Fort Worth school districts expanded summer school to help kids catch up. Did it work?

The good news for the kids on the playground at Rufino Mendoza Elementary School earlier this month was that their rocket flew. The summer school class had spent days tinkering with the plastic bottle structure, and when it came time to test it out, the prototype shot about 15 feet into the air.

The bad news was that its parachute broke away in midair, drifting slowly to the ground as the rocket plummeted downward and landed with a whack.

The kids regrouped to figure out what went wrong before setting the rocket up on its launchpad. Marcos Puente Osorio stepped up to a bicycle pump and began pumping air into the soda bottle rocket. The rocket hissed as pressure built. Marcos gave it two more pumps for good measure, then ran back with his classmates. Again, the rocket flew into the air, but this time, the parachute deployed, carrying it safely back to earth. A cheer went up from the kids.

After the successful launch, teacher Gaby Gandera brought the kids together for a debrief on what happened. They talked about Newton’s third law of motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — the principle of physics that powers rockets, both the kind made out of empty soda bottles and the kind NASA uses to send astronauts into space.

The project was one of many that kids in North Texas schools have worked on in the weeks since the end of the regular school year. Many districts in the Fort Worth area and across the country invested in expanded summer school programs they hoped would help kids catch up on skills and knowledge they missed during the pandemic.

But as the federal relief money that funds those expanded programs winds down, it’s unclear how much they helped kids catch up. A national study released last year suggests many summer learning programs had limited impact, largely because the programs were too short and not enough students participated.

Schools used COVID money to build up summer school

In the wake of the pandemic, the federal government sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states and local school districts to help them reopen schools safely and help students make up the ground they lost during school closures. That money came with broad parameters and a hard deadline for spending it. The last round of funding expires at the end of September, at which point districts must send any leftover money back to the U.S. Treasury.

With that money in hand, school districts across the country, including several in Tarrant County, invested heavily over the past three years in beefed-up summer learning programs designed to help kids catch up. Federal education officials encouraged districts to make expanded summer programs a key part of their pandemic recovery strategies. Last March, Biden administration officials hosted a panel of federal and local leaders at the White House to discuss summer learning programs.

The Fort Worth Independent School District spent a large share of its federal relief allotment on expanding its summer learning programming, including creating programs for bilingual students and English-language learners, as well as students in special education programs — all groups who were especially hard hit by the academic declines associated with school closures.

Linda Tucker, Fort Worth ISD’s director of student academic support initiatives, said the district’s approach to summer school changed somewhat this year. In years past, district leaders focused their efforts on getting students enrolled in summer school, she said. This year, district leaders still worked to enroll students who needed extra support, she said, but they’re also placing a greater focus on making sure the students who signed up for summer programs actually show up for them.

Unlike the regular school year, attendance at summer school isn’t compulsory. So district leaders have to take a softer approach to encourage kids to show up. Before the school year ended, Tucker and other district leaders made sure each summer learning site had a plan for staying in touch with families, she said.

Then, a few days before summer school began, campus leaders started making calls to parents, reminding them that the program started soon, Tucker said. Each site also has a designated staffer who calls the parents of any student who doesn’t show up to see why they were absent, she said.

The district didn’t place eligibility requirements on most of its summer school offerings this year. District leaders specifically invited students who were behind academically or who racked up a large number of absences during the regular school year, Tucker said, because getting those students back on track is one of the district’s top priorities. But even students who aren’t struggling academically can benefit from a little extra support, as well as the enrichment activities summer programs feature, she said.

Summer offers a number of opportunities students don’t get during the regular school year, Tucker said, including smaller class sizes. Some teachers work with a dozen or fewer students at a time, allowing them to give each student more individualized attention.

FWISD summer learning offers a range of activities

On a Wednesday morning earlier this month at Rufino Mendoza, teacher Alexandra Flores walked 10 fourth-graders through an array showing three rows of four circles, showing them how to use the array to work out multiplication tables. A few doors down, teacher Maria Spinelli talked with about a dozen students about prime and composite numbers. And in another room nearby, another 10 kids listened as Lizeth Gonzalez talked them through how to identify the main idea and supporting details in a reading passage about eyelash mites.

Katy Myers, principal at Rufino Mendoza, said each of those classes would include closer to 20 students during the regular school year. Throughout the morning, students shifted between working on math and literacy with their teachers and working with Lexia and Dreambox, computer-based programs designed to help them move forward in those subjects.

Down the hall, a team of students made tweaks to a pair of robots they’d built. The kids had used masking tape to line out a path on the classroom floor and littered it with pipe cleaners and blocks to act as obstacles. The team agreed that the larger robot handled the course better. The smaller one was faster and therefore harder to maneuver around roadblocks and tight turns.

Across the room, three fifth-graders were getting ready to re-record a podcast episode about soccer. They’d interviewed teachers and classmates, and all they had left to do was record the voice-over and edit the episode together. Their first try didn’t go as well as they’d hoped, so they were about to try again.

Jacob Trejo, one of the two speakers on the podcast, said the fact that they could re-record the episode to fix mistakes was one of his favorite things about the project. If there were issues with the recording, or if he and his co-host didn’t speak as clearly as they’d like, they could sit down with their producer, fifth-grader Lucas Vivero, and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Academic benefits of summer learning are unclear

In a study released last summer, researchers from the American Institutes for Research, Harvard University and the testing company NWEA analyzed student achievement data for more than 16,000 kids who participated in summer school programs in eight districts across the country, including the Dallas and Richardson independent school districts.

