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The Wallace Foundation's National Summer Learning Study, conducted by RAND and launched in 2011, offers the first assessment of district-run voluntary summer programs over the short and long run. This report, the second of five that will result from the study, looks at how summer programs affected student performance on math, reading, and social and emotional assessments in fall 2013.

Academic achievement -- United States. --- Low-income students -- United States. --- Summer schools -- United States. --- Low-income students --- Poor students --- Summer schools --- Academic achievement --- Students

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Research has shown that students' skills and knowledge often deteriorate during the summer months, with low-income students facing the largest losses. School districts and summer programming providers can benefit from the lessons learned by other programs in terms of developing strategies to maximize program effectiveness and quality, student participation, and strategic partnerships and funding.

Education. --- Summer schools -- United States. --- Summer schools. --- Summer schools --- Education --- Social Sciences --- Education, Special Topics

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To better understand sports participation rates for middle and high school–aged youths, the funding landscape, barriers and enablers to youth sports participation, and perceptions of the benefits and challenges of youth sports, RAND researchers launched three large-scale surveys of parents, school administrators, and community sports program leaders. A separate appendix provides detailed descriptions of survey and analysis methods, additional survey results, and survey protocols. Perceived and actual barriers for middle and high school youths who may be interested in playing sports include financial costs and family time commitments, such as volunteering and providing transportation. Lower-income families in the sample were more likely to name financial costs as a reason for not participating than were middle- and higher-income families. Schools and community-based organizations may need to examine how costs — both time based and financial — currently burdening families can be reduced or supplemented with outside sources. Schools, community sports programs, policymakers, and funders can work to lower fees, particularly for low-income students. Providing equipment and transportation and minimizing parent time commitments may have the greatest effect on increasing sports participation among youths from lower-income families.

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In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched the National Summer Learning Project (NSLP) to expand summer program opportunities for students in urban districts and to study the effectiveness of district-led summer programs and how they could be well implemented. Through the NSLP, The Wallace Foundation has provided support to public school districts and their community partners in Boston; Dallas; Duval County, Florida; Pittsburgh; and Rochester, New York. In 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a consensus study report regarding summer experiences and how they shape the development and well-being of children and youth. One of the key recommendations in the report is for cities and counties to take a comprehensive, communitywide approach to ensuring that the needs of their children and youth are adequately met during the summer. As the NSLP wound down, some districts and their community partners turned their attention and efforts toward sustaining their progress in promoting program scale and quality. To further sustainability, some of these districts and their partners are part of regional networks working to expand opportunities for quality summer programming in their cities. In this report, the eighth in RAND's Summer Learning Series, the authors chronicle the early efforts of community leaders to create coordinated approaches to increasing access to quality summer programming, noting their challenges, enablers, and early outcomes. The report is intended to help city and county leaders, district leaders, out-of-school time intermediaries, and other community organizations launch and sustain such coordinated networks.

Summer schools --- Children with social disabilities --- Cours d'été --- Enfants socialement défavorisés --- Education --- Éducation --- United States

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The National Summer Learning Project (NSLP) examined the implementation and effectiveness of voluntary summer learning programs developed by five school districts — Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Duval County, Florida; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Rochester, New York — and their local community partners. The study spanned three phases. The RAND research team (1) collected formative data for strengthening the five summer programs in 2011 and 2012; (2) examined student outcomes after one summer (2013) and after two summers of programming (2014 and 2015); and (3) examined student outcomes in spring 2017, at the end of three school years after the second summer of programming. This seventh report in a series summarizes the findings of this third phase in the context of earlier findings and offers implications for policy and practice. Overall longitudinal findings show that, by spring 2017, the academic benefits for high attenders decreased in magnitude and were not statistically significant — although when benchmarked against typical achievement gains at the same grade level, they remained large enough to be educationally meaningful.

Summer schools --- Academic achievement --- United States.