A Discussion with Dr. Beth M. Miller
 

Viewpoints: (VP)       About 10 year ago or even as recent as five years ago, people thought of afterschool programs and people had preconceived notions of afterschool programs; they were play time for kids and opinion of the general populace, well that seemed to be what people knew.  But then there started to be momentum around the real academic benefits of afterschool programs and other types (vacation and summer programs) to now where we are in the midst of a full fledged out of school time movement.  From your perspective, how did that all develop and gain momentum?

Dr. Beth Miller:         I think three streams really came together.  The first was in the 1980s when lots and lots of mothers went back to work or never left the work and kids started school and guess what?  School hours do not match parents’ working hours.  And as more and more, especially middle class women, were in the work force and saw this need, after school programs really developed.  But they developed as an extension of child care, so the first need was working mothers and with Welfare reform, there was clearly a need for after school programs for kids of poor families as well.  And so public funding came into play.

The second thing that happened was a lot of focus on prevention around teenagers so you had pregnancy prevention programs and drop out prevention programs and every kind of prevention that you can think of – drug abuse prevention and so on.  They were all kind of “siloed” funding streams that came out and that was more oriented towards teenagers and again in the 1980s, 1990s people starting saying wait a minute, these are the same kids.  There’s kids that are at risk, that was the first idea, and then it was, we don’t want to just look at kids as negatives as things we want to prevent, we want to look at them as human beings who need to develop in healthy ways, and that is what youth development came out of.  So that is the second stream.

The third stream is education and that is probably the strongest one in terms of really building public support and public funding for after school programs.  And that was the realization that if we’re going to have a world class education system, if we’re going to have kids in these very high stakes testing situations where they have to get over bars to get to the next grade or to graduate, then we need to be thinking about more than just the school hours.  School hours are not enough.

VP:               Some people ask and say well, now, here in Massachusetts we are in the midst of what is called the Extended Learning Time Movement, where communities are receiving money from the state and funders to help extend their school day.  With the Out of School Time movement and out-of-school time programs, it is a different type of learning than strict classroom learning,…talk about that…

Miller:              Actually extended learning time as it’s developed in Massachusetts, the goal is to include that more informal, more experiential…

VP:                Academically rigorous…

Miller:              …More extracurricular, well to have it be rigorous but engaging, to have it be hands on, to build kids’ background knowledge, to have them be able to get out of the classroom, to be able to do long term projects, things that there’s often not time for during the typical school day.  So I would say the best of extended learning time, whether it is in a school or in a community organization, whether it is extending the school hours or having a separate program after school hours are done in the school or in the community, doesn’t look very different.  I think people’s assumption sometimes is that more school means a triple or quadruple math block and a triple or quadruple English block.  If that is what it means I think we will be losing out and children will be losing out because there is other things they need to learn if they are going to grow up to be good workers, good citizens and good family members.

VP:               What types of things in particular and what is it that afterschool and out-of-school time programs teach that lends itself to kids learning those types of skills?

Miller:              Well they can help with specific academic skills, I mean there’s programs that have literacy components so there is nothing wrong with helping kids with their reading and their math and some kids may really need that extra help but that’s not enough and you can look at a number of studies of what’s needed for what they call 21^st century skills, so that focuses on things like communication – absolutely critical, oral and written communication, problem solving, being able to work as a team.  We are a more and more diverse society being able to work across different kinds of backgrounds is really important. 

All those things actually turn out to be just as important as numeracy and literacy.  So it is not that numeracy and literacy aren’t important. 

The second thing is we know about brain development.  Every day we are learning more about brain development and it happens that the way the brain develops isn’t you have one side of your cortex that is about math and another that is about reading, it’s very, very integrated, learning is integrated, learning is relational, kids need to have strong relationships in order to be good students, kids need to get background knowledge in order to be good students so those are the kinds of things that after school programs can provide.

VP:              You’ve done a couple of reports for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, your most recent one is called The Learning Season: The Untapped Power of Summer to Advance Student Achievement.  In the report you talk about,…the term is “summer learning loss.” Can you briefly describe for our listeners what summer learning loss is and how it is affecting children now that the fall is here, school is starting up again, what is the affect of that summer learning loss on these kids going back to school?

