How one public school system mitigated the summer reading gap - Kelli Marie Cedo

Kelli Marie Cedo is Principal of Forrest Elementary School in Hampton, VA. She has also served as Title I Coordinator, Division Contact for School Improvement, Literacy Coach, Academic Coordinator and Family Engagement Liaison in Virginia Beach, VA. Cedo is the cocreator of the VA PLC Consortium around Professional Learning.

It was back in 2011, when I was Title I Coordinator at Virginia Beach City Public Schools, that I first understood just how serious the summer reading gap is—and first realized that a solution to this problem is within the grasp of our schools and our communities.

Researchers have long demonstrated that a lack of access to books over the summer months is academically devastating for lower-income students. The reading level of these students typically regresses by between 1 and 3 months over that period, while that of their highand middle-income peers – even at the same school – stays constant or improves.

This outcome is not surprising, as the average low-income home contains between zero and three books, while a high-income home typically has 40 to 60 books. Higher-income children are also much more likely to participate in summer learning programs and visit public libraries while school is out. And, as research by the U.S. Department of Education has made clear, children will engage in more independent reading when they have greater access to books.1

Yet the focus of educators is so fixed on the school that we seldom pay sufficient attention to the educational impact of our students’ experience outside the classroom. That was certainly true in my case – until I heard Dr. Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee talk about the summer reading gap, and a light bulb went on in my head.

I knew then that I needed to see if this problem was prevalent in the Title 1 schools in our district. So I worked with our accountability department to run the numbers – and we found that the majority of our low-income students did indeed experience backsliding over the summer, with their reading level falling behind by anything between 1.5 and 2 months.

That finding was a shock for my colleagues and me. We were applying best-practice comprehensive literacy techniques in our classrooms, with teachers providing small-group instruction. We ensured the Title I supplementary programming we provided was implemented and assessed effectively. Yet with all that effort we still weren’t mitigating the achievement gap: summer backsliding was undoing much of our work and putting our low-income students at a disadvantage that would likely stay with them for the rest of their lives. As researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown, the achievement gap between high- and low-income students is driven mainly by differential summer learning over the elementary school years – and results in major differences in high-school completion and four-year college attendance.2

The question we faced was: how to turn the situation around? In discussion with teachers, parents, and the assistant superintendent we soon realized that we as a community had to work together to address this problem. Any attempt to create a solution for the families of our low-income students would fail: we had to create a solution with them.

That was the philosophy that guided our first home-based reading program in 2012. After a small pilot in the summer of that year, we welcomed all new kindergartners in the fall of 2012 with five new books to take home with them as their own, personal library – and we distributed additional books to them at the start of each quarter. For the summer vacation, students were given a special summer reading packet plus a writing journal. During the summer of 2013 all K-5 students were provided with books to read over the summer.

We organized workshops open to all parents, giving them the opportunity to practice skills for building literacy at home. Staff encouraged parents to immerse themselves in their child’s early literacy development through book discussions and read-aloud tips. In the process, we helped build trusting relationships between home and school – and boosted parents’ confidence in their ability to enhance their children’s literacy. We backed that up with home correspondence during the summer to encourage families to read every day.

Our hope was that, by providing texts for the home and working together with families to build a culture of reading, we would achieve real impact in closing the summer reading gap. To see if we had been successful, we undertook statistical analysis of K-5 students’ Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) across all 13 of our Title I schools in the fall of 2013.

The results were better than we’d dared to hope. In all, 73 percent of students did not backslide in the reading level over the summer, and 39 percent had actually improved their reading levels while out of school. Over the previous summer, before our program had got going in earnest, around 70 percent of K-5 students had regressed in their reading levels.

To complement this quantitative data, we also surveyed parents, teachers, and principals on their experience of the program. The feedback we gathered was a rich source of learning – and encouragement. For example, one parent reported that: “Having this home library changed the way our family interacts with reading.” Another said:

“Our children are so happy when they get a new book for their library. Each child keeps their library neat and organized and they do indeed use it to choose books and read. It is their space, their books. From the bottom of our hearts, we appreciate having the home library, helping us further our children’s education. It is something that we could not have done without the school’s program.”

Apart from giving us all a big boost in motivation, this feedback helped us build buy-in to expand the program to cover all low-income students from kindergarten to fifth grade. We also drew on our lessons from the first year to improve the program. In particular, we introduced text selection, with students in each grade able to choose their five books from a list of 20-30 put together by committees of teachers based on level, genre, student interest, and the following year’s curriculum.

We also added summer programming, including collaboration with local public libraries; previous research had found that public libraries are an important resource for children’s reading during the summer Reading for Life 41 break.3 Finally, we partnered with Scholastic, the children’s book publisher, to provide seamless book distribution to all participating students. They created a custom order form to allow students to choose their books with teachers’ guidance, then shipped the books to each school, bundling them by student and by classroom teacher.

Even after the success of our 2013 summer program, we were anxious about whether we’d be able to keep up the momentum and achieve impact across a much larger group of students and families. But when the ran the analysis of the expanded program in the fall of 2014, the results were hugely encouraging. A total of 70 percent of students had not regressed in their reading levels – and 35 percent had improved in their reading assessment. Our community had really sustained the program. Again, this was a major improvement on previous years.

We gathered feedback once again, and were thrilled with the positive response from both parents and educators. One first grade teacher said:

“The Summer Reading Program was great. I worked at quite a few of the sessions and it was wonderful to see the children excited about the books and activities; many of our students do not go to the public library and parents often have difficulty picking out books at their child’s reading level. We had many of the children who attended the sessions regularly and it helped keep them from losing their momentum over the summer. The librarians who came from the public library were great at engaging the children.”

One of our Title 1 principals emphasized: “Children take pride in things that belong to them. The summer reading program builds on that pride by placing books into the hands of children who take pride in reading to find out what is inside.” He reported that over 30 families participated in his school’s program, attending weekly events at the school library throughout the summer, which were supported by the local public library. “Although it seemed to be common sense that it would benefit the children participating,” he said, “I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the actual data, as measured by the DRA, also demonstrated the success of reducing the ‘summer slide.’”

I am tremendously proud of the job that the Title I community in Virginia Beach has done to close the summer reading gap and change the life trajectories of low-income children. There is so much evidence that problems with literacy have profound impact on people’s economic prospects, their employability, and even their likelihood of ending up in prison. This community has given thousands of young people a much better chance of leading successful adult lives.

They have also created some important lessons for educators and policy makers across the country–and the world. I’m now making it my mission to share those lessons on a broader platform, and encourage other school districts to invest in summer reading programs in collaboration with their communities.

The number one lesson is simple: summer matters. The second lesson is a tougher one for decision-makers to accept: mitigating the summer reading gap takes resources. Funds must be found for an ongoing supply of texts, for community outreach, and for summer programming – in a context where funding is finite.

All of us who care about literacy must go out and argue for that resource investment with passion and confidence, pointing out that this investment creates proven returns for students in the short term, and increased economic prosperity for the country in the long term.