TheLoop21.com

By: Raechal Leone (Add to your loop)
Tue, 08/04/2009 - 00:00

The girls' vacation highlights the achievement gap.

A story in Sunday's New York Times on the educational way first daughters Sasha and Malia Obama are spending their summer recounted the girls' adventures of learning about slavery in Ghana and making gelato in Rome. As reporter Rachel L. Swarns carefully noted, political rivals and other critics are asking whether a recession is the time to be flying the family around the world, even though the Obamas are picking up the tab for the added costs.

All of us are missing the point, though, if we're talking about whether it's good or bad for Sasha and Malia to spend what looks like a dream summer for any child. The Obama girls' summer highlights a larger issue that disproportionately affects black students: every summer vacation adds to the achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students.

When the last bell for class rings, many students head home for a summer of forgetting what they spent all year learning, regardless of their socioeconomic background. But, according to the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University, the so-called summer brain drain takes more of a toll on low-income students.

While students from families considered part of the middle class tend to improve their reading skills slightly in summer, students from low-income families usually lose two to three months of reading skills, which can add up to a loss of more than two years by the end of elementary school, the center's Brenda McLaughlin told The Baltimore Sun. The center estimates that "more than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities."

Of course, we already know that whatever season it is, black students as a whole are at a disadvantage because of the achievement gap between black and white students. The latest government report on that, out last month, offered mixed news — black students are doing better than they have in the last 20 years on reading and math tests, but so are white students. While it's great students of any race are performing better, the numbers revealed that the gap we've worked so hard to close has, for the most part, remained stubbornly intact.

Add the budget crises many states are facing into the mix, and low-income students have even less of a chance at keeping up with wealthier kids over the summer. As the New York Times' Sam Dillon reported, California, Florida, Delaware and other states drastically cut back on summer school in public school systems to slash their costs. Even with money from the stimulus package clearly marked for education, some states said they couldn't swing summer classes.

The National Center for Summer Learning and other organizations provide tips for keeping your child learning during the summer. But we all know families struggling financially are often too busy trying to make money to feed and clothe their children to put the ideas into action.

This is what we should be focusing on as we head into another school year. We need to be paying less attention to how many times Sasha and Malia Obama step onto Air Force One, and more attention to what their father, President Obama, and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are doing between now and then to make sure that more American students have productive summers. They may not all be able to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy, but at least they can hold on to what they've worked so hard to learn.

Raechal Leone is TheLoop21.com's senior editor and writes the Inside the Loop blog.

Do we still need HBCUs?

Yes, they're an outlet for blacks

If their standards were higher

No, they're outdated

No one goes to HBCUs