When I was a kid, every summer my parents took me to the library or to local art, history, and science museums on free admission days. We spent lots of time at local parks, exploring the miles of trails within, trying to figure out the types of trees, plants, or bugs we saw. We took road trips to visit relatives and on the way stopped to hike in the Smoky Mountains or to explore caves in Kentucky. This kind of enrichment was free or low-cost, and it exposed me to new vocabulary and experiences and helped to lessen the summer academic slide.

But not every child has opportunities like I did, especially children whose parents are working multiple jobs just to meet the basic needs. It is these children, often from low-income families, who suffer most from summer learning loss.

According to a study by the RAND Corporation last year, on average, students regress about a month during summer break. But for children from low-income families it can be even more, especially when it comes to reading growth. And over time, this phenomenon snowballs and increases the learning gap between children from higher income families and their lower income peers.

This means teachers spend the first several weeks of school repeating some of what was learned the previous year, in order to catch students up.

Extending the school year is one way to stave off summer learning loss, and principals should consider it as a school improvement strategy. It is not just adding extra time in school that matters; the more important factor is how time is used. Much of the school day is spent in transition from one activity or location to the next. Teachers should receive professional development on how to reduce the time they lose to transitions, so they can spend more time teaching content.

It is also important that extended school years go beyond rote learning and test preparation. Schools should add time to build critical thinking and problem solving skills and to focus on science, history, and the arts.

No study I’ve read has found evidence for a single, optimal number of days in school. But I doubt that decreasing the time children spend in school is the way to go. Yet over the past few years, in response to the economic downturn, some districts have switched or have considered switching to a four-day school week or shortened year. While cutting time may save dollars, it will not likely benefit students.

Here is a guest post by Gary Huggins, chief executive officer of the National Summer Learning Association.

We collectively pay a steep price for our prolonged break from learning. Most students lose two months’ worth of math skills each summer while low income children lose another two to three months in reading, leaving them chronically behind their more advantaged peers. This represents a significant drag on our investment in reaching learning targets during the school year and moving students to college readiness.

The current 180-day schedule certainly has its inefficiencies, but extending the school year is not the only available strategy. Time off from the regular routines of school can allow students and teachers to recharge their batteries and approach learning differently. But a break from school should not mean a break from learning.

In fact, recent research from the RAND Corporation shows that high-quality summer programs can help boost student achievement. We have seen this happen in the National Summer Learning Association and Walmart Foundation’s Smarter Summers initiative with programs like Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) which saw middle schoolers gain an average of 7.5 months of grade-level equivalency in literacy skills and 7.2 months of math skills just last summer.

Summer programs also provide excellent opportunities to innovate and can reshape the way that learning happens. For instance, Higher Achievement, a program in several East Coast cities, holds an annual Olympics of the Mind, helping students sharpen their academic skills while having fun. In California, THINK Together offers a summer program based on “The Hunger Games,” and in other cities, programs are using engaging strategies to combine learning with enrichment and fun.

Implementing these and other innovative methods of learning into summer programs have proven successful in communities such as: Pittsburgh; Baltimore; Oakland; and Duval County, Florida. Forward thinking leaders in these districts, along with a growing number of their colleagues, have recognized that summer learning is an integral part of their academic bottom line and a critical education reform priority. It is time that more of us recognize the value of this largely untapped strategy.

Extending the school year may be one way to eliminate the “summer slide” but summer can also be an opportunity for students to pursue valuable experiences outside the classroom

For example, to prevent stagnation—and to prepare students for life after school—we should consider the vital role that summer work experiences play in an individual’s educational and professional development.

To really maximize and inculcate the skills learned during the school year, those skills should be applied in real-life situations: meaningful work experiences require students to put to use the math, writing and research skills they learn in school, as well as enhance their ability to think critically and work in a team. What’s more, they underscore the immediate applicability of classroom learning, and motivate students to excel when they return to school in the fall.

