Rorschach blot

from The Learning Season: (pdf file)

The phenomenon of summer undoing school-year learning has come to be known as
“summer learning loss.” It was first commented on in 1906 [29], followed some decades later by the 1978 book Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling, by Barbara Heyns, which was based on her study of New Jersey students. More recently, a number of researchers [17, 30–37] have found that nearly all the differences in achievement between poor and middleclass children can be attributed to changes in learning that take place over class the summer. This finding is particularly surprising—and important—given that the vast majority of public and philanthropic resources are dedicated to school-year education, and that relatively scant resources are earmarked for summer programs.

While summer learning loss has operated mostly “under the radar,” the effects of early childhood experiences on racial, ethnic, and class test-score achievement gaps have received a great deal of media and research attention. Evidence from a set of longitudinal studies demonstrating that preschool children benefit significantly—and permanently—from early learning experiences [10–12], along with new understandings from neuroscience [4, 38], has formed the foundation for a national movement: public preschool is fast becoming a norm across the country, and public funding for early-childhood care and education is growing.

Despite these growing gaps, research on seasonal learning shows that children in all socioeconomic groups are actually progressing at the same rate during the school year. Yet during the summer middle-class children generally continue to learn, or hold steady, especially in reading, while poor children lose knowledge and skills [42]. These findings are especially surprising, given the well-documented disparities in facilities, teacher quality, curriculum, safety, and materials between schools serving poor children and those in affluent communities [9, 43–46]. Research on seasonal learning demonstrates that even struggling schools provide some support for children’s learning, at least compared with a summer devoid of educational experiences [34, 36, 47].

Of course there are two ways of looking at this, aren't there?

"Even struggling schools provide some support for children's learning".... or struggling schools don't "provide" much "support" for children's learning and there's not too much learning going on anywhere.

It's pretty horrifying that even policy reports on the subject of the achievement gap are now talking about "support" for children's learning.

We seem to have an entire K-12 philosophy of public education built upon the concept of incidental learning. Kids just naturally learn stuff, the same way they just naturally grow taller every year; the school's job is to "support" them while they learn (and grow).

Which is one of the reasons I particularly dislike the expression "academic growth."

note: the race gap in scores is different from the income gap