Districts that spent the majority of that year learning remotely tended to lose more ground in fourth-grade math scores than districts that reopened sooner. Every 10 additional days of school closures was associated with a roughly 0.2-point loss on NAEP from 2019 to 2022. The pattern was statistically significant and held even when controlling for the share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty.

“The districts with more remote learning have larger test score losses,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor who has tracked school closures through the pandemic. 

“It’s pretty consistent with what we have seen up until now,” added the researcher, an early and ardent supporter of reopening schools during the pandemic shutdown whose positions were .

The finding adds to the that online learning during the pandemic had a negative impact on student learning outcomes, even while there is renewed debate over how strongly the 2022 NAEP scores reflect it. The highly anticipated results released Monday showed the largest drops ever recorded in 4th and 8th grade math.

Peggy Carr, head of the U.S. Department of Education center that administers NAEP exams, played down any possible relationships between school closures and test results.

“There is nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed,” she said during a Friday press conference.

Oster, who also of the relationship between remote learning and NAEP results, called the National Center for Education Statistics director’s statement “odd” and “not very consistent with what we are seeing in the data.”

However, she acknowledged that there is an element of truth to Carr’s words.

“Maybe what they’re saying is that [school closure] is not the only determinant, and that’s right. It is not the case that there is a straight line between remoteness and test score losses,” she said.

An NCES spokesperson affirmed that stance Tuesday, denying any “simple direct relationship between duration of remote learning and score declines based on NAEP results” in a statement emailed to ����Ӱ��.

“Controlling for free- or reduced-price lunch is helpful but not sufficient,” the spokesperson continued. “NCES will be conducting analyses that conform to the highest statistical standards, consider multiple variables and link data collected by NCES to other high quality datasets.”

On the whole, results from what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card revealed the stark drop offs in math and a slide in reading since 2019, the last time the exam was administered. Some individual school systems, however, performed better than expected, including Los Angeles, among the districts which stayed in remote learning the longest and which saw improvements in reading for fourth graders and in both reading and math for eighth graders.

Since the release of NAEP results on Monday, and have conducted several analyses correlating scores with length of school closures and found moderate, statistically significant links. However, those analyses have largely focused on state data, an approach some experts warn against because it lumps districts that reopened quickly with those that stayed shuttered much longer.

“Within states, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in terms of closure policies,” said Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

“Looking at district data is superior to looking at state data because that’s where the [reopening] decisions were made,” he said.

����Ӱ�� took the district-level approach, crunching data from a sample of large urban school systems included in the NAEP release. Their scores were then matched with closure data from Oster’s , which tracked the percentage of the 2020-21 school year that districts offered remote, hybrid or in-person instruction. From the full sample of 26 school systems, Fresno was removed because it had no publicized 2022 NAEP scores and New York City, the nation’s largest school district, and Shelby County, Tennessee were excluded because they had no district-level school closure data available in the Hub.

Among the 23 remaining school systems, fourth-grade math was the only subject with a statistically significant relationship between district performance and time spent in remote learning. There were weak correlations in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math and no association for eighth-grade reading.

“It was very hard for the little kids to focus on Zoom,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the younger students saw more of an impact on literacy skills and early foundational computational skills.”

Her research group analyzed data on the effects of school closures, finding , especially for younger students and those living in poverty. 

“Schools stayed closed too long, especially in urban areas,” Lake said, noting that her judgment is much easier to make now with the benefit of hindsight as opposed to during the height of COVID when the science on infections and transmissibility was still coming into focus.

The variation in the NAEP results represents “shades of badness,” she said. “Some states are celebrating not being as bad as other states, but nobody has much to celebrate here.”

NAEP results must be interpreted carefully, experts caution. They are built to show how students are doing, not to explain the reasons behind their performance, Loveless said. (He compared the exam to a thermometer: “It can tell you if you have a temperature, but it can’t tell you why.”)

However, the exam is also the only U.S. test administered to students in all 50 states, making it “the only game in town when it comes to comparing across states,” said the former Brookings Institution researcher.

����Ӱ�� analysis, he said, “makes an addition” to the continued dialogue on the impacts of school closures during the pandemic.

Now, with the extent of pandemic missed learning coming into greater focus across the nation, Lake said, it’s time to hone in on how to respond.

