students, in particular, are now much better prepared for the start of regular classes.

Before the advent of summer study, "they didn't know things like where the bathroom was, how to line up for the cafeteria, sitting in a circle," said Diane Mohr, a former kindergarten teacher who works with Richardson. "You'd lose a good two to three weeks of instruction."

Years of research by Hopkins professors suggests that poor children fall more than two years behind their middle-class peers in verbal ability and 1 1/2 years behind in math between kindergarten and fifth grade; the math loss is smaller, they say, mostly because affluent parents aren't particularly adept at teaching their children math during the summer.

Researchers followed Baltimore students from first grade to adulthood, tracking their progress on tests taken at the start and end of each academic year.

"Children whose parents are college-educated, they continue to build their reading skills during the summer months," said Karl Alexander, a Hopkins sociology professor involved in the research. "You go to a museum or you go to a library or you go to the science center, and through osmosis you make some headway there."

Low-income children actually keep pace with more affluent students during the academic year but slip behind during the summer, for lack of books to read, museums to visit and generally "unequal summer learning opportunities," said Brenda McLaughlin, director for research and policy at the Center for Summer Learning at Hopkins, which is devoted to erasing the achievement gap.

At Sargent Shriver Elementary, the reading and math losses are compounded by language losses. More than half of the students are learning English as a second language. Those pupils spend much of the summer in neighborhoods where only Spanish is spoken, and they forget some of the English they've learned in school.

But progress was evident after just eight days in Barrett's summer classroom. From the start of classes, she had asked her students daily to write their names on large sheets of paper, and she posted each one on the wall. The sheet from the first day was an illegible tangle of letters. By day eight, the names were written in a straight line and, for the most part, correctly spelled.

"Let's help Richard count how many letters in Jonathan's name," Barrett told the class. The students counted aloud, reached eight and kept right on going. At 10, the teacher politely stopped them.