Here & Now

Sara Shaw on Learning Loss and Summer School in Wisconsin

Frederica Freyberg:

School is out for summer and now summer school begins, but who is going and how might extra class time help make up for learning loss suffered during the pandemic? We turn to Sara Shaw who specializes in education as senior researcher for the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Sara, thanks for being here.

Sara Shaw:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

So we know according to the Department of Public Instruction that the actual enrollment numbers for summer school this summer don’t come out until October. But what do trends from recent prior years of summer school attendance across the state tell us?

Sara Shaw:

So prior to the pandemic, summer school enrollment had generally been increasing. Then the pandemic hit and summer 2020, it saw a 57% decrease. The question was what was going to happen starting in summer 2021 and what we saw in that year was that enrollment was back up to 88.3% of 2019 enrollment, so what we describe as a partial recovery. A lot of the districts fully recovered. Many did not. Then we looked recently to see what happened for summer 2022, so last year at this time. And the numbers barely budged, so it’s only up by an additional half a percentage point. We’re at 88.8% of what the numbers were in 2019. And these numbers are relevant because while summer school isn’t everything to everyone, it was serving a purpose prior to the pandemic and the question is, has it been able to even regain that original purpose, much less be able to provide additional support to help learning recovery.

Frederica Freyberg:

So why wouldn’t enrollment mostly have rebounded after the worst of COVID?

Sara Shaw:

There are a lot of hypotheses. I think in that summer of 2021, that first year back, there were concerns of staff burn-out, of continued COVID hesitancy, even with the vaccines, districts getting themselves going again. As we get further out, I think the explanations become trickier to pin down, and it is a tight labor market, so teachers have a lot of options or had a lot of options, at least, of what they could be doing over the summer. Budgets at the state and local level were fairly constrained. But at the same time, many districts had access to federal relief funds that could have helped fund that summer school. So probably most related to staffing, but also questions in there about school budgets and parental interest, or parents and guardians thinking about how did they want their kids expecting the summer.

Frederica Freyberg:

You wrote a tale of two districts, one being Milwaukee, which did not rebound significantly at all, and one being Green Bay, which did and really leaned into this kind of summer school engagement. What’s the difference between these two districts?

Sara Shaw:

Well, it’s a little difficult to just look at summer school because each of these districts are taking on so many different efforts of which summer school is a piece, but Green Bay really made the strategic investment to say summer school is the lever we are going to pull, or one of the major levers we are going to pull to get our teachers used to being back in person, get our students used to being back in person. They switched from a part-day program to a full-day program because it gave them extra time with kids to not only help them catch up academically and accelerate their learning, and also reestablish some of those social ties that really were frayed or in some cases even broken through the pandemic and it was a response to parents who were asking for full-day childcare, summer school for all of its benefits for students is also childcare for parents and guardians. So that was a big investment on Green Bay’s part that in many respects from enrollment seems like it was very successful, but also brought budgetary challenges for the district. MPS has been putting its investments elsewhere, so summer school has really not been at the primary level that they’d pulled as part of their recovery efforts.

Frederica Freyberg:

Just super quickly, we know that the COVID relief funds expire in 2024, funds that had helped districts kind of do these summer school programs. What’s on the horizon after that?

Sara Shaw:

After that, depends a lot on what happens with the state legislature. The question is to what extent can districts pull on state and local dollars to help smooth that transition away from the federal funds.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Sara Shaw, thanks for your expertise.

Sara Shaw:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.