Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap

learning inform fundamental questions of educational stratification and help parse school, family, and community influences on children’s academic development. With children “in” their homes, schools, and communities during the school year, but just “in” their homes and communities over the summer months, the academic calendar approximates a natural experiment that affords leverage for isolating the distinctive role of schooling in children’s cognitive development. This was the great insight exploited by Barbara Heyns in her 1978 book Summer Learning, which established that achievement gaps by family SES (socioeconomic status) and race/ethnicity widen more during the summer months than during the school year. Although the detailed results of subsequent research on the seasonality of learning do not line up perfectly (see Cooper and colleagues’ [1996] meta-analysis for an overview), the patterns documented by Heyns in the 1970s for middle school children in public schools in Atlanta, Georgia appear to have considerable generality. This is especially the case for her conclusions regarding family socioeconomic background, which have been replicated in our Baltimore research on the early elementary years with data from the 1980s (e.g., Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 1997), in studies conducted in other localities (Murnane 1975; O’Brien 1998), and in national data from earlier (Heyns 1987; Karweit, Ricciuti, and Thompson 1994; Phillips 2000) and more recent periods (Burkam et al. 2004; Downey, von Hippel, and Broh 2004; Reardon 2003). Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap