New research released last month has offered persuasive new evidence of the potential of summer learning opportunities, particularly in STEM subjects. One, a meta-analysis compiling the findings of dozens of prior studies over the last two years, shows consistent gains in math achievement resulting from student enrollment in summer coursework. Another showed participants in a summer STEM program enjoying significant later-life benefits, including greater success in college and higher earnings. 

The papers emerged just as national leaders made a concerted push to broaden access to summer instruction. In July, to spend more of their federal relief funds on tutoring, afterschool activities, and summer enrichment. Next, the Department of Education the Engage Every Student Initiative, a public-private partnership designed to guide local communities toward evidence-based programming. The administration to highlight the work of schools that have expanded their summer offerings.

The campaign demonstrates the promise that many experts see in summer learning — and the enormous academic challenges facing the nation’s schools after three school years disrupted by COVID-19. Along with extended school days and a stiff dose of high-quality tutoring, researchers and policymakers alike are turning to the traditionally vacant summer months as an untapped resource in the battle against academic erosion. 

Kathleen Lynch, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut and coauthor of the meta-analysis, said the existing research shows not only that summer learning is an effective means of bolstering academic growth, but also a worthy recipient of finite COVID recovery dollars.

“Summer programs provide an opportunity for children to catch up on material they may have missed, or to enrich their learning on new topics aligned with their interests,” Lynch wrote in an email. “I would recommend an effort to replicate successful models over the next few years, as schools and districts continue to combat learning setbacks that children experienced due to the pandemic.”  

Lynch and her co-authors cast a wide net to gather relevant findings from existing research dating between 1998 and 2020, ultimately selecting 37 studies of summer math initiatives that included control groups against whom program effects could be assessed. Programs could be conducted in a school, a community site, or private homes, and while some of the experiments were exclusively math-focused, others provided instruction in other subjects as well.

Participation in the programs significantly lifted children’s math performance. The average effect size of .1 standard deviations (a common measure showing the difference in any group from the statistical mean) in improved standardized test scores compares favorably to other touted learning interventions, such as teacher merit pay and school choice. And the benefits were similar in scope regardless of whether a given program served primarily low-income or high-income children. 

That distinction is critical given the intense diversity of summer learning experiences. Many are operated by school districts on a remedial basis, recruiting (or requiring the participation of) students who struggled academically during the year. Historically, these forms of summer school with poor attendance and low engagement from participants.

By contrast, Lynch noted, “contemporary summer programs increasingly focus on enrichment, hands-on activities, and learning via projects and inquiry.” Such programs, offered electively, are more likely to attract high-achieving pupils from relatively advantaged families.

focused on a particular initiative that attempted to split the difference by signing up high-achieving students from racial or ethnic backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in STEM fields. The program, offered by an elite technical university located in the Northeast, draws a disproportionately nonwhite field of rising high school seniors with top test scores and an average GPA of 3.86. 

Researchers from Columbia Teachers College, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the consulting company Mathematica assessed the effects of three separate varieties of the program: two summer residential periods (one week and six weeks, respectively) on campus, complete with direct coursework in STEM subjects as well as workshops and visits to STEM-focused workplaces, as well as a six-month engagement that was primarily offered to participants online. 

In all, participants from the 2014, 2015, and 2016 cohorts of experiment gained impressive life advantages in the years to come. Across all three summer offerings, students were more likely than members of a demographically similar control group to enroll in college, as well as persist and finish with a degree. Perhaps most importantly, since the program’s top priority was to diversify the STEM pipeline, participants offered seats in the six-week residential experience were 33 percent more likely to graduate in four years with a STEM degree. 

Sarah Cohodes, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a co-author of the study, said that the experiment provides evidence of a somewhat rarefied type of summer learning opportunity, tailored to students who were likely to enjoy its full benefits. That makes it a limited, though suggestive, window into what can be expected from summer school generally.

“Does it look like what we’re thinking about when we’re thinking about remediating learning loss? No, it doesn’t,” Cohodes said. “But I think you can see this as an existence proof that, yes, carefully designed programs targeted at the right level for students can make a huge difference for their life trajectories, and it is possible to create summer opportunities that change the lives of students.” 

Intriguingly, the study’s findings in terms of college outcomes aren’t clearly attributable to a particular facet of the college program; for instance, graduation rates after five years with a STEM degree were not significantly different in the one-week experience versus the six-week experience. This suggests that the benefits might be attributable to the simple influence of gathering students from traditionally underrepresented groups together on a prestigious campus, Cohodes argued.

“It’s not clear that the learning that made a difference here was standard, ‘I know more physics than I knew before’-type learning,” she observed. “A lot of it seemed to be around knowledge of the college application process, knowledge of what was out there, peer effects and social networks.”