Researchers found that students who participated in summer learning programs made only modest gains in math and no gains in reading. They also noted that most of the gains in math were concentrated mostly among students at the elementary level.

Fort Worth ISD officials were unable to provide data showing how much progress kids made during summer school. But state test scores released earlier this month showed that academic progress has been slow to materialize. Across the district, 33% of third-graders met grade level in reading, the same percentage who met that threshold in 2019 and a one-point uptick over last year. But 40% of third-graders didn’t meet or approach grade level in reading this year, compared to 36% in 2019.

One big factor that seems to make a difference in how much progress students make in summer school is the length of the program, said Emily Morton, a researcher with the American Institutes for Research and one of the study’s lead authors. The districts researchers looked at for that study offered summer programs that lasted an average of about 17 days.

But Morton pointed to a separate study released last month looking at results of a summer program in New York City that offered students 22 days of programming. That program showed stronger results than the ones included in the previous study: Students who participated gained about four to five weeks’ worth of learning in math and three to four weeks of learning in English language arts, according to the report.

Morton said it’s difficult to say for certain that the extra days of programming were the sole factor leading to greater academic returns. It’s possible that the New York program differed from the other programs in other ways not included in the reports, and those differences also played a role, she said. The program the more recent study looked at was also in a different context — public charter schools in New York compared to traditional school districts across the country — and it was based on data gathered a year after Morton’s team’s study.

“The extra dosage is a part of the story, but it could be that there’s also some other aspect of quality that we can’t measure,” Morton said.

Separate research highlights a fact about summer learning programs that’s as crucial as it is obvious: those programs only help kids if they enroll. In a study released last month by the RAND Corporation, researchers looked at summer offerings in more than 1,000 school districts across the country in 2023. They found that 81% of districts, including every urban district surveyed, offered summer programming, and urban districts often offered four or more programs.

But those programs typically only enrolled less than half of the students eligible to participate, no matter whether those programs had eligibility restrictions, researchers found. If districts want their programs to succeed in helping kids make progress academically, they need to step up enrollment substantially, researchers wrote. They acknowledged that doing so is a tall task, but recommended that districts try sending personalized messaging to parents letting them know that their kids need extra help. Districts could also use teachers as trusted messengers for that information, researchers wrote.

Researchers also said summer programs need to be longer for students to get substantial benefits from them. Although the length of those programs varied widely, the most typical program was four weeks long. Previous research recommends five- to six-week full-day summer programs at the elementary level that include at least three hours of academic instruction each day, plus enrichment activities.

HEB ISD leaders see hopeful signs in summer learning

Some school leaders and summer learning advocates argue that test scores aren’t the only way to tell that summer programs are effective. Marie Becker, coordinator of federal programs for the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District, said the district hasn’t seen substantial gains in student achievement as a result of expanded summer programming. But she said that doesn’t mean those programs haven’t helped kids.

School leaders are always looking for ways to make the material kids learn in class more meaningful, Becker said, and summer learning offers opportunities to do that. For example, last summer, members of the Fort Worth Astronomical Society visited a school and talked with students about the sun. They set up a telescope with a solar filter so students could look at the sun safely. That experience might not translate to immediate gains on an achievement test, she said, but if any of those students encounter a reading prompt about sun spots, they’ll be able to understand it better because of that personal connection.

Becker said HEB ISD is working out plans for how it will be able to sustain the programs it started or expanded with federal relief funding, including summer school.

“I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but we are committed to finding the money so that we can still provide the service,” she said.

Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, said summer learning programs can offer a host of benefits for kids who participate. Those programs can offer academic instruction, mental health support, physical activity and usually a meal, he said. As kids get older, many of those programs offer workforce development and job training opportunities like internships, he said.

Effective summer school programs offer a mix of academic instruction with enrichment activities, Dworkin said. That combination is important, he said, because the academic component gets kids help they need to catch up and the enrichment piece holds their interest enough to get them to show up every day. Better attendance tends to lead to better outcomes, he said, so the most effective programs are often the ones that kids find the most fun and interesting.

Dworkin said he’s optimistic about the future of summer programming, even after the federal funding expires. That money, and the post-pandemic academic declines it was meant to help fix, served as an incentive for school districts across the country to build partnerships with community organizations they’d never worked with before, he said. Those partnerships won’t necessarily end once the money dries up, he said.

Summer school faces unclear future

A few doors down from the fifth-graders building robots at Rufino Mendoza, a handful of kids wearing virtual reality headsets navigated their way through virtual environments they’d designed themselves, while their classmates worked on laptops, making adjustments to their own designs. Teacher Jose Carranza reminded the kids wearing headsets to stand still, since they couldn’t see what was around them in the real world. Still, some kids took a few aimless steps, bumping into classmates, desks and cabinets.

Watching the kids working on their designs, Myers, the school principal, said it’s important that students be given the chance to explore science and technology. Many kids in the district don’t get a lot of exposure to those areas, she said, and summer school can be a good opportunity to let them try new things.

Even after the federal money runs out, Myers said she hopes to be able to continue some of that programming, both during the summer and during the regular school year. The district has already bought the virtual reality headsets, for example. As long as she keeps advocating for her kids, she’s optimistic that the resources will be there.

But Myers acknowledged that next year’s summer learning offerings, as well as other programs funded by federal relief money, will almost certainly look different once that funding is gone.

“I think everyone’s kind of wondering what this is going to look like,” she said.