Overall, summer school programs didn’t deliver on their promises. But some subgroups did benefit: the students who regularly attended the programs that were better at navigating hurdles like student retention.

It’s perhaps never been so urgent to make educational interventions like summer school work for kids. Two years into the pandemic, children across the nation are behind where they would have been academically if the pandemic hadn’t happened. To help bridge the gap, educational theories will have to adapt to the unique realities of actual kids’ lives and families’ needs. If they don’t, even the best ideas, with tons of evidence behind them, won’t work in the real world.

Kids learned plenty during the pandemic, Kuhfeld told me. The problem, she said, is that they aren’t learning as much or as quickly as they were each year before the pandemic. Nationally, third-graders in fall 2021 were, on average, testing significantly below where third-graders were testing in fall 2019 in reading and math. The NWEA assessments showed these declines extended across third-graders through eighth-graders, too.2