BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals.

As Rodriguez worked with two students on a difficult problem, Noelia Ames was called over by a soft-spoken student sitting nearby. Ames, a rising senior who took Algebra II Honors with Rodriguez as a sophomore, was serving as a peer leader for the summer class.

“Are you stuck on a problem?” Ames asked, leaning over to take a closer look.

The students in Rodriguez’s class were participating in a summer program created by the Calculus Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Founded at Brookline High near Boston in 2009, the group now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 nearby districts beginning in the summer after seventh grade to help them complete advanced math classes like calculus before they finish high school.

It focuses on helping students who are historically underrepresented in high-level math classes — namely those who are Black, Hispanic and low-income — succeed in that coursework, which serves as a gateway to selective colleges and well-paying careers. While some states and districts are nixing advanced-math requirements, sometimes in the name of equity, the Calculus Project has a different theory: Students who have traditionally been excluded from high-level math can succeed in those courses if they’re given a chance to preview advanced math content over the summer and take classes with a cohort of their peers.

In recent years the Calculus Project’s work has taken on fresh urgency, as the pandemic hit Black, Hispanic and low-income students particularly hard. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action left even some college officials concerned that inequities in high school math would make it harder for them to fill their classes with students from diverse backgrounds. The Calculus Project’s national profile has grown — its staff advises the College Board on AP math exams and classes and have advised groups in a few other states — even as the organization has attracted some scrutiny from parents, due to its emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“One out of 10 Black students in the eighth grade math scores were scoring basic or above,” saidKristen Hengtgen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group EdTrust, referring to last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. “When you see that, you need to throw certain student groups the life jacket,” she added. “We cannot combat a math crisis if we’re not helping the students who need it the most.”

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

The racial and socioeconomic gaps in math are stark: Only 28 percent of Black students and 31 percent Hispanic students nationwide took advanced math in high school compared with 46 percent of white students, according to a 2023 report from EdTrust. Just 22 percent of low-income students took advanced math. Experts say that’s because these students are less likely to attend high schools that offer higher-level math or to be recommended by their teachers for honors or AP classes, regardless of mastery.

They are also less likely to report feeling confident in math class or to enroll in calculus even when they are on a path to take the class early in high school, according to a report from EdTrust and nonprofit Just Equations. When it comes to Black and Hispanic students, Hengtgen blames what she calls “the belonging barrier.” “Their friends weren’t in the class,” she said. “They rarely had a teacher of color.”

As a math teacher at Brookline High in the early 2000s, Calculus Project founder Adrian Mims got firsthand experience in what the research was beginning to establish. Black and Hispanic students were largely absent from the high school’s honors and advanced math courses, he said, and the few Black and Hispanic students who did enroll often dropped out early in the year.

As a PhD candidate at Boston College, Mims was writing his dissertation on how to improve African American achievement in geometry honors classes. His findings — suggesting that Black students dropped out of the course because they lacked knowledge of certain foundational math content, spent less time studying and preparing for tests, and lacked confidence in their math ability — became the catalyst for the first iteration of The Calculus Project.

Mims’ idea was to introduce Black students over the summer to math concepts they’d learn in eighth grade algebra in the fall. Students would be able to take the time to really understand those concepts and to build their confidence and skills, learning both from district teachers and peer teachers who could provide individual support.

In the summer of 2009, Mims piloted his idea with a group of rising eighth graders. In addition to learning concepts they’d see in algebra that fall, they were exposed to the stories of famous Black and Latino figures who excelled in STEM, such as Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Mexican-American astronaut Jose M. Hernandez. When the school year arrived, they participated in after-school tutoring at Brookline High.

The next fall, 2010, the district opened the program to all interested students, regardless of race. Summer participants were placed into cohorts so they could advance through math classes in high school with peers they knew.

Teachers and administrators at Brookline say the project had an immediate — and lasting — impact. “It’s so much more than learning math,” said Alexia Thomas, a guidance counselor and associate dean of students at Brookline High.

