new summer learning loss study - the achievement gap explained? (and Summercamp!)

Fordham posts a link to a new study & report arguing that much of the achievement gap can be attributed to summer learning loss in poor kids:

Miller presents past research showing that, during the school year, low- and high-SES students make similar progress on standardized tests. Between spring and fall, however, the scores of low-SES students either level off or decline, while those of high-SES students continue to rise. Research by Alexander and colleagues confirms this trend. Tracking 325 Baltimore students, they found that high-SES students gained a cumulative 47 points on reading test scores during the summer, while their low-SES counterparts lost 2 points.

We talked about "summer regression" at the old site (summer brain drain, summer reading question, time costs of spiralling curricula)

Reading Fordham's summary of the new research, I feel I'm watching a re-run. Maybe that's unfair, but isn't this the usual correlation equals cause-type reasoning that leads to busing and 5 gazillion initiatives to increase parental involvement in the schools?

Or am I missing something?

It seems to me that the common theme running throughout these studies is that middle class parents are doing a very large amount of incidental and not-so-incidental teaching of their kids - and that schools are failing to "disaggregate the data" concerning the parent contribution.

I think I've mentioned that this was a bit of a moment when we met with the new assistant superintendent who, as I've also mentioned, intends to use classroom and test data to drive instructional decisionmaking. ["drive instructional decisionmaking"?? I may be reading slightly too much Ed Week....]

I like most-to-all of her ideas, but she has a blind spot on the subject of tutoring. She herself hired a math tutor for her son when he was in high school, and she sees this as normal.

Of course, hiring math tutors - hiring tutors of all kinds in all subjects - has certainly become normal. It's the new normal. But that's the problem.

Even if you decide that you're going to have a public school system in which parents do a great deal of preteaching, reteaching, and tutor-hiring, you need to know what parents are doing if you're going to have data-driven decisionmaking.

Data is useless if you leave out major variables.

If an English teacher sends home a writing assignment that's over the students' heads, but a mostly-OK set of papers results because parents have walked their kids through the composition step by step, teachers aren't getting correct feedback on the assignment.

The data is going to tell you the assignment worked, when what worked was parents breaking the assignment down into component parts and teaching each part separately.

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Beyond this, why am I reading about summer camp?

Miller quotes an NCES study, for instance, which found that "42.5 percent of children in high-income households attended camp the summer after kindergarten, compared with just 5.4 percent of children in low-income" families.

Are these researchers suggesting that middle class kids routinely gain 47 points on reading tests at camp?

(How much is 47 points, anyway? How many points did kids gain during the school year? I may have to see if Ed can get a copy of the article...)

If summer camps run by distracted teenagers are producing major gains in reading, maybe we need some studies of the super-effective teaching methods known only to 18 year old, untrained college kids.

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Speaking of camp, C. and I played hooky Wednesday (though, as C. pointed out, you can't really play hooky from camp) and went to the city to see Summercamp!

You must see it.

Summercamp! is a laugh-cry-embrace-life sort of movie; I don't think I've cried so much in a movie theater since seeing Forrest Gump two weeks after giving birth to twins. [for newbies: my oldest son Jimmy, who was then age 7, is autistic]

An incredible movie - beautiful. There's no crying 'til the very end, and even then it's good crying. I promise.

from the NY Sun review:

In the summer of 2003, filmmakers Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price joined forces to tackle a documentary subject of almost unbearably powerful emotions and compulsively watchable conflict: a season at a Midwestern sleepover camp.

[snip]

The film's two stars are Holly, a charismatically energetic and wistful girl, and Cameron, an overweight kid with an unusual flair for challenging counselors' patience and making enemies among his peers.

[snip]

Holly and Cameron "are our main characters because they related more to adults and adult-type issues and they didn't have a whole lot of friends within their cabins," Mr. Beesley said.

[snip]

Something else the filmmakers discovered was how much prescription medication has permeated children's lives. "There was this group of kids going to the nurse's office every night," Ms. Price said. "It took us a few days to catch on to what was going on." Per their parent's wishes, campers diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and other behavioral maladies were reporting to receive their prescribed meds. Images in "Summercamp!" of what appear to be perfectly healthy children lining up to swallow pills like the mental patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest" are disturbing; at the same time, a scene in which one boy flirts with a girl by bragging about the magnitude of his ADD is hilarious.

[snip]

"Summercamp!" also doggedly follows Cameron down a road of trials littered with obstacles of the boy's own devising. Cameron has an unfortunate genius for clumsily rebellious behavior; witnessing his steady failures and occasional triumphs will likely empower the inner outcast in anyone. "We're watching two kids go through growing pains and be open enough about it to sort of let us discover and experience it while they do," Ms. Price said.

Pure pleasure.