“We’ve just got a lot of work to do to give kids back what they were owed, both academically and developmentally.”

Oster agreed that it may be time to put aside reopening showdowns and instead work toward recovery.

“There is a very reasonable desire to move on from the discussion of, ‘How important were school closures?’ into, ‘How do we fix this?’” she said. “I’m quite sympathetic to that desire to move on.”

When COVID struck in 2020, the then-eighth grader’s Upper Valley, New Hampshire middle school campus shut down for several weeks to pivot to virtual learning, like most others across the country. Paige knew then that her daughter Amy — whose name has been changed in this piece for the student’s privacy — was at risk of falling behind even further. Once online school started, live instruction was only on a “part-time basis,” Paige said.

“There was lost learning time,” she said. “Sometimes there weren’t teachers because the teachers were sick.”

Although Paige didn’t know it yet, Amy had dyslexia. For years, the now-17-year-old’s condition went undiagnosed. Meanwhile, it complicated the teen’s part-time job at a clothing store, because she struggled to type in email addresses at the cash register.

In a last-ditch effort to help her daughter, Paige connected with a tutor specializing in phonics-based literacy, who she now works with via a relatively new state program. After beginning tutoring, Amy showed quick improvement on spelling and reading tests administered by her high school, Paige said. Amy’s literacy coach recognized signs of dyslexia and pointed the family toward screening for the disability, which led to her diagnosis and extra services at school.

“I’ve seen progress,” Paige said. “The way [her tutor] works with her is not a way … a teacher would have the time to work with her in a classroom situation.”

That sort of individualized, intensive coaching is a key solution the Granite State has bet on to help students like Amy get back on track after the pandemic. The state is entering its second year offering the scholarship, which uses a digital wallet to provide $1,000 for private tutoring to any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic. The scholarship is available to all students, regardless of need, and can be applied toward tutoring from state-approved educators.

“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said. “In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”

But families in New Hampshire have tapped into less than a third of the available scholarship funds. So far this academic year, 724 young people have received scholarships — accounting for just $724,000 out of a $2.5 million total funded by federal COVID relief cash. Upon inception, the state granted scholarship eligibility only to students from low-income families, but with signups lagging and substantial funds remaining, they made access universal.

State testing in 2022 revealed that more than half of New Hampshire students were not proficient in math and over 40% were behind in English, though scores have rebounded slightly since 2021, according to data provided by the state. Research shows sustained individual or small-group tutoring can be one of the best ways to help children catch up.

“One student might be struggling with functions. Another is struggling with algebraic equations,” Edelblut said. “Those are the kinds of things that in a one-on-one tutoring session with a teacher that can be drawn out, they can be addressed, they can be targeted, and we can fill in those gaps.”

Soon after the Paige family began tutoring, they saw a post on social media about the YES! grant and realized they qualified. Though they’re still working out the logistics of the digital wallet, the funds will cover more than two months of intensive lessons, which will be “definitely helpful, without a doubt,” Paige said.

The program has also served its purpose for student Sylas Marrotte. The scholarship gave him access to a trained special education teacher for twice-a-week math and reading tutoring, grandmother Sherry Newman said.

“My grandson, who already had learning disabilities, was falling way behind [during COVID],” Newman wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “The tutor was very flexible and supportive.”

The program could help to “democratize” the private tutoring market, which often is available only to wealthier families, said Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education at Brown University. 

But in his eyes, the slow uptake among low-income families is a damning indicator, signaling either poor advertising to the neediest parents or failure to alleviate other barriers such as transportation costs. 

It’s possible many families “just never learned about the program or couldn’t figure out how to sign up or didn’t think that they could make it work,” Kraft said. “I don’t think … they’ve met the demand in that group of students.”

Nationwide, parental interest in learning recovery options has been lower than policymakers would have hoped, according to recent from the Brookings Institute. Despite significant gaps in learning for millions of students across the country, less than a third of families said they wanted their kids to participate in tutoring and less than a quarter said they were interested in district-run summer camps.

Even if all the New Hampshire tutoring funds get disbursed, Kraft observed, it will still only serve 2,500 learners — a drop in the bucket compared to the state’s over 185,000 students, including roughly 50,000 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy indicator for the number of students living in poverty.