In 2012, Brookline High saw more Black students score as advanced on the state Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Math test than ever before; 88 percent of those students had participated in the Calculus Project. The highest-scoring student in the district was Black – and a program alum. Two years later, when the first cohort of students who participated in both the summer and year-long programs graduated from high school, 75 percent had successfully completed calculus.

Today, eight districts participate in the year-round program and another six send their students to the group’s summer programs, two three-week sessions that take place at Boston University, Emmanuel College and University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As of May 2024, 31 percent of students in the program identified as Black, 39 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent as Asian and 7 percent as white, according to program data. Mims has helped develop similar models in Florida and Texas.

In 2023, research consultancy group Mathematica, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, published findings from a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Calculus Project and two other math-oriented summer programs. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) According to the report, students in the Calculus Project outperformed students who hadn’t participated by nearly half a grade point in their fall math classes, on average.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

The project runs counter to a recent push to engage high schoolers in math by making the content more relevant to the real world and substituting classes like data science for algebra II and calculus. Justin Desai, the Calculus Project’s director of school and district support and a former Boston Public Schools math teacher and curriculum designer, said he sees risks in that approach. Students need subjects like calculus, he said, because “it’s the foundation of modern technology.” To replace advanced math classes in favor of less rigorous math courses keeps students from accessing and excelling even in some non-STEM fields like law, he said.

The project finds ways to show students how math skills apply in the professional world.  Every semester students take field trips to Harvard Medical School, Google and to university research centers and engineering companies, where they are introduced to careers and see how the math they are learning is used in society.

In late July, a group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools’ summer program took a field trip to the sprawling campus of global software company MathWorks. In one room, an engineer showed students how a car simulation model is built and used, while a second engineer helped students test a robotic arm. Another group of students learned how to use a programming software to turn an image into music.

As the Calculus Project has grown, there has at times been friction. In July, simmering tension between teachers and students at Concord-Carlisle High School came to a head when some project participants learned they’d been placed in financial literacy or statistics courses instead of calculus.

Some students being placed into lower-level classes has been a pattern since the program started at Concord-Carlisle in 2020, Mims said. He threatened to pull the program from the high school, and the students were reassigned to calculus (and one to statistics).

Mims said “this is a clear example” of how teacher recommendations can lock students out of advanced math classes. School administrators and teachers often point to students and parents as the reason for a lack of diversity in high-level math. “When we destroy that myth and we show that students can achieve at that level,” said Mims, “they can no longer point the finger at the students and the parents anymore, because we’ve created a precedent that these students can thrive.”

Laurie Hunter, the Concord-Carlisle superintendent, wrote in an email that her district is committed to partnering with the Calculus Project and that it “works closely with individual students and families to ensure their success and path align with the outcomes of the project.” She did not respond to specific questions. 

Milton Public Schools, another district that works with the Calculus Project, was the subject of a 2023 federal civil rights complaint from national conservative group Parents Defending Education. The group accused the district of discrimination by partnering with the Calculus Project, which it said segregates students by intentionally grouping students of certain backgrounds together as part of cohorts.

Mims rejects the group’s claims, noting that the Calculus Project is open to students of all backgrounds including white and Asian students. He says he has not heard from the federal government or the group about the complaint since early 2023. Parents Defending Education did not respond to several interview requests. A spokesperson for the federal Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints but pointed to its list of open investigations. At the time of publication, there were no open investigations against Milton Public Schools.

Art Coleman, a founding partner at legal group EducationCounsel LLC, said that he doesn’t expect such challenges to be successful. School districts have a legal obligation to address inequities in student performance, he said, and “there is nothing in federal law that precludes that targeted support, as long as in broad terms, all students, regardless of their racial or ethnic status, have the ability to tap into those resources and that support.”

Related: How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

This summer, the Calculus Project expanded its programming, including by adding a college advising class for rising seniors. It’s part of the group’s mission to help its students succeed not just in high school but in college and beyond, Mims said.

