You can’t blame teachers for wanting to educate students. It’s what they do and they do it very well. The problem, they say, is keeping students educated over the summer. Whether or not the so-called “summer slide” is a real thing depends on who you ask.
Dr. Deborah K. Reed served as the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center from 2015 to 2022. She reports that students can lose up to three months of learning over the summer. Projecting this trend, she suggests that by the end of the fifth grade, students could have lost up to three years of learning.
Wow! With that in mind, hypothetically, if a person finished high school, say, 50 years ago, by now they might have lost 30 years of knowledge. (So that’s where it went!) Of course, there would be individual differences. For example, when I took algebra, I didn’t have to wait for summer to forget all about polynomials and the associative law of multiplication. I could forget that every day.
Paul von Hippel, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin (the same place where Dr. Reed earned her doctorate) questions whether the phenomenon of summer slide actually exists at all. He points out that while some private programs quote alarming statistics based on the NWEA assessment that show a three-month loss of learning over the summer in order to sell their tutoring services, another standard test by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies indicates practically no loss of learning over the summer. And when it comes to mind-numbingly dreary number-crunching and incomprehensible jargon, both studies finish in a statistical dead heat.
However, most studies agree that kids can lose their edge in math and reading over the summer. It’s probably worse with math because while a child might read the Harry Potter series over the summer and, by fall, be an even better reader, not many kids will spend their holiday hammering out quadratic equations. The whole summer vacation thing is probably a remnant of a bygone era in which children were needed to help work the family farm during the summer. Now, a brief break, then summer school probably makes more sense.
Summer school would undoubtedly sharpen students’ academic skills, but that is not to say that they stop learning when they step out of the classroom. Isn’t spending the summer perfecting your curveball a legitimate form of learning? How about practicing your pentatonic scale? Or just walking through the woods on a warm summer day, experiencing Nature in ways that are beyond words and objective analysis?
I admit I have forgotten a lot of what I learned in school. But I was exposed to a world of ideas and resources I would never otherwise have encountered. Today, I couldn’t tell you what a polynomial is if my life depended on it. But I do know where to look it up.
Living in Iowa: School’s (never) out for summer
July 11, 2024