The New Hampshire Department of Education does not “at this time” know the share of low-income students who have taken advantage of the tutoring scholarship money compared to wealthier youth, Edelblut said. Students could opt for virtual sessions in cases where transportation presented a barrier, he noted.

The YES! scholarship is one of three state-funded tutoring options available to New Hampshire families. The state announced this month that it had that will give more than 100,000 students access to the site’s 24/7 digital tutoring services. Since early in the pandemic, the state has also partnered with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan’s initiative, providing the state’s students with free access to the site’s learning resources. That site has seen about 4,300 New Hampshire visitors, said Kimberly Houghton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Education, although she did not have figures on how many tutoring sessions students have actually participated in.

Among the 74 individuals and organizations registered by the state as , including specialists in math, literacy, speech and executive functioning, a handful said over email that none or just one student had reached out for tutoring sessions.

But Krista Martin, who runs the Sylvan Learning centers in Portsmouth and Salem, has worked with six students who have used YES! scholarship money to pay for sessions. Two of those families were already paying for Sylvan tutoring services before the grant and now use the funds to offset costs, but the other four enrolled once they received the scholarship, Martin said. 

For the most part, families come in hopes that the sessions will help their kids recover from the pandemic, Martin wrote in an email.

“​​For many of our students, the breakdowns started during the COVID years,” Martin said. “Since the pandemic, we have heard from many families that they want their children to enjoy school again and show interest in what they are learning like they did before COVID.”

For the Paige family, Amy’s struggles began earlier, but YES! has helped — at least a little — along the way. On an August evening in northern New Hampshire, tutor Lynne Howard sat at her dining table and helped the teen break down words into their individual sound components. Howard was a longtime reading specialist in the local schools and now runs a tutoring company called Summit Literacy.

“Say hush,” Howard said.

“Hush,” Amy responded.

“Now say hush but change ‘shh’ to ‘mm,’ ” Howard added on.

“Hum,” Amy answered.

Word by word, sound by sound, Howard and Amy made out ways to fill the student’s learning gaps. They identified prefixes, suffixes, root words, closed and open vowels — steadily making progress to improve her spelling. And their time together ended with praise that, for many years before tutoring, Paige was concerned she’d never hear about her daughter’s literacy.

“And that’s it, you worked hard today,” Howard said at the end of an hour. “Excellent job.”

“It’s actually a little surreal” seeing the rich slate of offerings, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of the .��

He’s worked at summer learning organizations for over a quarter century, making what used to be a difficult case to school administrators: That districts should offer camp-style July programs to all students rather than enrolling only those who flunked classes during the academic year.

Suddenly, his job has become much easier. 

A growing consensus has elevated summer learning programs to top priority after three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic. Several studies, including a 2018 , show camps blending fun and academics give students a leg up in key subject areas. So with millions of students nationwide lagging behind grade level in math and reading, and with schools sitting on billions of dollars in COVID relief cash, summer learning programs have become a go-to solution. 

So far, schools nationwide have poured $3.1 billion in American Rescue Plan dollars into summer and afterschool initiatives, according to an from Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Summer learning has emerged as districts’ “number one priority” for academic recovery spending, said Phyllis Jordan, the organization’s associate director.

“We’re actually investing in programs that we know work and have had results. We just get to do them at a much larger scale because there’s finally funding for it,” U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Cindy Marten told ����Ӱ��. 

“If you put enriching, engaging experiences together for kids and give them a chance to be together, they can learn.”

However, the picture remains murky on just how much progress states, districts and community organizations have actually made toward catching up students before the school year re-starts.

“We do not have data on the number of summer programs this year compared to years past,” said Jen Rinehart, senior vice president of strategy and programs at the Afterschool Alliance. “Similarly, we do not have data on the number of students enrolled this year.”

Marten acknowledged she was not aware of any federal effort to track how many youth are engaging in summer learning programs this year and did not clarify when the results of these programs will come into focus.

To fill the gap, ����Ӱ�� obtained exclusive datasets from , a data service that tracks school policy, and the research-based auditing publicly shared information about districts’ summer offerings. Burbio’s figures include the 200 largest U.S. school systems and CRPE’s cover 100 major metropolitan districts, many of which overlap. Though there are roughly 13,800 districts in the country, the 200 largest account for over a quarter of the nation’s students.