Despite the value of summer work experience, 7 in 10 US teens will be jobless this summer. That adds up to a troubling situation—with the unemployment rate among 16-19 year olds as high as it’s been since WW2, we’re facing the real possibility of a lost generation in the years ahead, one without the skills they need to compete for jobs in a global economy

How do we know summer jobs really help kids? This summer, nearly 100 students will be working at HBO, JetBlue Airways, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and other leading companies as PENCIL Fellows. The internship is the culmination of a year-long, comprehensive career development program. And there’s no ‘summer slide’ allowed when you have to show up to work every day and earn your keep. In fact, the PENCIL Fellows class of 2011 reported that the program increased their self-efficacy and ability to contribute in a business setting. Fellows noted that—through their experiences in working offices—they could serve as creative problem-solvers, work as a part of a team, and contribute to a company’s overall goals and strategy.

Yet while life-changing for these 100 fortunate students, the program is just a drop in the bucket. There are hundreds—in fact thousands—more looking for a similar opportunity. We need to think seriously about how we provide that kind of opportunity to motivated young people. Because as important as school is, “education” is so much bigger than what goes on inside a classroom.

Our competitive advantage, as communities – and certainly as a nation -- will always be our people. We primarily invest in people through public education, and while the average student in other countries is in school 200 days each year, children in the United States spend fewer than 180-days in classrooms. In our community, the number of (mandatory) instructional days is actually fewer than 170 days, or an entire month below the international average. It was once necessary for our children to have their “summers off, a hundred or so years ago (literally), but today it’s not only problematic; it’s at the heart of some of our most pressing challenges in education.

By the time school starts for a child, typically around age 5 when they enter kindergarten, 90 percent of the brain is fully formed. For many low-income children without access to quality early learning experiences, they will start school as much as 18 months behind their middle-income counterparts.

They can almost catch up if they have a great kindergarten teacher, but then the school year ends and the achievement gap starts all over again. That’s because most middle-to-upper income students have access to quality summer learning experiences, and the vast majority of low-incomes students do not. During each summer, low-income students will lose two months of reading while everyone else will gain momentum. Combine these loses over the course of elementary school, and summer learning loss accounts for two-thirds of the achievement gap as students enter high school (if they haven’t already dropped out).

In Cincinnati, our community is tackling the issue of summer learning in two ways.

First, the largest public school district in our region, Cincinnati Public Schools, has extended the school year by five weeks as part of their Fifth Quarter initiative. In its third year, the effort has received funding from the Wallace Foundation to help us better understand the impact this voluntary summer learning initiative has had on student achievement.

Second, we have launched a multi-year, early grade-level reading campaign, which includes a cross-sector, “Summer Learning Collaborative.” Through collaborative action, or “collective impact,” this group is assessing the landscape of summer learning opportunities in the region and increasing access to high-quality summer learning opportunities for all students in the campaign’s footprint.

Members are currently conducting site visits of several existing local programs, including Fifth Quarter, to document and share best practices across the collaborative. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, data is being collected at each summer learning site as part of a larger evaluation to better understand access and impact in a way that might fundamentally transform the way we provide a comprehensive set of summer learning options, particularly for our younger children.

There is little doubt that summer learning matters, and that we must provide high-quality options for students, particularly those who are economically disadvantaged. Extending the school year may not be the answer. Let’s face it, who wants to go to school for another 30-days each year? But there are summer learning programs that work, and with a focus on data and a willingness to invest in what works, we can provide a high quality summer learning options to students that need it. If we do, we’ll begin to close the achievement gap.

States and districts are frantically looking for ways to save money, and too often the school calendar falls victim to the budgetary axe. The United Teachers of Los Angeles recently agreed to cut days off the school year for the fourth consecutive year. It’s a simple concept—as school hours and days are reduced, so are operating and transportation costs. But to what end? For high poverty and minority students who are already at an academic disadvantage this can mean more hours, days, and weeks of unstructured, unsupervised time, added to long summer months of inactivity, while their wealthier peers head to summer camps, or travel with their family.

