Worried your kids will forget what they learned in school over the summer? Scholars have been studying the problem for over a century.

When William White, a New York state mathematics professor, set out in the early 1900s to study how much math students remembered over summer vacation, he checked to see how well they would do at the start of school on a test like the one they had taken at the end of the previous school year.

Whereas second graders on average got nine out of 70 questions wrong in June, after the summer break on average they got 25 out of 70 wrong on the same test. But after two weeks of drills, the number of answers the students got wrong dropped to 15.

White’s study – titled “Reviews Before and After Vacation” and published in 1906 – concluded that “that which is least vital is first to be lost.”

White’s study is also one of the first to identify what educators today refer to as “summer learning loss” – which is the negative effect that a long summer break has on students’ ability to remember facts and skills they had learned the previous school year.

Effects on student achievement

Studies of summer loss increased in the 1990s as Congress began to place a bigger emphasis on holding schools accountable for the achievement of all students.

Over the summer, students typically lose the equivalent of about a month’s worth of learning, mostly in the areas of math facts and spelling. Research has also found that summer learning loss is more severe among students with disabilities, English language learners and students living in poverty.

But researchers’ understanding of summer loss is continually evolving. For instance, one study found that the students who experienced the biggest losses were the ones who had shown the biggest gains just before the test at the end of the school year. This raises questions about whether their gains were true gains or just the result of special preparation for the test.

A longer school year?

Some people have argued that summer loss wouldn’t occur if the U.S. had a longer school year or year-round school. For instance, they point to countries like China, where the school year is 245 days, as opposed to the traditional 180-day school year in the U.S. China is ranked first in the top 20 nations in terms of student scores in math, science and reading. The U.S. is ranked No. 25 out of 77 countries and is several points behind Australia, Switzerland, Norway and the Czech Republic, which are ranked 21 to 24, respectively.

But shorter school years don’t always result in lower test scores. For instance, students in Ireland outscore American students on math, science and reading by an average of 10 points, according to the Program for International Student Assessment, better known as PISA, yet attend school for only 167 days, or 13 days fewer than in the U.S.

How parents and caregivers can limit summer loss

Some parents take advantage of school-based programs that can help students keep up their academic skills during the summer. But there are still ways that parents and other caregivers can stave off summer loss that do not involve school. Here are six:

1. Model what you want to see: First and foremost, never forget that you are a role model. Children will do what they see the adults around them do. Summer is the perfect time for you to reduce screen time and increase time reading, writing, taking walks, playing games or having conversations.

2. Visit the library: Children love independence. One of the best ways to allow children to demonstrate independence is to have them browse the shelves of the local library and select books that they can read independently or for you to read aloud to them. Participate in story hours if your local library offers the activity. Establish a habit of visiting the library on a weekly basis or at least several times a month. These library visits will strengthen a child’s reading skills.

3. Play games during trips: When traveling by car, bus or train, there are games – both word and number – that you can engage in with your children. For instance, you can play “I Spy with My Little Eye,” estimate the number of fast-food restaurants you’ll pass or even look for all the words that begin with a certain letter. These activities not only keep children engaged but also incrementally sharpen their skills in a wide range of academic areas such as literacy, numeracy and communication.

4. Encourage your children to keep a summer journal: To get them started, suggest one journal entry of “10 Things I Want to Do Before Summer is Over.” The list can include activities like watching the sunrise, going an entire day without wearing shoes or seeing how far they can spit a watermelon seed. To make the journal more interesting, encourage children to fill it with both writing and drawing.

5. Visit landmarks: Plan visits to acquaint you and your children with local landmarks. Document the visit with a journal entry, drawings or photographs and some research on the history of the site. The excursions can become even more meaningful if you have children do a little research into the landmarks you visit.

6. Plan weekly family picnics: Vary the meals to include breakfast, lunch, dinner or even dessert. Let your children plan the menu and cook with you, as well as select the site for the picnics. Research has found that involving children in the preparation of meals by doing things such as making grocery lists can help improve their reading, writing and math skills.

Suzanne McLeod, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Food deserts. Poor housing conditions. Lack of community investment.

These challenges may not always come to mind when people think about how to improve America’s public schools.

But when my colleagues and I studied the 21st Century School Buildings Program, a US$1.1 billion school building and renovation initiative in Baltimore, these were the kinds of issues that staff from community-based organizations, schools, philanthropic organizations and city agencies hoped to address through improved school facilities.

