U.S. News & World Report
IF THE AMERICAN DREAM depends on its education system, summer break could be holding its students back.
“Summer is the most unequal time in America,” says Matthew Boulay, founder and CEO of the National Summer Learning Association. “We pour enormous amounts of resources in children learning but much of that investment stops in the summer months.”
A growing body of scholarship shows that the weeks students have off school in the summer months hamper student learning across the board, and exacerbates the divide between the haves and have nots in the nation’s schools.
“It’s a uniquely American problem, we have the longest summer break of any developed or industrialized country,” Boulay says. “In this country the inequalities, the income gap and wealth gap are growing and that sort of reinforces the inequalities during the summer.”