The development of non-cognitive skills and traits was an explicit point of focus in Lynch’s compilation of summer learning studies. Across a range of 37 non-cognitive outcomes (including mindsets and attitudes, social skills, and academic behaviors like school attendance), summer math programs were associated with positive movement in 27; the average effect size for those outcomes was roughly equivalent to the programs’ effects on math test scores and course grades, with notable reductions to school-year absenteeism.

“The number of studies that measured noncognitive impacts is relatively small, but the evidence we found suggested that there’s unlikely to be a tradeoff between learning and noncognitive outcomes from attending summer programs,” Lynch said.

One example singled out in the meta-analysis was the Horizons National Summer Enrichment Program, an intensive summer intervention serving thousands of low-income pre-K–8 students across dozens of affiliates in 20 states. A commissioned by the organization found that its enrollees were less likely to be chronically absent or repeat a grade. A Horizons affiliate in New Haven, Connecticut, on the first lady’s July tour of summer learning and enrichment programs.

As policymakers at the state and federal levels search for tools to restore the academic growth forfeited during the pandemic, they will have access to thousands of existing summer schools, camps, and enrichment activities targeted toward K-12 students of different ages and achievement levels. National Summer Learning Association CEO Aaron Dworkin, who accompanied First Lady Biden on her visit to Horizons, said in an interview that this panoply of approaches — wedded to ample government support — could make a significant impact in the next few years.

“We have a lot of people who are doing what they think is best, but we can support and train them and invest in them so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A lot of people have tried already and learned the hard way. What’s different is that we have a lot of training, data, intermediaries, and infrastructure to support all kinds of people who are trying to be helpful right now.”

In , academics at the University of Rochester, the University of Colorado, and Duke University discovered that many winners of North Carolina school board races saw property values rise in their neighborhoods. The gains may have been generated by winners’ manipulation of attendance zones to sort whiter and higher-achieving students into nearby schools.

The findings also deliver an unmistakably partisan message: Board members registered as Republicans or independents yielded increases in home prices, while effects for Democratic winners were null. 

“The finding that non-Democratic — but not Democratic — school board members affect local school attributes in ways that raise home prices in their neighborhood…raises the question of self-interested, as opposed to public service-oriented, motivations for seeking office,” the authors write.

The study’s design offers a somewhat dark perspective on the linkage between school quality and the cost of real estate, hinging on the often-controversial power of local education authorities to determine which schools in their district enroll which students. To derive a clear picture of board members’ potential unspoken agendas, it combines data from a host of sources and examines three phenomena at once.

First, the research team gathered a comprehensive set of election results from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, focusing on all school board races between 2006 and 2016. While the vast majority of those races were nonpartisan (as are most such races around the country) they were able to determine the partisanship of roughly two-thirds of all candidates by matching them to county-level voter registration rolls, which also provided identifying information on race, ethnicity, age, and home address.

Next they built an index of home values throughout North Carolina at the level of the Census block using records from ZTRAX, a database encompassing all home transactions in the state between 1995 and 2016. The inventory, maintained by the online real estate marketplace Zillow, tracked not just sales prices and addresses, but also design and construction details such as square footage, structural condition and number of bathrooms. 

The combined figures clearly showed that property values in winning, non-Democratic candidates’ neighborhoods rose by an average of 4.2 percent — compared with the neighborhoods of losing non-Democrats — in the four years following a school board election. By comparison, winning Democratic board members enjoyed no bump in prices relative to losing Democratic candidates. Among winners registered as Republicans, who made up roughly 80 percent of non-Democratic candidates, the effects were even larger: a 6.2 percent increase in home prices relative to Republican losers.

“It could totally be possible that board members are increasing house prices across the whole district because they’re doing great things for schools,” said co-author John Singleton, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. “What we’re showing in this paper, though, is that the distribution of those effects across neighborhoods is related to where school board members live. It’s about how the pie is being divided, and it looks like it’s being divided in a more equal fashion by Democratic candidates.”

Controversy over attendance zones

But what could explain the higher prices?

To answer that question, Singleton and his collaborators introduced a final set of facts: records from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, which included academic, residential, and demographic information on students and schools. Soon enough, they found that the schools serving the neighborhoods of winning non-Democrats seemed to improve in the years following their election to school boards.

Specifically, math and reading scores on the North Carolina standardized End-of-Grade Tests increased slightly for children enrolled in those schools between kindergarten and the eighth grade. At the same time, average years of teacher experience (a crude but intuitive measure of school quality) increased significantly, with the proportion of brand-new teachers dropping by 12.8 percent and the proportion of teachers with over a decade of experience increasing by 3.8 percent.

Singleton said that the marked increase in teacher experience could be linked to lower turnover. Whatever the cause, it would be one of the clearest signals to potential home buyers — along with climbing overall test scores — of elevated school quality, which would in turn push home values higher.

“That’s something that’s potentially very visible to people who are deciding which neighborhood to live in and where to send their kids to school,” Singleton said. “But it’s also going to be private information that’s not more widely known — it travels by word of mouth through social networks: ‘This school is good, they retain their teachers.’”

