Reading literacy is a problem for Austin's children. To counteract the summer decline, libraries are offering incentives. Librarians recommend children read 10 hours every summer – News

Six out of ten Austin ISD elementary school students cannot read at grade level (Image by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

As students across Austin head back to school this week, teachers may be watching for the effects of what's known as “summer backslide” — the phenomenon of students falling behind academically, particularly in math and reading, during summer break, a phenomenon that summer reading programs like the one at the Austin Public Library aim to combat.

“It's getting worse over time,” said Alanna Graves, APL's summer coordinator, of the summer reading loss. “It also disproportionately affects children of color and children from poorer neighborhoods.”

“When we measure the reading ability of 8- and 9-year-olds, it is a very good indicator of how much and how well they can read in middle and high school.” – Alanna Graves of the Austin Public Library

Preventing this type of summer reading loss is a major concern for Graves and a number of educators and researchers. Equally important is figuring out exactly how summer reading loss works. Despite the longstanding notoriety of summer decline, which was first written about over a century ago, there continues to be disagreement among researchers about whether the phenomenon exists and to what extent it impacts students.

For example, Paul von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, wrote in a 2019 article that after studying summer learning loss in depth, he was “no longer sure that the average child loses skills over several months each year during the summer” and expressed doubts that summer learning loss “contributes significantly to the ninth-grade achievement gap.”

Von Hippel wrote that one thing was clear from his work: students learn more slowly in the summer. This gives students who have better access to learning resources in the summer the opportunity to increase the gap between them and students who have less access to these resources. Or, conversely, students who are lagging behind have the opportunity to use the summer months to reduce the gap between them and the higher-performing students.

This means that reading during the summer can have a major impact on student learning, whether or not the summer decline phenomenon exists. A study by James Kim, a professor of education at Harvard University, found that the effect of reading four to five books each summer is so large that it can offset any potential decline in reading test scores between fall and spring.

To that end, APL's summer reading program challenges its participants to read for 10 hours in June, July and August. Graves said it doesn't matter if the book Wilbur and Charlotte the Pig or a comic book – the most important thing is that children develop a rhythm of reading. Developing and maintaining this rhythm is especially important for children in elementary school, an age when researchers have found a significant decline in the frequency of reading for pleasure.

“When you're learning to read and just starting to read on your own, that's a critical time in your development,” Graves said. “When we measure the reading level of 8- and 9-year-olds, that's a very strong indicator of how much or how well they'll be able to read in middle and high school – because reading levels don't increase as much between middle and high school as they do between kindergarten and third grade.”

Such data makes the work of summer reading programs like APL's important every year. But in the wake of COVID-19, their work could be especially important. Several studies have found that significantly higher numbers of students who were in school during the pandemic lockdown are at higher risk for reading problems than students before COVID-19. In Austin ISD, standardized test scores show that six in 10 elementary school students are not reading at their grade level. That means 22,000 young Austinites are at risk of diminished literacy skills or illiteracy.

More reading hours could help improve those scores — and kids who complete the 10 reading hours over the summer can pick up a prize at their library branch: a book they can take home and keep. The goal of this prize isn't just to reward kids for their summer reading — it's also to make it easier for them to keep reading later. Graves said more than 3,400 kids have signed up for the program, though she believes the final number of signups will be closer to 5,000.

Austin Public Library (Photo by Jana Birchum)

“I think it's common knowledge that our public transit isn't great,” Graves said. “So the ability to get to the library is sometimes a big hurdle for our patrons – especially in some target areas that need more attention. So we're trying to build their home libraries so they have something to read at home.”

Efforts to bring books into children's homes are one of the best practices suggested by Kim's study, which found a clear link between the ease of access to books and how much children read. But a summer reading program at a public library may have only so much to do to address reading inequalities that break down along class and racial lines.

“If I had to guess, I would say they're probably kids whose parents can take them there or who can walk there,” said Elizabeth Swanson, a research professor in the University of Texas's special education department. “They're also probably highly motivated kids – they want to go to the library. When you talk about your weakest readers, I just don't know if these programs are really helpful.”

Swanson, who runs an after-school reading program at the YMCA of Central Texas where older students teach younger students to read, said expanding such programs to the summer could help reach more students. Programs like Austin ISD's could have a similar effect.

“A targeted program where kids build their skills every day can really work,” Swanson said.