Achievement Gaps Increase The Longer Kids Stay In School. Here’s Why.
The rich get richer--in terms of knowledge--and the poor get poorer.
Education pundits are predicting wider gaps between groups of students as a result of Covid-related school closures, citing evidence of how much learning is lost over the summer. But recent data shows gaps grow at the same rate year round. In fact, school isn’t just perpetuating those gaps—it’s widening them.
The idea that poor kids lose the most ground over the summer is widely accepted. One well-known study done in Baltimore found that nearly all of the gap between students at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum was due to “summer learning loss,” also known as “summer slide.” The researchers concluded that the gap was due to inequities in children’s lives outside of school, and that time in school was helping to compensate. Based on that study, Malcolm Gladwell argued in his book Outliers that “America doesn’t have a school problem … It has a summer vacation problem.”
Now, with schools closed during the pandemic, commentators are relying on the same data to argue that disadvantaged students are falling farther behind by the day—and that the solution is to increase the number of hours of instruction when schools reopen. That could mean a longer school day or year, or a calendar that runs year-round with shorter breaks instead of a three-month summer vacation.
But hold on: the studies showing that income-based gaps grow over the summer were done decades ago. The Baltimore one began with kindergartners in 1982. A review of research that reached a similar conclusion came out in 1996. More recent research indicates that while most students lose some ground during the summer, especially in math, the gap between rich and poor doesn’t grow more then. It grows at pretty much the same rate as during the school year.
The real question raised by the recent evidence on summer learning is why time spent in school doesn’t narrow income-based gaps. Some studies show most gaps grow a bit wider the longer students stay in school. Others suggest they barely change at all.
Either way, interpretations of the data actually present too rosy a picture. Researchers measure gaps in terms of standard deviations. Let’s say that at first grade the gap between wealthier and poorer students is one standard deviation; at eighth grade it’s also one standard deviation. That suggests the gap hasn’t changed. But—as was explained to me years ago by David Grissmer, an education researcher at the University of Virginia—the amount of learning that makes up one standard deviation at eighth grade is far greater.
In the early grades, Grissmer said, a student only has to make up one grade level to move up a standard deviation. By eighth grade, moving up a standard deviation requires making up three grade levels. And in high school, the amount of learning that needs to be made up is so large that it may be impossible for students who are behind to catch up.
That explanation lines up with another well-known theory often referred to as “the Matthew effect,” a reference to the passage in the gospel of St. Matthew that boils down to “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The longer you wait to address gaps in students’ reading ability, according to this theory, the wider the gaps get and the harder they are to narrow. And it’s pretty clear from the gap in reading scores that schools haven’t been addressing them in time.
When it comes to the current crisis, the data on summer vacations probably doesn’t help us figure out how much gaps are growing. Given that schools are still technically in session, some students are getting instruction, albeit remotely, and the available data suggests those from affluent families are getting more of it. And parents may be trying to do more now to boost learning than they do over the summer. More highly educated parents—who, in our society, also tend to be the wealthier ones—are in a better position to offer informal instruction in things like history or science. So the gaps between groups of students almost certainly are widening now, even if they don’t over the summer.
Still, the recent evidence on summer learning loss is useful because it suggests that it’s dangerous to draw conclusions based on the old data. America doesn’t have a summer vacation problem. It has a school problem. And given the significant gaps that will almost inevitably emerge once schools reopen, it’s urgent that we figure out how to solve it.
The place to look is an area that few policymakers or reformers focus on: what schools are teaching, especially at the elementary level. That’s where narrowing the gap isn’t such a heavy lift and the payoff in later years is significant. If they did look there, they would find that few elementary schools are even trying to teach much substance at all, outside of math.
Instead, kids spend many hours practicing the reading comprehension “skills” that appear to be measured by standardized tests, like “finding the main idea” of a passage. And they’re limited to texts on random topics that have been determined to be easy enough for them to read on their own. That widespread approach neither boosts test scores nor equips students with the knowledge and vocabulary they’ll need to understand what they’ll be expected to read in later years. And the students who suffer the most are the ones who are least likely to pick up academic knowledge and vocabulary outside school—those with less educated parents.
One question is why studies of summer learning loss from decades ago found, contrary to recent research, that schools do help narrow gaps. Some have argued that the older results are inaccurate because of problems in the way tests used to be constructed. But it’s also possible that schools actually were doing more to compensate for inequities then: they were spending more time on subjects that could build kids’ knowledge and vocabulary, like social studies and science. Since the advent of high-stakes reading and math tests in 2002, most elementary schools have narrowed the curriculum to spend more time on test prep.
To address the inequities resulting from the pandemic, many are now urging that schools expand the number of hours they’re in session, perhaps eliminating summer vacation. But research shows that such initiatives have had little or no effect. Extending the school year would only make sense if we also improved the curriculum so that it focused on building students’ knowledge, beginning in kindergarten.
A report issued by a group of state and district education leaders calls for doing just that. But if an increase in instructional hours simply results in more of the same failed approach, the gap between students from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum will only continue to grow. And “Covid slide” could well become permanent.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.