Is Summer School the Answer Or the Problem?

By Marilyn J. Stenvall

Increasingly today, there is a cry for more summer school programs, better summer school programs, longer summer school programs—well, you get the picture. If only students would go to school in the summer, we could instruct them, promote them, and send them on to the next grade, chock full of all the information they somehow missed during the regular school year. Even large school systems are buying into this idea. Take New York City, for example.

Toward the end of the last school year, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced grandly that all social promotion was ended, and that 35,000 students were to report to summer school before they could continue their educations. This was hailed by the standards promulgators as signifying that here, at last, was a definitive line in the educational sand. The announcement said to the world that summer school was in the future of every student who didn't meet the mark.

The follow-up to the city's whole "do it or else" declaration was that, of the 35,000 students who were ordered to report to summer school, 14,000 never showed up. And among those who actually enrolled for summer courses, according to The New York Times , just 57 percent passed the classes they were required to take. So fewer than 8,000 of the original 35,000 failing students complied with the summer school...