We Need National Summer School To Help Kids Recover From Learning Lost In COVID Pandemic

The morning of March 13, I remember making the agonizing decision to close the network of schools I lead in New York City for what I hoped would be a two-week period to wait out the worst of the pandemic.

As we know now, those two weeks out of school have turned into a painful year.

Before the pandemic, I used to worry how a single snow day would impact students’ ability to meet educational imperatives, like learning to read by third grade or solve algebraic equations by eighth. Helping students stay on track after being separated from the classroom for a year, in comparison, seems nearly impossible.

But we owe it to our kids to do everything within our power to address this once-in-a-generation crisis.

What our nation’s students urgently need, and what the Biden administration and incoming Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona must deliver on, is a national summer school program for elementary and middle school-aged kids where educators can heal the pain and anxiety students have experienced through the pandemic while remediating the skills they’ve lost.

This may seem like a far-fetched proposal, but if executed carefully, it may help to alleviate many of our country’s current economic and social woes. And support for summer school is already growing among leading education advocates and elected officials.

Read the full article here.