Miller:             You know, summer learning loss is something that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention but ask any teacher what they spend the first couple weeks of the school year doing and they will tell you, reviewing what the kids learned the year before.  So here we are saying we need more time for learning, schools have to do better, they have to do more, plus they have to close the achievement gap and at the same time at least the people in the schools know we have a real problem because we are really wasting a significant portion of that time reviewing what kids have forgotten over the long summer months.  That’s kind of what we all have experienced of summer learning loss. 

There is a lot of research on summer learning loss and it creates what I would call a paradigm shift, which is kind of a big word but it’s a different way of looking at things, really a different way that we need to think about education.  Because what this research shows is that the difference between poor children and middle class children – and we know that shows up over and over again and on the standardized tests they have to take these days, under No Child Left Behind, under state policies that preceded that – the difference is due to the time out of school.  Let me explain, there’s two portions of that.

VP:               Right, because I was surprised to read that. Because a portion of the report says…well, it’s kind of a little bit of a heads up.  It’s like, “hey our schools are doing a little bit better than we think, these kids are achieving at somewhat similar levels…”

Miller:             Actually some of the newest data says that the poor kids are learning more during the school year.  They are starting out behind, they are not catching up, but they are actually learning, if anything, more.  Now, not every study shows exactly the same results but there has been one researcher, Harris Cooper and his colleagues looked across all the studies that have been done and found very strongly the same results.  That is, during the school year all kids are learning at about the same rate.  Now, why are poor kids doing worse?  Well they don’t have anything that supports their learning during the first five years, or not to the same extent the middle class kids do.  So when kids enter kindergarten or first grade, poor kids are behind.  They stay behind, they learn at the same rate during the school year, during the summer they fall further behind.

VP:               Because they don’t have the same opportunities…

Miller:             …Because they don’t have the same opportunities and even though we don’t think of what a lot of middle class kids do during the summer is learning, what we just talked about in terms of  brain development…

VP:               …Experiential learning….

Miller:             …Experiential learning, hands on learning, practicing the skills you learned in school, developing relationships, getting a sense of yourself as somebody who is competent  at something.  It might not be reading, it might be something else.  It might be sailing or it might be finding frogs under rocks or in ponds – should be a better place for frogs.  It is all learning and we know that, not just because we understand how kids learn but because we have these tests that have been given in the fall and given in the spring and we can see that middle class kids, especially in reading, continue to learn over the summer or at least hold even, and low income children, on average, lose two to three months of reading skills during the summer. 

The meta analysis that I talked about that looked over all the studies found that middle income kids gained a month and low income kids lost two months on average.  So what that means is that there is a three month difference.  That is a third of a school year that’s happening over and over again.  And so if you look at anything about the achievement gap, even if you are not thinking about summer learning loss, you will see that it increases – though particularly the elementary school years – it increases.  So what is that increase about? We think it’s because school aren’t doing their job, often we make a lot of assumptions about what schools need to do to close the achievement gap.  The research says it’s about these different opportunities in the summer that children have.

VP:               Now people would hear this and I am sure some people would say, ‘well, hold on there are inequities in public school systems for certain kids.’

And I want to stress that (the report’s) not so much saying that ‘of course school isn’t important’ here,…rather, the big thing is that we focus a lot on the school day, and it is the out-of-school time - in this case the summer time - that we have to really focus on, and think about when our kids are learning.  Is that….?

Miller:              …Yes, schools that poor children go to in general are poor quality schools.  They have poor facilities, they have few materials but they’re still schools, there’s still curriculum, there’s still a teacher, there’s still learning going on.  In the summer some kids have a lot and some kids have nothing.  So the way we come to understand why kids are learning at the same rates during the school year and not during the summer is what can be called the faucet theory.  That is during the school year the faucet is on for all kids, it might be slower or faster, but it is on for everybody.  During the summer there is no resources coming out for low income kids and particularly low income kids in poor low resource neighborhoods or communities, low income communities.

VP:               You had mentioned that they lose two to three months of reading skills and you mentioned that there is a simple way to try to address that during the summer months?

