Try Something Different for Weak Students
By John Merrow

New York City's school board is deeply divided over whether to make drastic cuts in its summer school program. Last year, 269,620 students in grades 3 through 12 attended summer school at a cost of $176 million. If any cuts are made, however, it will be to save money, not because of a loss of faith in the idea of summer school. ' 'If you can provide kids with extra time,'' said school board member Terri Thomson of summer school, ''they improve.'' Actually, I don't think the kind of ''extra time'' now offered matters a bit. Summer school, in New York and elsewhere, is little more than mindless repetition of failed practices. Yet summer school is being mandated in a growing number of public systems around the country. Chicago started the trend in the late 1990s, but the roster of cities mandating summer school for students who haven't met the new education standards now includes Miami-Dade; Oakland, Long Beach; Greenville, S.C.; Baton Rouge; Richmond, Va.; Dallas; Davenport, Iowa; Oxnard, Calif., and Orange City, Fla., among others. The growth in summer schooling is a response to the demand for an end to what is called ''social promotion,'' the practice of keeping students with their age peers regardless of their academic performance. Social promotion is based on the belief that making a struggling child repeat a grade does more harm than good. But it conjures up powerful images of students being passed along even though they can't pass tests, write coherent sentences or read. Most Americans believe that social promotion is wrong. It's also something politicians of varied persuasions are against. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg have opposed it and campaigned to end it. Now many school districts have replaced social promotion with ''retention'' -- what most of us call ''staying back.'' Unfortunately, ending social promotion has not solved the underlying problem of school failure -- and summer school in its current form doesn't help, either. What happens to students who are retained? What opportunities does the system provide to enable students to catch up? Normally, it's summer school and more of the same. That is, most remediation programs are echoes of what already has failed. Think of it this way: Imagine you are driving into town, looking for the Wal-Mart. You get lost and ask me for directions. I tell you how many blocks to go, when to turn left, and so on, but you do not understand. (If you are with me on this, you are the student, and I'm the teacher.) When I realize that you are confused, I simply repeat the directions, only this time I SHOUT. It won't take you long to realize that you never will get where you want to go with me as your guide, so you step on the gas and seek help elsewhere. That's a pretty fair description of how schools treat failure. First of all, just as I blamed you for not grasping my directions, it's the student's fault for not understanding. Summer school is the equivalent of my shouting the same words. So just as you would give up on me and drive away, many students who are retained drop out of school. At a time when President Bush talks about leaving no child behind, teachers need to find more creative ways to remediate these students. The Bush administration believes that testing students every year will end the problem, because failure will be spotted early. In that sense, it is right, but if schools don't provide thoughtful -- and different -- remediation programs, nothing important will change, and kids will continue to pay the price of our failure. So how do we fix it? Get back in your car for a minute and I will tell you. First of all, I wouldn't shout at you, because I would want you to get to your destination. I would try new approaches, find different ways to explain my directions, until you felt ready to go on down the road. That is, I would feel that I had failed (as your teacher) if I couldn't help you get where you were going. So, to be successful, summer school teachers should begin by abandoning what has not worked and adopt instead a new motto: ''If students don't learn, then we have not taught.'' OTHER ARTICLES by John Merrow from USATODAY How Many Tries at a School Test are Enough? European Preschools Should Embarrass USA Remodel Public Schools into Knowledge Factories Easy Grading Makes 'Deep Learning' More Important Eliminate Tests' Double Standards Avoid Law that Limits Class Size Change the location, schedule field trips and overnight excursions, put kids in groups, teach in teams, and experiment with technology. I recall a summer-reading program that took advantage of the students' obsession with basketball. They had one rule: Only those who had done the reading could suit up. Then, about a dozen times during the games, the ref would blow his whistle for vocabulary words. If you could define the word, your team got one point, but if you could not, someone from the other team got the opportunity to score. ''Vocabulary points'' decided most games, and, believe me, that worked. Of course, students and teachers and schools must be held accountable for falling short, but the goal of schooling ought to be learning, not simply doing a better job of placing the blame. That means discarding what isn't working. No more shouting!