Speaking to this point at an event at the Center for American Progress last year, Secretary Arne Duncan asked, “Does every child need a huge amount of additional time?” He went on to answer, “Honestly, not necessarily. There are lots of middle class children who can go to the park or the museum, or go to ballet, or to a piano lesson after school, and that’s okay. But on a targeted basis [we can provide more learning time] to the children in the communities where those opportunities aren’t the norm, where students don’t have those kind of chances. In tough economic climates like this you can’t try and do everything for everybody, but for the children that need the most help this is a desperately important resource, that has been underutilized and untapped.”

The Secretary is right. Increasing learning time is not essential in all schools, but it can help close the achievement and opportunity gaps in our lowest performing schools. Schools across the country are boasting impressive increases in achievement after redesigning the school schedule, to increase time for not only academics, but also enrichment programming. Take Balz Elementary School District in Arizona where approximately 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch. After the school year was increased from 180 days to 200 in 2009, reading scores in third and fourth grade increased by 19 percent, and fifth and sixth grade reading scores went up by a whopping 43 percent. Improvement of this scale cannot be ignored.

Increased time is a vital piece of any school improvement strategy, yet is not a magic potion. Just tacking more days to the school year will not yield the kind of dramatic results we saw in Balz. The schedule must be intentionally redesigned to incorporate the additional time for academics, enrichment programming, and teacher planning and collaboration. Formally integrating enrichment into the school calendar allows disadvantaged children access to the kinds of programming their wealthier counterparts take for granted.

It is appalling that states and districts continually choose to shortchange their students in the face of a budget crunch. Rather the conversation needs to focus on how schools can effectively increase learning time for the neediest students.

The summer slide is real, it’s important, and it’s been neglected. But as we think about how to address it, we need to move away from a mindset focused on the mere intensification or extension of the school year. That’s a remedial model, and it’s one that’s often built on a deficit idea of children and their families.

In contrast, think about the enrichment activities gifted by wealthier families to their children over the summer. These activities engage and they accelerate learning; rarely are they intended as a simple extension of the school year. These children are given rich opportunities to learn, and when summer turns to fall their minds are prepared to continue playing with new ideas.

From this perspective, we need to move away from the old “summer school” thinking, which generally connotes a corrective experience and which continues to target kids seen as failing (or close to failing). In most such situations, the students know very well that summer school is a punitive intervention, which is partly why it’s so often a miserable experience for them.

As an alternative, the National Summer Learning Association has described a new vision for summer school (http://www.summerlearning.org/?nvssstatement). Please click through; it’s short and it’s worth a read. Note in particular the 4th principle: “Strengthen and expand partnerships with community-based organizations and public agencies that provide summer activities to align and leverage existing resources, identify and meet gaps in service, improve program quality, and develop shared outcomes for summer success.”

Summer learning loss, and Fawn notes, disproportionately affects children from low-income communities. It also disproportionately hits children of color and English Language Learners. So the equity considerations are huge. In fact, the RAND study cited by Fawn (as well as other research in this area) suggests that learning happens at roughly the same pace across groups during the school year. Yet low-income children of color tend to start out behind and then experience summer learning loss while more affluent children lose little to nothing over the summer, which widens the achievement gap on a year-over-year basis.

One cannot seriously consider these issues without thinking about the role of time. But we should also be careful and creative when thinking about time. It might be helpful to shift from speaking about “extending the school year” to speaking about extending into the summer rich opportunities to learn and grown. High-quality summer learning can certainly provide the additional time for children to catch up with reading skills and other academic pursuits, but it can also ensure that low-income children have engaging growth opportunities similar to their more affluent peers. So what we’re talking about here is not just summer learning loss, it’s summer opportunity loss – a gap that is arguably often even more stark and pernicious than the opportunity gaps students experience during the school year.