Tomas Morrissey - Mon Apr 13 14:18:49 2009

"Summer School: Unfulfilled Promise," highlights the rise of summer schools in American secondary education along with the lack of standards for these programs.  Addressing the former point, the increase in popularity of summer school, the article points to the pressure on school districts to simultaneously increase their retention rates and reduce social promotion.  In an effort to reduce both problems at once, summer school is an attractive option.  Instead of socially promoting a student, or failing the student and having them drop out, the student can attend summer school and theoretically receive the education they missed during the formal school year.  While summer school on paper appears to be an attractive remedy for social promotion, it is not without its flaws.  Most glaringly, there is a lack of standards and accountability for summer schools.  

The standards and accountability issue seems to be two fold: first, there is lack of formal structure across the board, so a summer school in Oregon can be run differently than one in Mississippi.  Secondly, there is a lack of criteria to determine a students successful completion of summer school.  This second issue was addressed in a 2002 article in the New York Times, entitled "Summer School Draws More Critics," and written by Abby Goodnough.  The article highlights that one failure of New York summer schools is that students may pass the class even if the fail their exit exams, due to classwork and attendance grades.  While this may happen as well in normal school, the idea behind summer school is to ensure that the students enrolled will be ready for the next year of class, and if these students are failing their exit exams and being passed anyways, this seems like social promotion again.  Ultimately, summer school must substitute for an entire year of an academic class, and most importantly, it must fill in the academic gaps that the student has missed.  If it is simply a hoop for the student to jump through before they are socially promoted, it is useless to the student and a waste of resources for the school district.