The analysis comes after the Department of Education announced the Engage Every Student Initiative in July to expand access to summer and afterschool offerings. Accompanying the launch, First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured programs in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia.

The Burbio and CRPE numbers reveal that the vast majority of school systems did indeed provide opportunities for students to catch up on learning and most offered their summer programs at no cost to families. Specifically:

• 93% of districts, according to Burbio, and 87%, according to CRPE, offered summer learning programs this year

• 79% of school systems that had programs provided them at no cost to families

• The average program length was 154 hours, just under four weeks and roughly equivalent to 12% of the academic school year. However, some offerings only covered about 30 hours, while others made up nearly 350 total hours

Additionally, most districts offered programs that went beyond rote academics — including activities such as theater, debate and robotics — and about 2 in 5 worked with community organizations to flesh out their camps. Nearly all programs included breakfast, lunch or both:

• Of the districts that offered summer learning opportunities, at least 83% included credit recovery options, 80% mixed academics with enrichment activities such as sports, arts or social-emotional learning, 48% offered programs for students with learning disabilities and 39% had dedicated options for English learners

• 96% of programs provided meals to children and 74% offered free transportation

• At least 39% of districts partnered with community organizations on summer offerings

The data align with recent figures reported by the , which surveyed a representative sample of 859 public schools in June. The figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison with the Burbio and CRPE data because they focus on individual schools rather than districts, but also point to extensive programming nationwide. NCES found:

• Three-quarters of schools offered learning and enrichment programs this summer

• School leaders estimated that 18-20% of their students enrolled, compared to 13-16% during a typical year

• 49% of education leaders said they partnered with an outside organization, 14% offered internship programs and 13% offered summer jobs or work-based learning programs

“When we talk about academic recovery … you can’t do it just within the regular school day,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You need to make sure acceleration is extra time. The summer has become that time.”

A question of equity

Maritza Guridy, who has five children in Philadelphia public schools and also works as deputy director of parent voice with the , said some families in her network were able to find programs that met their needs while others were not.

“For those that [registered] early, they were able to get in there. For those that waited, it’s unfortunate,” she told ����Ӱ��.

She enrolled her kids in a local chapter of the nationally acclaimed program and also for a shorter stint at an organization called . Among her considerations were aspects like program cost, learning opportunities and emotional supports, but also factors like fun, clear communication from leadership and a building with central air.

In addition to academics, her children have practiced yoga and went for twice-a-week swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day, they came home with a gleeful announcement: “Mommy, I jumped into the deep side of the pool today — and I wasn’t scared!”

It thrilled Guridy, but she knew other families have missed out on similar joys because of barriers such as lack of transportation or no translated information about the opportunity. Guridy wants officials who plan programs to consider accessibility.

“Is [messaging] being offered in different languages?,” she prompts them. “How are parents supposed to enroll their children if they don’t even understand the application?”

It’s an equity issue, said Clarke, the National Summer Learning Association VP.  Youth who don’t have access to summer programs can see academic gains evaporate between June and September, a well-documented concept known as “summer slide.” Now the issue is particularly pressing, because students living in poverty have the starkest pandemic learning deficits.

“Families with access and privilege go into their bank accounts and provide great opportunities for their kids during the summertime,” he said. “The 26 million young people that are on free and reduced lunch … don’t have that luxury to do so. But they certainly need, want and deserve to have those opportunities.”

‘Explosion’ or ‘afterthought?’

With the stakes at an all-time high as schools reel from the pandemic’s impacts, experts have mixed views on whether summer offerings have actually scaled up this year.

“We’re seeing an explosion of programs,” said Ron Ottinger, executive director of , an organization connected to a network of thousands of providers across the country.

Meanwhile, Christine Pitts, who has done her own summer learning analysis as CRPE’s director of impact and communications, has a more pessimistic view.

In 2022, “[districts] were offering less than they were last year. So it’s almost like summer slipped back into that characterization of being an afterthought again,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her team found that school systems provided fewer offerings for English learners and fewer programs with social-emotional supports this summer compared to last.

“It’s hard to speculate at a national level, why that might have dropped off,” said Marten, the deputy secretary. Some districts may have decided their 2021 summer programs had done enough to catch learners up and that they could scale back this year, she said. However, if leaders wanted to maintain programs but were facing a lack of funds, she encouraged them to tap resources from the new initiative.