Miller:              Well I think it depends the way you want to think about it.  If you just want to think about reading skills, there have been a couple studies.  We need more research in this area but a couple studies of simple intervention, such as giving kids books and encouraging them to read ,and encouraging their teachers to encourage them to read over the summer, and encouraging their parents but in very simple low effort ways, potentially sending kids the books over the summer so they get a book every week or so and that is shown to make a difference in summer reading loss. 

However, I think we do need to think a little more broadly and that is fine and that is one good thing to do but we really need to think more broadly because what is showing up in the reading tests is much broader, the kinds of things that many of us can think back to what we gained from our summer and summer camp experiences are part of what made us successful in the long run and so what we are really talking about is having all kids get things that really support their development, their social development, their cognitive development, their physical development over the summer.

VP:               With all the research that has been out there on the benefits in terms of cognitive development and everything you just mentioned, do you see that momentum carrying to make us rethink the type of learning that goes on in schools, you mentioned the 21^st century skills earlier.  Does that have momentum, does that have legs to make itself seep into education reform efforts as a whole or…

Miller:              …I would say – this is from my personal opinion, I am seeing a shift just in the last couple of years.  You know, there is always some people who had a different perspective but I recently had some discussions with, for instance, some superintendents of schools of large urban school districts and also some high level administrators, and I think people have come to the conclusion we can’t do it alone.  We are going to do everything we can, we want to do great teacher training, we want to have great curriculum and so on, but we know how kids grow and we know that they need more than great teachers and great schools if we’re going to get them to where they need to be and that includes the tests that they need to take and pass as well as the interpersonal kinds of skills they need to have and so on.

VP:               They may need to be evaluating for these 21^st Century skills or different kinds of academic development?

Miller:             We need mental health services to come in for lots of kids have had trauma and it is not the school’s place to do it but it is the school’s place to connect with the people who can.  We need experiential learning and maybe we have time for some of that during the school day but we could make sure a lot of that happens after school.  So the kinds of partnerships now that more and more schools are getting, not only involved in, but I think committed to.  They are seeing the results, they are seeing that it makes a difference for their students.

VP:               Do you see all this research having a positive effect on the pathways for our students, from kindergarten to 12^th grade or from kindergarten to college? Because everything that the out-of-school movement is showing  - all of these gaps, and not only does there need to be different kinds of learning, but that we need to be teaching more than just during a traditional school day, perhaps during a traditional school year - do you see a connection there?

Miller:              Well, yes, I think there are two things; one is that the loss of engagement in learning overwhelmingly happens when kids hit the junior high/middle school ages and it is often during that transition.  But the other thing that’s really important is a new study has just come out of Johns Hopkins which followed students from entry to school to age 22.  And what they found was that at ninth grade kids got tracked right, that is when it really happens big time, you are either on the college track and taking aP courses and so on or you are on the technical school or standard “track,” and the kids on that second track are much more likely to drop out of school and much less likely to go to college.  So they  studies the effects of summer learning loss and believe it or not, when they looked at ninth grade test scores, two thirds of the difference between low and high income kids in those test scores was attributable to summer learning loss.  And that’s summer learning loss during grades one through five so they didn’t even have tests to look at from middle school and they could look at that so if we want to help kids get on track in high school to where they need to be in the 21^st century, we have to pay attention to them in elementary school and we have to pay attention to summer learning loss.

VP:               Where do you see the out-of-school time movement in say, five years?

Miller:             We have to really reframe our whole accountability system for schools.  That’s a big step, that’s number one.   Annual testing that doesn’t take into account summer learning loss penalizes schools serving low income students and it’s not just that that’s not fair, it’s that then we don’t know, we don’t what schools are really helping kids and what aren’t.  We can’t learn about what works because we don’t have that information.

VP:               An overriding theme I am hearing is, there really needs to be…we need to be looking at different kinds of outcomes for our students then we do currently and afterschool and out-of-school time programs help address those….

Miller:              …We need to look at the same outcomes in a different way and we need to really be thinking about go beyond them and think about all the different ways that kids are developing.  For instance, kids need to develop leadership skills in order to be able to really navigate through life.  Where are kids getting that?  I think you would find that middle class kids are getting that in a whole number of different places including summer and afterschool programs and low income kids often aren’t.  There’s an achievement gap there as well.

VP:               Beth Miller, Miller Midzik Research Associates, thanks for speaking with us.

Miller:             Thanks for having me.