Summer school was meant to be a supplement to a good education, not a safety valve for a bad one. Nancy Karweit of the Center for Research on the Education of Disadvantaged Students at Johns Hopkins University did a comprehensive review of more than a dozen summer school studies. Most were conducted in the 1980s. Karweit cautions that the studies are small and cover a diversity of grades and programs with different orientations. The mayor knows that this is one small component of what needs to happen.
Educators are the first to say their program can only do so much.
Don't worry about failing kids, the reasoning goes, summer school can save them. All this avoids facing the real emergency. If every classroom looked like the ones at Ockley Green's summer session, we wouldn't have so many failing students. In many ways, Portland summer schools seem like an ideal education. There are 15 or fewer students in each class, compared with about 30 during the academic year.