... Research shows that children, particularly those from low-income families, slip in reading and math over the summer if they don't receive appropriate enrichment to reinforce school lessons. The findings have grabbed attention in Washington, where Maryland Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski and Democratic presidential candidate and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama are co-sponsoring a bill that would, among other things, grant $100 million to five states selected by the U.S. secretary of education to fund summer programs for children from disadvantaged families.
"Everyone would expect an athlete or a musician's performance to suffer if they didn't practice. The research suggests the same is true for students and their academic work," said Ron Fairchild, executive director for the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. "We know, through research, that students who don't practice lose ground every summer. Those losses are cumulative and grow the achievement gap that schools are working so hard to erase."
The latest study from Johns Hopkins, which tracked 325 Baltimore students from first grade to age 22, found that by the end of the ninth grade, students from disadvantaged homes performed more than three grade levels below their peers in higher socio-economic families on reading comprehension tests. Two-thirds of that gap, Hopkins sociologist Karl L. Alexander found, was attributable to the lack of adequate summer enrichment in the early years. By the time the same students graduated, the disadvantaged students were performing six grade levels below their peers.
