When Reneta Johnson, head of a small charter network here, asked students how they wanted to spend this summer, they said they like to make TikTok videos.
That gave her an idea.
The staff at Legacy Prep built a three-week summer schedule around the theme of “Lights, Camera, Action,” blending drama, music and dance, culminating in a final performance. But between learning choreography and exploring careers related to content creation, students this month are spending three hours a day polishing the math and reading skills they’ll need for next school year.
From D to B
After three years of the program, Johnson sees more confidence in kids when they come back in the fall and considers it one of the reasons why Legacy Prep’s elementary school went from a D to a B last year on the state report card.
“Our test scores were in the tank,” she said. During summer school, “our kids have more time to talk to the teacher. They know what they need to focus on.”
It’s a model that prevents what’s known as the summer slide, not just at Legacy Prep, but at nearly 460 charter schools in seven cities. Standardized assessments show that over 39,000 students in Summer Boost gained, on average, nearly a month more learning in math and two and a half extra weeks in English language arts, according to a new study. While the growth is significant, the fact that the study found improvement across so many sites makes the findings stand out even more, said Geoffrey Borman, a researcher at Arizona State University who led the study.
“A key thing to keep in mind is the scale at which these impacts are being made,” he said. “We’re talking, in this case, about tens of thousands of students per year.”
In education research, he added, there are examples of small, “one-off efforts” that produced “groundbreaking impacts.” But those effects often fade when a program — high-dosage tutoring, for example — expands to more students and locations.
Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent $50 million to launch Summer Boost in 2022 to help students recover from academic decline during the pandemic. The program served over 16,000 students that year in New York City and has since spread to six more cities, including Baltimore, Nashville and San Antonio.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Linda Jacobson and was originally published by The 74.
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