Summer schools that offer academics, play, socialization and internships for older students are in the works across the country, reports Erin Richards in USA Today.

Many districts will use federal funds to expand summer learning in hopes of helping students catch up on what they lost when schools were closed, she writes.

Effective summer programs last at least five weeks with at least two hours of reading and one to two hours of math instruction each day, says Heather Schwartz, a RAND  researcher who studied summer programs in five large cities before the pandemic. Teachers shouldn’t have to write their own lessons, she adds.

Cadence Learning, which debuted last year as the  National Summer School Initiative, is providing structured math and literacy lessons developed by master teachers, writes Richards. Local teachers can use the model lessons, geared at grades three through eight, as a guide and receive coaching from master teachers.

Summer school is a hot idea these days, writes Hechinger’s Jill Barshay. It seems to make a lot of sense. But evidence of its effectiveness is “slim.” In the pre-pandemic days, programs have not led to stronger reading and math achievement.

“Generally, summer programs are not effective because they don’t really engage young people and they’re not run well,” said Jean B. Grossman, an economist at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, and Princeton University, who has evaluated summer school programs. “It looks like summer school should help but the research is a mixed bag.”

Often, attendance is poor. A RAND study found benefits for elementary students who attended regularly for two summers in a row — but they were a small minority.

“Summer school programs that resembled camp, including sports and arts, didn’t have any better attendance than those that resembled ordinary school,” researchers have found.

Grossman conducted one of the few studies with a control group. Middle-school “students were randomly assigned to a five-week summer program with trained instructors using good curricula for reading and math lessons in the mornings and fun afternoon activities such as sports, music, theater and art,” Barshay reports. Attendance was good, but students’ gains were small.

“If you’re lucky, for every week of summer school, you get what you get in a week of regular school,” she says. “And if the summer school is not done as well, you get less than that.”

Her “advice is to focus on social-emotional skills and relationships to help re-engage students in learning,” writes Barshay.

Robert Slavin, an education researcher at Johns Hopkins, believes “intensive, daily tutoring” as part of a summer camp with fun activities is the most likely to improve achievement.

In a review of summer school research, he found two effective programs focused on teaching reading to kindergarten and first-grade students. In both cases, children received group phonics instruction followed by reading practice in very small groups that resembled tutoring.

However, in one of the studies the gains had faded by spring; the other study did no follow up.

Matt Barnum has tips for making summer school successful. Getting students to show up is the biggest challenge.