Contrasting the data Pitts saw, Nicholas Munyan-Penney spoke to officials in over 30 states about their summer learning programs while researching for a report with . The narrative he heard was of continued growth.

“Anecdotally, they’ve said that there’s definitely been an increase in enrollment this summer,” the researcher told ����Ӱ��.

Rinehart also cites data that indicate an upward trend. In the spring of 2022, her organization and 90% said they were planning to offer summer programs, compared to 79% at the same time a year earlier. Respondents also indicated they expected upticks in enrollment, with an increased share expressing concern they wouldn’t be able to meet families’ demand for programs.

In one of the only direct comparisons between this year and last, the recently released NCES data found no change between 2021 and 2022, with the share of schools saying they offered summer learning programs holding steady at 75%.

‘How are we going to fill the staff?’

One factor often hindering summer learning expansion has been a staff, only the latest symptom of wider shortages that have affected K-12 schools for much of the past year.

“Officials are finding it very hard to find teachers,” said Domenech. “In many cases, the problem has been that where the district has large numbers of kids sign up for the summer programs, they wind up wanting to cut back because they just don’t have the staff to cover it.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, administrators had to from their summer offerings, about 1 in 6 students who had signed up, because of “unanticipated staffing challenges.”

Gia Maxwell works as a site director at summer learning provider . Throughout the spring, she joined monthly calls with leaders from across the Breakthrough network, which operates in 26 cities. Her colleagues were continually worried about finding enough instructors.

“Everyone was talking about, ‘How are we going to fill the staff? How are we going to fill the staff,’” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her Miami program usually finds all 130 youth and 30 adult staff for its summer teaching corps by May, she said. But this year, it took until halfway through teacher training in mid-June to recruit everyone, and they had to hire more teenage candidates than usual. 

The Providence, Rhode Island Breakthrough location was forced to this summer altogether, explaining “we have struggled to recruit students and teachers this year.”

To combat shortages, Arkansas brought in tutors from its to staff summer programs, said Munyan-Penney. In West Virginia, program leaders pulled from teacher training programs in the state to fill out their summer learning staff ranks. And Arizona boosted teachers’ wages 20% for the summer months to entice instructors.

They’re among the states “​​thinking about the staffing issue and being proactive about it,” said the Education Reform Now researcher.

‘Math, Reading and a Little Stampeding’

Several states shared provisional data with ����Ӱ�� on their summer offerings, though many said they won’t have finalized enrollment or academic impact numbers for months.  

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey launched the which state leaders estimate has served about 100,000 campers — 10% of the state’s 1 million students — across 680 sites, including at least one in every county. 

Arizona officials went to great lengths to spread the word about the program. The state ran a including ads on television, radio, social media and in magazines, and direct texts to parents in both English and Spanish informing them of the free programs.

“We targeted lower-income families, as the goal of free summer camp was to see the highest number of campers from families that may not have been able to afford an adventure-style summer camp in prior years,” Kaitlin Harrier, the governor’s senior policy advisor, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. 

The governor’s office opted for a “summer camp” approach rather than a “summer school” model, describing the opportunities as “Math, Reading, and a Little Stampeding,” said Harrier.

“It is no secret that when kids are having fun, it sets up a great foundation for learning,” she added.

In Connecticut, the state also rolled out a grant program to help providers beef up their summer offerings and defray program costs for low-income youth. The state disbursed roughly $8 million in grants last summer and increased that sum to $12 million for 2022, said Eric Scoville, communications director for the State Department of Education.

Enrollment across a sample of 121 locations nearly doubled, from 17,000 to 32,000, between 2020 and 2021, according to an spearheaded by University of Connecticut researchers. However, it’s too early to tell how many students the state reached this summer, said Scoville.

In North Carolina, all 115 school districts offered one or more summer learning programs this year funded by COVID relief money, each attended by 30 to 200 students, said Todd Silberman, a public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The enrollment figures will not be finalized for several weeks, he said, but he expects the total will be lower than 2021, when the state legislature required math, science, English and enrichment summer learning programs.

At the city level, Baltimore City Public Schools has scaled up its programming sharply thanks to COVID relief dollars. The maximum number of youth the 77,800-student district had served between June and August previous to the pandemic had been 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. But in 2021, they reached 15,000 and have served at least that many again in 2022.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��.

