This biweekly newsletter contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. It is designed expressly for parents and families. This issue highlights a pilot reading program under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) launched at 11 sites nationwide in April. The NCLB Summer Reading Achievers Program encourages students in grades…

Over the summer, many children lose ground in the reading skills they are building at school. Weave reading into the family's summer, and children will go back to school refreshed, excited, and ready to pick up where he or she left off. Advice for parents and caregivers includes: seek out books and reading materials that tie into children's summer…

This report reviews the research on summer school and demonstrates that summer school makes a difference in students' lives if it is done right. A survey of more than 1,000 schools in the southern United States found that one-third of the responding schools did not offer summer school, many programs being the victims of budget cuts. Of those…

This report describes some of the key immediate and long-term outcomes achieved by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC)-Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Summer Institute for Math/Science/Technology for student and teacher participants. This two-week summer program provides high school students and teachers from the Appalachian region the…

What is Chautauqua? What contributions were made to adult education theory and practice by three early Chautauquan leaders: John Vincent, Lewis Miller, and William Rainey Harper? How did they handle certain administrative tasks? This article briefly introduces the reader to the Chautauqua Institution that then became the Chautauqua Movement. It…

Summer learning comes from reading books, singing songs, playing games, listening to stories, taking trips, and all kinds of other fun activities that kids rarely realize are actually good for them. However, this kind of summer learning can be more difficult for children of low-income and other disadvantaged families. Careful analysis of…

Wake Summerbridge is an enrichment program that has supported selected Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) (North Carolina) middle school students for a number of years. This evaluation compared subsequent academic performance, suspensions, and dropout rates of students who had participated in the program with a comparison group of students…

This study investigated parents' attitudes toward the summer vacation period and their children's summer experiences. Participants were a nationally representative sample of approximately 400 parents of children age 5-14 years who completed telephone interviews as part of two subsequent omnibus surveys. Most parents ranged in age from 35-54 years.…

This study drew on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 to examine whether children made gains in general knowledge over the summer following their first year of kindergarten, whether general knowledge gains were similar for all children, and whether participation in certain types of summer activities…

The Summer Opportunity To Accelerate Reading (S.O.A.R.) program is the elementary summer school program to improve reading and literacy in the Austin Independent School District, Texas. In June 2000, the 21-day program served 2,406 students in grades 1 through 3 who were below grade level in reading or at risk of retention. The budget allocation…

The Summer Opportunity To Accelerate Reading (S.O.A.R.) program is the Title I elementary summer school of the Austin Independent School District (AISD), Texas. The S.O.A.R. program provides early intervention to accelerate literacy learning for students entering grades 1-3 who are at risk of retention or are below grade level. In its second year…

School-age children ages 5 through 12 years spend their out-of-school time in many different types of arrangements. In addition to parental care, these include relative care, non-relative care (either in their own or another family's home), center- or school-based programs, sports and extracurricular activities, summer activities, and self-care.…

By the simple technique of opening our minds a bit, we can come to judge African music from the African's point of view rather than from our own. (Author)