Literacy Is a Problem for Austin Kids. To Fight the Summer Slide, Libraries Have Incentives.

Six in 10 Austin ISD elementary students aren’t reading at grade level (Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

As students across Austin get back to school this week, teachers may be on the lookout for the effects of what is known as the “summer slide” – the phenomenon of students losing academic ground over the summer break, particularly in math and reading. It’s a phenomenon that summer reading programs, like the one run by the Austin Public Library, are designed to help address.

“It snowballs over time,” Alanna Graves, APL’s summer experience coordinator, said of summer reading loss. “It also disproportionately affects kids of color, kids in low-income neighborhoods.”

Preventing that kind of summer reading loss is a major focus for Graves and a host of educators and researchers. So is identifying exactly how summer reading loss works. Despite the longstanding notoriety of the summer slide, which was first written about more than a century ago, there are ongoing disagreements between researchers about whether the phenomenon exists and the extent to which it impacts students.

In an article published in 2019, for instance, Paul von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, wrote that after diving into research on summer learning loss, he was “no longer sure that the average child loses months of skills each year” in the summer and expressed his doubt that summer learning loss “contributes much to the achievement gap in ninth grade.”

The one thing that was clear from his work, von Hippel wrote, was that students learn more slowly over the summer – giving students who have more access to learning resources over the summer an opportunity to widen the gap between them and students who have less access to those resources, or, alternatively, an opportunity for students who are behind to use the summer months to close the gap with higher-performing students.

That means that, whether the summer slide phenomenon is real or not, reading over the summer can have major effects on student success. A study conducted by James Kim, a professor of education at Harvard University, found that the effect of reading four to five books each summer was significant enough to potentially negate any decline in reading test scores from the fall to the spring.

To that end, APL's summer reading program challenges its participants to read for 10 hours over the course of June, July, and August. Graves said it matters little whether the book is Charlotte’s Web or a graphic novel – what is most significant is that kids get into a reading rhythm. Developing and sustaining that rhythm is particularly important for kids who are in the middle of elementary school, an age at which researchers have noted significant declines in the rate kids read for pleasure.

“When you’re learning to read and when you’re just starting out as an independent reader, that’s such a crucial stage in your development,” Graves said. “When we measure reading levels for 8- and 9-year-olds, it’s a very strong indicator of how much or how well they will be reading for middle and high school – because reading levels don’t jump as high between middle and high school versus when you’re in kindergarten to third grade.”

That kind of data makes the work of summer reading programs like APL’s important every year. But in the aftermath of COVID-19, their work may be of particular importance. Multiple studies have found that a significantly higher number of students who were in school during the pandemic lockdown are at a higher risk for reading issues compared to pre-COVID-19 students. In Austin ISD, standardized test scores show that six in 10 elementary students aren’t reading at grade level. That amounts to 22,000 young Austinites facing a risk of reduced literacy or illiteracy.

More reading hours may play a part in raising those scores – and children who complete the 10 hours of reading over the summer can return to their library branch to claim a prize: a book they can take home and keep. The goal of that prize is not just to reward kids for their summer reading – it’s to make it easier for them to keep reading down the road. Graves said more than 3,400 kids have registered for the program, though she believes the final number of registrants will be closer to 5,000.

Austin Public Library (Photo by Jana Birchum)

“I think it’s common knowledge that our public transit is not that great,” Graves said. “So being able to come to the library is sometimes a really big barrier to our customers – especially to some target areas that need more love. So we’re trying to build their home libraries, so they have something to read while they are at home.”

The effort to get books into children’s homes is in line with one of the best practices suggested by Kim’s study, which found that there was a clear correlation between ease of access to books and how much children read. But there may be only so much that a summer reading program anchored at a public library can do to combat disparities in reading that breakdown along class and racial lines.

“If I were to guess, it’s probably kids whose parents can get them there or the kids can walk there,” Elizabeth Swanson, a research professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Texas, said. “It’s also probably highly motivated kids – they want to go to the library. When you’re talking about your most struggling readers, I just don’t know if those programs are super helpful.”

Swanson, who helps run an afterschool reading program out of the YMCA of Central Texas in which older students tutor younger students in reading, said that extending those kinds of programs into the summer could have an impact in reaching more students. Programs like the one facilitated by Austin ISD may have a similar effect.

“A purposeful program, where children are engaged in every day in skill-building, can really work,” Swanson said.