Schools are the “hubs and hearts” of neighborhoods, as one community member told us during our research in the Southeast, Southwest and Cherry Hill sections of Baltimore. If, as one community school coordinator shared, schools want to achieve their goals to educate students, they should strengthen the communities that surround them.

Our research suggests four ways schools might play a more meaningful role in supporting community development:

1. Open schools to the wider community

Making schools accessible to residents can strengthen the connection between schools and neighborhoods.

In Southeast, one school included space to host programs for newcomers to the United States. Those programs provided English language classes for students, as well as academic and social supports to help students and their families understand U.S. schools’ culture.

As a community school coordinator in Cherry Hill told us: “We can promote events and workshops and services to the entire community because they’re all happening here.”

However, although schools in our study were open in theory, they were not always easily accessible. Organizations sometimes encountered barriers, such as needing permits or having to pay fees to cover custodians or security, to host public events at schools. Our research suggests that collaboration between school districts and other city agencies can help make shared spaces more accessible by using a broader definition of community beyond just the school community, such as parents and teachers. They can also eliminate required permits and fees.

2. Meet community needs

Schools in our study partnered with community-based organizations and governmental agencies to provide services to meet their community’s needs.

In Southwest, a school partnered with local organizations to offer families a food pantry and adult education, including GED preparation.

In Cherry Hill, where access to full-service grocery stores is limited, a community school coordinator reached out to a local organization to host a morning produce market at the school once per week. A representative from the city housing authority also visited the school to make it easier for families to file complaints about poor housing conditions, such as mold.

3. Engage the community

Across all three communities, officials sought input from students, families and residents about the renovation plans or designs for new schools. They also provided updates about the construction process.

Other projects included creating a walking school bus – where adult volunteers walked with children to school – in Southwest to help students travel to and from school safely.

In Southeast, parents’ advocacy to improve school facilities – such as heating and cooling systems – helped them become more involved in their neighborhoods. Families from the schools have participated in neighborhood beautification projects, community cleanups and other activities.

Strong family and community engagement, however, is not a given. Successful partnerships also require trust among schools, families and community members. In Southwest, one school’s construction resulted in another school’s closure. The students from the old school would be sent to the new school. Families from the closed school saw their school as a safe haven and fought to prevent its closure. According to one community advocate, the process of closing the school led some families to lose faith in community organizations, the school district and city agencies.

4. Attract new residents and development

Many stakeholders that we talked to saw the new and renovated schools as a way to bring new residents, businesses and development to their communities.

In Southwest, one stakeholder told us that the new school building has led to greater interest among residents to invest in the neighborhood. “There’s a lot of residents who are organized and involved in these neighborhoods. They’re saying, ‘Hey, we got a new school. Let’s build up this neighborhood.’” Similarly, families in Southeast have become more excited about the renovated schools. A nonprofit representative said, “We see it on Facebook feeds. Because we put the [school] designs out there as much as we can, they’re starting to think, ‘Maybe I’ll put my child there.’”

However, as schools attract more residents, people in Cherry Hill and Southeast wanted to be sure existing residents weren’t pushed out. In both neighborhoods, school and community partners are creating pathways to help existing residents to purchase homes in their neighborhoods. This includes home ownership counseling and loan programs for qualifying residents.

Education will always be the primary function of America’s public schools. But as our research suggests, schools need not only concern themselves with what takes place in the classroom – they can also play an important part in improving the conditions in the surrounding community.

Alisha Butler, Provost's Equity Fellow, Wesleyan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When politicians talk about reaching “net zero” emissions, they’re often counting on trees or technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air. What they don’t mention is just how much these proposals or geoengineering would cost to allow the world to continue burning fossil fuels.

There are many proposals for removing carbon dioxide, but most make differences only at the edges, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to increase relentlessly, even through the pandemic.

I’ve been working on climate change for over four decades. Let’s take a minute to come to grips with some of the rhetoric around climate change and clear the air, so to speak.

What’s causing climate change?

As has been well established now for several decades, the global climate is changing, and that change is caused by human activities.

When fossil fuels are burned for energy or used in transportation, they release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that is the main cause of global heating. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. As more carbon dioxide is added, its increasing concentration acts like a blanket, trapping energy near Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space.

When the amount of energy arriving from the Sun exceeds the amount of energy radiating back into space, the climate heats up. Some of that energy increases temperatures, and some increases evaporation and fuels storms and rains.

