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.