Tulsa, for its part, has also cultivated a thriving summer learning culture, part of a wider “City of Learning” initiative that has been in the works for several years. That infrastructure has made the district into a poster child for community partnership, with over 40 youth-serving organizations contributing to the district’s programming this summer — including clubs for debating, biking and rowing.

“The summer is the time that kids get to experience those things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do, especially during the school year,” said Jackie DuPont, executive director of the , which orchestrates the connections between the nonprofits and the district.

However, the district has not been able to maintain its high summer learning enrollment. Last summer, about a third of its 33,000 students participated in summer learning — an unusually large share. This year, a total of 7,000 youth engaged in the school system’s initiative, Director of Expanded Learning Jessica Goodman estimated. 

“​​Last summer was really an immediate response to not having kids in our school buildings … so some families just needed that time more than they did this summer,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Despite enrollment fluctuations, Marten believes the proliferation of new summer learning programs nationwide will outlast the influx of federal funding.

“Communities will fall in love with these programs,” she said. “They will say, ‘We’re never going to let this stop. We’re not just doing this because there was a pandemic. We’re doing this because this is what’s good for kids. Let’s keep doing it.’”

The course is “Cloudy With a Chance of Science,” and James Ramirez places his hand-fashioned tin foil boat into a bin of water, squealing with excitement as he discovers it floats. The first grader and his classmates are learning about density by testing how many pebbles each students’ contraption will hold before it sinks.

Ramirez tosses in every stone from his first handful — quickly surpassing the class record of five pebbles — and rushes back for more as his boat remains above water. The child, who is reserved and hasn’t spoken yet this period, keeps adding weight, laughing and wriggling his shoulders with each successful placement.

“…27, 28, 29…” 

He has the attention of the class now and his peers count with him.

“…42, 43, 44…”

With each pebble, Ramirez is doing more than proving he crafted a sturdy ship. He is accomplishing something educators across the country are anxiously hoping he and millions of students like him can do: accelerate their learning to get back on track after COVID.

The first grader is one of 481 youngsters enrolled in Baltimore’s Emerging Scholars program this summer and one of over 15,000 students participating in no-cost summer learning opportunities through Baltimore City Schools. Thanks to COVID relief funds, the 77,800-student district is serving more than twice as many young people as its pre-pandemic max of 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. 

Among the offerings are typical summer school options like credit recovery and career exploration, but also more specialized programs like debate, farm and forest camp, robotics and “Freedom Schools” focused on Black history. The Emerging Scholars program stands out as a camp providing accelerated academic instruction, but with none of the cost or admission requirements typical of gifted programming.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��. “We wanted students to not only make progress academically, focusing on math and [English], but also the social-emotional aspect as well as enrichment.”

Young people in and nationwide continue to score far below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math tests, with more severe deficits for high-poverty schools. Experts estimate it may take a half-decade to fully recover. Meanwhile, many officials pin their hopes on summer learning efforts like those in Baltimore to make up lost ground.

“Especially because of COVID, the kids are a little behind,” said Claudia Wiseman, a second-grade summer science instructor with Baltimore Emerging Scholars. During the school year, she’s an elementary special educator and said months of Zoom school have meant many young learners still lack basic skills like how to hold a pencil. The students she’s teaching now will be “a little better prepared for second grade,” she hopes.

It’s afternoon pickup time at the Emerging Scholars’ John Ruhrah Elementary School campus, and Ramirez’s mother Christy Miranda arrives. Staff tell her about her son’s latest feat: 63 pebbles.

Miranda beams. The program is helping the family recognize their son’s potential, unlocking academic capacities she didn’t realize he possessed.

“He’s learning a lot,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I didn’t know he had the ability to do so.”

During the year, her son has few opportunities for rigorous coursework, she said, explaining that his school is “very defunded.”

But this summer is different. Baltimore Emerging Scholars is a six-week gifted and talented program. In collaboration with , a global leader in gifted education, the camp provides high-level content in science, math and literacy to rising 1st  through 6th graders. 

“During the regular year, [school] is just teachers rambling on about stuff I already know about … but this is new material,” said rising fifth grader Basil Coleman. “I’m just having a great time here.”