Because of these changes in atmospheric composition, the planet has warmed by an estimated 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 F) since about 1880 and is well on the way to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which was highlighted as a goal not to be crossed if possible by the Paris Agreement. With the global heating and gradual increases in temperature have come increases in all kinds of weather and climate extremes, from flooding to drought and heat waves, that cause huge damage, disruption and loss of life.

Studies shows that global carbon dioxide emissions will need to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury to have a chance of limiting warming to even 2 C (3.6 F).

Currently, the main source of carbon dioxide is China. But accumulated emissions matter most, and the United States leads, closely followed by Europe, China and others.

What works to slow climate change?

Modern society needs energy, but it does not have to be from fossil fuels.

Studies show that the most effective way to address the climate change problem is to decarbonize the economies of the world’s nations. This means sharply increasing use of renewable energy – solar and wind cost less than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world today – and the use of electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, this changeover to renewables has been slow, due in large part to the the huge and expensive infrastructure related to fossil fuels, along with the vast amount of dollars that can buy influence with politicians.

What doesn’t work?

Instead of drastically cutting emissions, companies and politicians have grasped at alternatives. These include geoengineering; carbon capture and storage, including “direct air capture”; and planting trees.

Here’s the issue:

Geoengineering often means “solar radiation management,” which aims to emulate a volcano and add particulates to the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space and produce a cooling. It might partially work, but it could have concerning side effects.

The global warming problem is not sunshine, but rather that infrared radiation emitted from Earth is being trapped by greenhouse gases. Between the incoming solar and outgoing radiation is the whole weather and climate system and the hydrological cycle. Sudden changes in these particles or poor distribution could have dramatic effects.

The last major volcanic eruption, of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, sent enough sulfur dioxide and particulates into the stratosphere that it produced modest cooling, but it also caused a loss of precipitation over land. It cooled the land more than the ocean so that monsoon rains moved offshore, and longer term it slowed the water cycle.

Carbon capture and storage has been researched and tried for well over a decade but has sizable costs. Only about a dozen industrial plants in the U.S. currently capture their carbon emissions, and most of it is used to enhance drilling for oil.

Direct air capture – technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air – is being developed in several places. It uses a lot of energy, though, and while that could potentially be dealt with by using renewable energy, it’s still energy intensive.

Planting trees is often embraced as a solution for offsetting corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Trees and vegetation take up carbon dioxide though photosynthesis and produce wood and other plant material. It’s relatively cheap.

But trees aren’t permanent. Leaves, twigs and dead trees decay. Forests burn. Recent studies show that the risks to trees from stress, wildfires, drought and insects as temperatures rise will also be larger than expected.

How much does all this cost?

Scientists have been measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958 and elsewhere. The average annual increase in carbon dioxide concentration has accelerated, from about 1 part per million by volume per year in the 1960s to 1.5 in the 1990s, to 2.5 in recent years since 2010.

This relentless increase, through the pandemic and in spite of efforts in many countries to cut emissions, shows how enormous the problem is.

Usually carbon removal is discussed in terms of mass, measured in megatons – millions of metric tons – of carbon dioxide per year, not in parts per million of volume. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.5x10¹⁵ metric tons, but as carbon dioxide (molecular weight 42) is heavier than air (molecular weight about 29), 1 part per million by volume of carbon dioxide is about 7.8 billion metric tons.

According to the World Resources Institute, the range of costs for direct air capture vary between US$250 and $600 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed today, depending on the technology, energy source and scale of deployment. Even if costs fell to $100 per metric ton, the cost of reducing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 1 part per million is around $780 billion.

Keep in mind that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 parts per million before the industrial era to around 420 today, and it is currently rising at more than 2 parts per million per year.

Tree restoration on one-third to two-thirds of suitable acres is estimated to be able to remove about 7.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050 without displacing agricultural land, by WRI’s calculations. That would be more than any other pathway. This might sound like a lot, but 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide is 7 billion metric tons, and so this is less than 1 part per million by volume. The cost is estimated to be up to $50 per metric ton. So even with trees, the cost to remove 1 part per million by volume could be as much as $390 billion.

Geoengineering is also expensive.

So for hundreds of billions of dollars, the best prospect with these strategies is a tiny dent of 1 part per million by volume in the carbon dioxide concentration.

This arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions. There is no viable workaround.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliated Faculty, University of Auckland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.