The summer slide and why September is harder than it looks

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Okay so Marina comes in the second week of September, third grader at home, and she is not talking about nails at all, she is talking about a boy who forgot how to subtract. Her words. Over the summer he read fine, he swam, he went to a camp in July, and now the homework takes an hour and a half and ends in tears, and she wants to know what she did wrong.

Nothing, probably. But here is what the numbers say, and they say it about math.

What actually slides

NWEA, the creators of the MAP tests, went and compared spring scores with fall scores, and the math drop over a summer comes out, on average, to something like 10 to 30 percent of what a kid picks up in a regular school year. Reading in the same comparison barely moved. So what falls out of a nine year old over a summer is not the alphabet, it is the arithmetic he had only just got hold of.

Here is the bit that got me, though. The kids who gained the most during the year are the ones who lose the most over the break, which is unfair, I think, and also just how it goes. Researchers still argue about the size of all this, some say the slide is smaller than everybody repeats, but nobody argues that September feels like September.

Most of the slide is math, and it lands on the kids who grew the most last year.

My own summers came in December, school in Rosario began in March, and nobody at home had a word for any of this. What we had was my grandmother, who would sit me down to read the newspaper out loud to her, which I hated at the time, and which I think now was the entire program.

Why September lands the way it does

First unit of the year is mostly review, teachers plan for exactly that, and the catching up runs over weeks and not over a weekend. At home it reads as something else, as a kid who got worse over the summer, when in fact you are watching a head that has to go and find the thing again, and that part nobody warns you about.

For a family that landed in July there is a second layer on top of it, because the child is finding English again at the same time, and the school’s fall check comes in those same weeks, so the tears at the kitchen table have four reasons in them, I think, and only one of them is subtraction.

How to soften it

Twenty minutes a day of the boring thing, and by boring I mean whatever was hard in June, times tables or fractions or whatever the teacher put in the last report, because a summer of general enrichment does not seem to put back the one piece that fell out.

Then the free program at the school itself, which I think nobody uses enough. Beyond the Bell runs free after school programs at more than 700 LAUSD schools, until 6 p.m. in elementary schools, with homework help, and most schools also serve a free supper at dismissal, and you enroll by giving the application to the site coordinator at your school. Most families sign up in the first weeks, but you can sign up any time of year. Some schools have a morning version too, Ready-Set-Go, 90 minutes before the bell.

That free program is not charity, by the way, it is public money, state and federal, and the district runs these programs across its schools. The question at the office is which program your school has, and whether there is a seat.

Before you pay for a tutor

She asked about tutors first, everybody does, and the prices she had been quoted were the reason she was not sleeping. I told her what I would do myself, start with the free homework hour at her own school, give it a month, and pay somebody in November only if the same thing is still stuck. In September nobody can tell yet what is a real gap and what is a kid coming back from three months of the pool.

Ask the teacher one question, not five, that is my advice. Which single thing should we practice at home until winter. Marina sent that by email, three lines, and got back subtraction with borrowing and a link, and that was the plan for the fall, all of it.

Summer programs do help, the real ones anyway. NWEA found gains in math worth about two to three weeks of school-year learning, and recommends four to six weeks of programming, with daily math and reading and steady attendance.

Sleep is the other half of it, and the hour before bed, and I am not going to pretend I have a study for that. What I have is a salon full of mothers every September, and the ones whose evenings are quiet by half past eight tell a different story in October than the ones whose kids sit down to homework at ten.

Panic in the kitchen helps nobody either. A kid who keeps hearing that he forgot everything may well start believing it, and I have never once seen that speed anything up.

Marina came back in October for a fill, and the update was short. Homework is 40 minutes now, the crying stopped somewhere in the third week, and the boy can subtract, mostly.

And the other thing that slides over a summer, quietly, is the language at home, because three months of English camp do their own work. Palme School works with children from four years old, online, in small groups, and a lesson runs 40 minutes. Every family gets two sessions at no cost to start with, a talk with a methodologist first and then a trial lesson inside a group. A kid who follows Russian and answers you in English belongs in Russian for bilingual children, and a kid who talks but stalls over a page belongs in the reading school.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · School of reading · Free materials for families

Monica Perez moved to Los Angeles from Rosario, Argentina. She interacts a lot with Russian-speaking women at her nail salon, so she has a wealth of knowledge about Russian culture and the secrets that women from Russia keep to themselves.