Unlike most other gifted programs, the camp doesn’t rely solely on test scores for eligibility but rather welcomes virtually any student who is up for the challenge. As a result, the cohort of students is more diverse than the group of students identified for gifted lessons during the academic year. Some 68% of summer students are Black, 14% are Hispanic, 9% are white and 3% are Asian — figures that closely resemble district-wide demographic averages.

Rae Lymer, who manages the program and reviews every student application, explained that anytime a student has a recorded assessment at or above grade level, it automatically qualifies the youngster for the program. If such a metric does not exist, the administrator calls families directly, looking for an alternative qualification such as if the applicant likes to ask lots of questions or thinks outside the box.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, what I hear is, ‘My kid is completely under-challenged and they’re not motivated by school and so that’s why you’re not seeing scores,’” Lymer told ����Ӱ��, explaining that the program almost never turns away motivated students. 

Youth who choose to participate usually rise to the occasion, the data suggest. While the summer program does not yet have numbers on its academic impact, Emerging Scholars also runs afterschool offerings during the fall and spring. In 2020-21, the most recent data available, the share of participants testing at or above grade level increased 18 percentage points in reading and 39 percentage points in math over the course of the year.

“We’re learning advanced stuff and we’re able to get ahead,” said 11-year-old Ama Amoateng, between stints on the playground during recess. “It makes me feel smarter.”

After engaging in the summer program, “many of these kids will become identified [as gifted],” anticipates Stacey Johnson, spokesperson for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. “It’s reaching kids we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”

Indeed, parent Torrey Parker said his daughter Skylar got “bumped up” in reading and science last school year, which he believes was “absolutely” because of the work she did in the program.

The rapid growth attests to what education scholars have long posited: That academic talent is equally distributed across all students without regard to race, class or gender — but that access to advanced learning opportunities are not. 

“We firmly believe that if opportunities are provided, students will flourish,” said Lymer.

In one reading course focused on mystery novels, rising fifth graders are already 12 chapters into their third book in as many weeks and engaging in what their instructor called “detective work” to predict the ending. In another classroom, second graders concoct oobleck, a water and cornstarch mixture that has both solid and liquid properties, to learn about states of matter and “non-Newtonian fluids.” Down the hall in “Toyology,” first graders study inertia and momentum by unleashing metal and plastic slinkies down a set of stairs.

A classroom of fifth graders peer down the lenses of microscopes at magazine cutouts of the letter “e,” diagramming what they see at various magnification levels. It’s several students’ first time using a microscope and they’re surprised to find what one describes as “static on a TV.”

“They were playing, but they were also learning,” said Toyology instructor Tamika Robinson.

Even the students admit it’s a good time.

“Because it’s called summer school, most of us thought it would be like school … but instead it’s a lot of activities and really engaging,” said Brooke Bennett, 12.

Propelled, perhaps, by rave reviews, the camp has grown nearly three-fold since its 2019 launch and added about 35% new seats this year while transitioning back to in-person programming for the first time since COVID. Staffing challenges, which have of numerous summer programs across the country, haven’t posed a barrier for Emerging Scholars. In fact, two teachers rather than one work in each classroom under its co-teaching model.

“Many of our teachers come back from year to year because they really respect and value their time with our program,” said Lymer.

As the day winds down, a dozen rising first graders arrive at their last class, Social-Emotional Learning. Shoulders slouch and one student’s head is on his desk. They’ve just watched a on how to keep a growth mindset and their instructor Brother Modlin wakes them up with some call-and-response. 

“It’s not ‘I can’t do it,’ is it class?” He asks the question by trailing off. “It’s ‘I can’t do it…’”

“YET,” they exclaim, picking up their heads and once again regaining attention.

Modlin works as a school counselor during the year, but was previously a therapist at a juvenile detention center in the city. 

“My whole thing as a counselor is about growth mindset,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re going to have bad situations, especially in Baltimore. … If I give them a growth mindset, they can rise out of any situation without depending on anyone but themselves.”

The lessons are having an impact for 10-year-old Akorede Adekola.

“I feel really confident and relief [after SEL class],” he said. “I get to show my feelings and get it all out.”

The program’s approach, coupling rigorous academic work with emotional supports, could be a promising model, believes fourth-grade instructor Michelle Brown-Christian. She scoffs at the idea that the curricula, fashioned for gifted children, should be reserved for only a select few.

“This could work for any child that wants to learn,” she said.