1 post from March 2009

My vision for summer school 2009 builds off a few lucid points made in the article “Summer School: Unfulfilled Promise.” In light of the article’s sidebar “The Summer Slide,” and what sociologists David Stark and Annette Lareau have found, I concur that summer school is the best possible “alternative support program” available to struggling students. Seeing what enormous ground mandatory, fully-funded summer schools in Chicago and Delaware have gained gives me hope for what significant educational gains Holly Springs Summer School may one day equip its students with. I advocate for three major, new steps in particular for HSSS this summer: first, for the installment of a school-wide, cross-grade, cross-subject reading program embedded within the curriculum; second, for the summer to culminate in an official retake of the state test which was failed by the student to begin with; and third, for the extra-curriculars to culminate in an end-of-summer concert/showcase/performance. Whereas the first vision stems out of sociological research, the second springs from my belief that the bureaucratic management of student proficiency is too slow in Mississippi – and from inspiration at what states like IL and DE have done about that dilemma. 

Regarding the centrality of reading during the summer: Reading belongs in the limelight of summer school because it is the centerpiece around which the student’s future performance will hinge. Sociologist David Stark writes in his textbook for undergraduate sociology, and sociologist Annette Lareau in her study “Unequal Childhoods” has chimed in, that summer is the key time when achievement gaps between privileged and underprivileged students widen – especially in the area of reading levels. The reading program should incorporate intensive reading skills tutoring by teachers to students whose fluency and comprehension are lagging.

Regarding what HSSS can do to compensate for the MDE’s lethargy in giving timely feedback on standardized tests: Other states manage to get their test results back to students in a timely manner, within a time frame in which the results are still meaningful and relevant. Since HSSS cannot control state-level functions, the next-best thing it can do is equip its students for the state exam. That is why each state-tested subject should have a full-length state test as its final. If there were any way to make this test official, I believe that would highly motivate our students to “get ‘er done” during the summer, and be on-track with their peers come August.

Even so, the survey points out that only a minority (4%) of summer schools exist only to help students pass a particular test (p. 8). There must be more of a heart to the program for it to be appealing to students. We should ask ourselves as HSSS teachers whether extra-curriculars might be the trick to providing the summer curriculum with the flexibility, innovation and creativity its students need, since implicit in re-teaching is the implication that the students “need help that goes beyond simply re-teaching the same material in the same way” (p. 15).Therefore, keeping extra-curriculars as an exciting and rewarding part of the summer school day will be important. This is an outlet through which subjects can be extended into realms which actually appeal to students in ways that English and history class can’t – in drama club, for example, where students may find themselves almost accidentally enjoying what they learn about characterization and historical time periods.

As I see it, success for my summer school students in English I/II will be their demonstrated aptitude to pass the English II state exam. We gave this exam to our students at the end of summer school last year, and few passed. My expectations, or at least hopes, are higher this year. The evidence I will need to see to identify their overall success is 80% mastery among our students after each weekly exam. If 80% do not pass our teacher-made exams, then success is not being reached. I also believe that success is being reached if returning students – either ours from last summer or the middle school teachers’ students – demonstrate higher reading comprehension and composition levels than they did before. Fostering autonomy in our students, expressed in the self-monitoring they need to know when and how to ask for help and to be self-starters, will be a goal I bring to our class this summer. Thus, a secondary indicator of success will be the visible proof that the students can work more independently by the end of the summer than they were able to do at the beginning.

To ensure this success, I will encourage our team (the Sophomoric Studs) to implement individual, regular tutoring for the students (since we are fortunate to find ourselves in the luxurious, multiple-teacher set-up) and also to embed mini-lessons within our lessons on how to study and how to be a successful student – and hopefully not in the form of a corny, ineffective lecture, as I recall getting in middle school.

The recommendations on page 18 strike me as agreeably attuned to instituting greater equality into our public schools. I heartedly agree that summer schools should be provided free of charge to students who need the reinforcement and greater attention. Many of these students, I am sure, got to this point because other students (through their distractions and poor conduct in classrooms during the traditional year) robbed them of attention from their teacher, who is overburdened with discipline and other tasks at that time, to give the quiet strugglers the attention they need. So it is still owed to them. So long as summer schools enforce extremely strict conduct expectations, that indebted attention for those students can be protected. Timely catch up, instead of overdue remediation, IS an integral part of the schooling process that rests on the state’s shoulders to deliver. Overdue remediation is about as effective as creek water on an open wound. Though the idea of having state-mandated standards for summer schools at first rubbed me the wrong way (recommendation #4), but in fact, that might be the key to (a) enforcing strict discipline standards at summer school (low tolerance for chronically disruptive students) and (b) ensuring that summer school is intensive, rigorous and tight, and not merely an impotent, aimless, sloppy attempt at overdue remediation.

Recommendations 5 through 7 are great – requiring highly qualified faculty, the call for rigorous evaluation of the program and providing students with innovative alternative teaching styles – but implementing them will require ample professional development and support from state resources. This can be done; the resources simply need to be delivered to the schools themselves (i.e., state evaluators and curriculum specialists from the state ought to do school visits with the mission of helping and equipping teachers). I think these are the most problematic to institute because of the sluggishness that bureaucracy brings whenever delivery of human resources is involved.

My favorite recommendation was for incorporating summer school as a term that can be avoided by performing at proficient achievement levels during the three other quarters of the year. This strikes me as a fantastic motivator for our students to bring it upon themselves to strive. A puzzle piece perennially missing from our discourses on how to address low student motivation levels is what motivators we as educators can offer them, since those that exist for them already (the freedom and fun of college, instead of premature motherhood, for example) are often outside of their immediate vision.