What It Takes to Make Summer Learning Work (Based on the National Summer Learning Project)

Many school districts across the country offer voluntary summer learning programs to students in order to promote academic achievement, provide enrichment experiences, and help narrow the achievement and opportunity gaps between children of the lowest and highest income families. But simply offering a program does not guarantee results. In order to identify what works, RAND conducted one of the largest and most definitive studies to date of summer learning programs. The project and the resulting study were called the National Summer Learning Project.

Join Catherine Augustine, one of the principal investigators of RAND's evaluation of the National Summer Learning Project, to hear what the research team learned during this six-year study about how to establish and sustain high-quality summer learning programs in urban school districts. She will present key findings and recommendations from the two most recent reports in RAND's Summer Learning Series: Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success, 2nd Ed., and Getting Support for Summer Learning: How Federal, State, City, and District Policies Affect Summer Learning Programs.

Catherine Augustine is director of the RAND Pittsburgh Office and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, with 20 years of experience conducting education research. She focuses on improving academic and social-emotional learning (SEL) outcomes for students in urban school districts, specializing in out-of-school time. She both evaluates implementation of reforms and assesses their impact. Dr. Augustine recently conducted a systematic evidence review on summer programs based on the evidence tiers specified in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), adding to the knowledge base of what works in summer programming.