Summer is a problem for poor kids. All children forget some of what they learned during the prior year in school, but a number of studies have shown that poor children with uneducated parents lose more ground.

Paul T. von Hippel of the Ohio State University notes that kids from low-income families learn almost as quickly as their more affluent peers during the school year, but setbacks during the summer are compounded, widening the achievement gap.

Schools in the US serving poor children have noticed the summer problem, and some are trying to solve it by adopting a year-round schedule. Instead of having a three-month summer vacation, these schools redistribute the 180 days of the school year to include a series of evenly-spaced shorter breaks.

Von Hippel set out to see if the year-round strategy works by comparing learning rates of students in year-round schools to those in school with traditional nine-month school years. He examined reading and math scores of over 17,000 children in 992 schools, collected as part of a national study called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Only 27 of the schools in the study had year-round schedules.

Taking into account differences in the types of children who attend year-round and traditional schools, von Hippel found that the year-round schedule had little effect on learning. On balance, over a twelve-month period, children learned about as much in year-round schools as in schools using a nine-month calendar. Summer setbacks in traditional schools appeared to be replaced by several smaller setbacks throughout year.

In von Hippel’s words, "Year-round calendars do not fix the problem of summer learning. Instead, they simply hide the problem by sweeping it under the rug of fall, winter, and spring".

What poor kids need, he says, is to attend more days of school, not the same number of days, distributed differently. Policymakers might assume that the quality of education for low-income kids is the problem. Von Hippel's research suggests that quantity is just as much a factor.

"What Happens to Summer Learning in Year-Round Schools?" by Paul T. von Hippel, Ohio State University. For copy of full report, see: What Happens to Summer Learning in Year-Round Schools?