But the perception of better academic performance seems to have more to do with changes in school composition than actual improvement. While overall standardized test performance in these schools trended upward, scores derived from teacher value-added — by economists to isolate exactly what schools contribute to student learning — remained flat. 

Instead, the ostensible academic growth may have been generated by changes in the schools students were assigned to. Those patterns in school assignment are substantially decided by board members, who may have a personal financial stake in having “good schools” (often, those that enroll more advantaged students who are most prepared to succeed academically) located near their own homes. 

The process of drawing and redrawing school attendance zones is typically highly controversial for that reason. In recent decades, some education analysts have advocated the intentional construction of attendance zones that cultivate more racial and socioeconomic diversity in classrooms. Efforts to put such plans into action have sometimes been stymied by changing election results — including in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest school district, where to an ambitious desegregation plan.

Singleton and his colleagues found that in the years after local non-Democrats won election to school boards, the schools serving their neighborhoods became 3.5 percent whiter relative to those serving the neighborhoods of non-Democratic election losers; enrollment of high-achieving students (those scoring higher on state exams than same-aged children the previous year) increased by 3.6 percent. No such changes were detected among schools serving the neighborhoods of winning Democrats.

The authors also revealed that, compared with results measured in the year before an election, average test scores markedly increased in the schools enrolling children who lived in the same Census block as a winning, non-Democratic school board candidate; in other words, local kids were being assigned to higher-performing schools after their neighbor became a board member.

Eric Brunner, an economist at the University of Connecticut, said that factors like test scores operated as clear signals in real estate markets because of the “very limited information” that families can otherwise access. Previous research has shown that the school ratings included in sites like Zillow can lead directly to neighborhood segregation. 

“What buyers are given by their realtors, and the research they do themselves, is typically the average test scores in different school zones,” Brunner argued. “If [board members] were able to adjust test scores within the boundaries of the school zone such that they went up on average — even though students weren’t smarter, and it was just due to sorting — then home values will go up. People think it’s a better product.”

‘Normal people engaging in politics’

Brunner noted that the study builds by Singleton and another co-author, economist Hugh McCartney, which found that Democratic school board members in North Carolina tended to reduce school segregation by shifting school assignments. The latest paper takes that insight “one step further,” he said, by demonstrating the self-dealing that might follow from the massaging of attendance zones. 

He also took note of an interesting sub-finding of the newer study: The changes in school-level achievement and home values were driven not only by non-Democrats, but also by candidates elected on an at-large basis to represent an entire school district. 

At-large contests only made up about one-quarter of board races in North Carolina over the course of the study, but their structure could help explain its results, Brunner said. Marginal changes to school attendance zones would theoretically produce a small number of winners, but also some “losers”: those who live near a board member but see themselves as adversely impacted by school assignment changes.. Under new assignment patterns, such voters might see their own property values fall as their children are enrolled at relatively lower-achieving schools.

That kind of dissatisfaction would be a serious liability in a ward-based race, Brunner observed; but if the candidate was elected on an at-large basis, most of their voters would take no notice of minor assignment changes occurring in other parts of their school district.

“If you’re elected at large, you could do something that satisfies a very small, unique group of people without pissing off the other voters within your ward. You don’t need to be worried about satisfying the rest of your ward — you could satisfy a microcosm of it.”

Robert Maranto is a political scientist at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform. Between 2015 and 2020, he also held a seat on the Fayetteville School Board, which undertook several rounds of student redistricting during his tenure. Maranto noted that such policy changes were some of the most fraught he could remember, recollecting in an interview that certain constituents needed to be “grandfathered in” to attendance zones viewed as superior.

“When people buy a house, or sometimes even an apartment, they have the expectation that their kid will go to a certain school,” Maranto said. “So if you upend that expectation, it can be very controversial. Even if they’re redistricted to a brand-new school, people are usually not happy about that.”

He added that the magnitude and direction of the effects measured by Singleton and his collaborators was “very plausible,” but added that his own interpretation was “somewhat less nefarious” than what others might infer.

“Your constituents either want or, more often, don’t want boundary changes,” he said. “It could be for elitist purposes — ‘We don’t want our kids going to school with those kids’ — but you’re representing that on the board. For me, it seems more like normal people engaging in politics.”

Singleton himself added that he would like to see similar research conducted in other states to reveal more about the connection between district leadership, school outcomes, and home prices. Though the findings from North Carolina were suggestive, he noted, the “very distinctive flavor” of local politics — including a comparative abundance of private and charter schools, which could dilute the effects somewhat by partially de-linking home addresses from school assignment — meant that a similar experiment might yield different results elsewhere. 

Above all, he said, it was important to further explore the role of school boards as actors in a complex machinery of school governance because the difference between a good board and a bad one might be greater than is now understood.

“I think there’s mounting evidence that boards can be consequential players. And we’re just starting to learn more about the conditions under which these kinds of effects can arise.”