Summer Vacation from School Can Erase Half a Year's Worth of Learning | Karim Abouelnaga | Big Think

Summer Vacation from School Can Erase Half a Year's Worth of Learning

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Is America's achievement gap crisis caused by long summer vacations? "In lower income neighborhoods, kids forget anywhere from two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months of what they learned during the school year over the summer, while their middle-class peers break even or even make gains," says Karim Abouelnaga, CEO of Practice Makes Perfect. This startling statistic is why he started a different kind of summer school, one based on a chain of near-peer mentors, where kids are connected with college students and college students are connected with teaching professionals. "This model, where everyone is sort of a participant but also a beneficiary, creates this win-win-win situation for everyone, making summer school a lot more fun and exciting." Why do some eighth grader students only have a fourth grade reading level? Theoretically speaking, they’ve only been in school for half the time, says Abouelnaga. To find out more, visit practicemakesperfect.org.

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KARIM ABOUELNAGA:

Karim Abouelnaga is the CEO of Practice Makes Perfect, a Benefit Corporation that partners with K-12 schools to deliver high quality, academic summer programs. He founded Practice Makes Perfect at 18. He writes for Entrepreneur, Forbes, Linkedin, and is working on releasing three books during Summer 2018. Karim is a TED Fellow and Echoing Green Fellow. At 23, he was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in Education, and at 24 was named to Magic Johnson’s 32 under 32 list. In 2016, he was ranked in the top 3 most powerful young entrepreneurs under 25 in the world by Richtopia. He graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor’s in Hotel Administration and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Education Policy at Columbia University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Karim Abouelnaga: The summer learning loss is a term that they use to describe the regressions that kids in low-income neighborhoods face relative to their affluent peers. So they say in lower income neighborhoods kids forget anywhere from two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months of what they learned during the school year over the summer, while their middle-class peers break even or even make gains.

When I first learned about the achievement gap I was a freshman in college and I wanted to understand what the causes of it were. And as I started to do my research I realized that there were a thousand different reasons why the achievement gap existed: everything from a lack of positive role models to poor health conditions in so many of these inner-city and low-income neighborhoods.

And then I found this startling statistic that said that two-thirds of the achievement gap could be directly attributed to unequal summer learning opportunities, or the summer learning loss. In low-income neighborhoods, kids forget anywhere from two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months of what they learn over the summer from the school year, and so when they return to school they’re now two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months behind their affluent or their middle class peers.

Just to put that in perspective for you all: the school year from September to June is only ten months long. If a kid forgets two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months of what they learned, that’s almost 25 to 35 percent of their learning. Teachers have then reported that they spend anywhere from a month-and-a-half to two months reteaching old material. So if you add that additional 20 percent you’re talking about 50 percent of a kid’s learning.

So we sit here and we ask ourselves, “Why does an eighth grader only have a fourth grade reading level?” and the truth of the matter is that theoretically speaking they’ve only been in school for half the time.

When I first learned about the summer learning loss I thought the obvious solution was summer school, right? If kids were in school over the summer then they couldn’t be regressing, they couldn’t forget what they were learning. And then I learned really quickly that summer school sucked; it was punishment for the kids and babysitting for the teachers. And I thought back to my own days when I was in summer school, and I didn’t like it—and no one does. There’s such a negative stigma associated with it.

When I was 18 I actually brought together a group of friends to start to alleviate some of the issues around summer schooling in general.

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