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School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and SES only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal Northwest Evaluation Association dataset, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (ELA).

Keywords
summer learning loss, achievement inequities, role of schools in achievement
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/2mam-bp02

This EdWorkingPaper is published in:

Atteberry, A., & McEachin, A. (2020). School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities. American Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831220937285

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Atteberry, Allison, and Andrew McEachin. (). School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities. (EdWorkingPaper: 19-82). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/2mam-bp02

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