The group plans to help its graduates secure internships while they’re in college and network once they’re out, he said, and will soon begin tracking students to see how they do in college and the workforce. “It’s really about giving them every advantage that rich kids have,” Mims said.

Ames, the Brookline High senior and peer teacher, said she has found the program “totally life-changing,” in part because of the relationships she’s built with other students and teachers.

“You can be in the hardest class or the easiest class and every teacher will be there to support you,” said Ames, who is taking AP Calculus this fall and is considering studying finance after high school. “Whatever questions you have, they’ll answer.”

Quentin Robinson, a college junior who joined the Calculus Project as a rising seventh grader, said it taught him that he enjoyed math and also how to advocate for himself.

“My freshman year, they tried to put me in a lower-level math class because they didn’t think I was capable,” Robinson said. But his summer experience empowered him, and he persuaded the school to place him in Geometry Honors instead. He graduated from high school having completed both calculus and a college-level statistics course.

Now, Robinson is an accounting and data analytics major at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. The Calculus Project, he said, helped him realize the voices of naysayers can be used as “a fuel” to achieve what you want.

Contact staff writer Javeria Salman at 212-678-3455 or salman@hechingerreport.org.

This story about advanced math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

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DURANGO, Colo. — For three dozen high schoolers, summer break in this southwest Colorado city kicked off with some rock climbing, mountain biking and fly-fishing.

Then, the work began.

As part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment, mountain researchers taught the students how to mix clumps of grass seed, clay, compost and sand for seedballs that they threw into burned areas of the Hermosa Creek watershed to help with native plant recovery. The students upturned rocks — and splashed each other — along the banks of the Animas River, searching for signs of aquatic life after a disastrous mine spill. They later waded through a wetland and scouted for beaver dams as part of a lesson on how humans can support water restoration.

Each task was designed to prepare them for potential careers connected to the natural world — forest ecologist, aquatic biologist, conservationist. Many of the students had already taken college-level environmental science courses, on subjects such as pollution mitigation and water quality, at local high schools and Fort Lewis College.

Other students in and around Durango were taking a summer crash course in the health sciences, and this fall can earn college credit in classes like emergency medical services and nursing. Still others were participating in similar programs for early childhood education and for teacher preparation.

“I like the let-me-work-outside model,” said Autumn Schulz, a rising sophomore at Ignacio High School. Every day this past school year, she rode a public transit bus, passing miles of high desert terrain, to take an ecology class at Bayfield High School, in another district. She’d already completed internships at a mountain research nonprofit and a public utility to explore environmental and municipal jobs in her preferred field.

“It’s my favorite subject,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things.”

None of this would have been possible before 2020. Back then, the Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio school districts operated largely independently. But as the pandemic took hold and communities debated whether to reopen schools after lockdown, a newly formed alliance of nine rural districts in southwest Colorado attempted to extinguish their attendance boundaries and pooled staff and financial resources to help more students get into college and high-paying careers.

Across the United States, rural schools often struggle to provide the kinds of academic opportunities that students in more populous areas might take for granted. Although often the hub of their communities, rural schools tend to struggle with a shrinking teaching force, budgets spread too thin and limited access to employers who can help. Rural students have fewer options for advanced courses or career and technical education, or CTE, before entering the workforce.

But clustered near the Four Corners in Colorado, the coalition of nine rural districts has partnered with higher education and business leaders to successfully expand career and college pathways for their students. A nonprofit formed by the districts conducts job market analysis and surveys teenagers about their interests. Armed with that data, academic counselors can advise students on the array of new CTE and college-level classes in high-wage positions in the building trades, hospitality and tourism, health sciences, education and the environment.

Teachers working in classrooms separated by 100 miles or more regularly meet in-person and online to share curriculum and industry-grade equipment. More than five dozen employers in the region have created ways for students to explore careers in new fields, such as apprenticeships, job shadows and internships. And some students earn a job offer, workforce certificate or associate degree before they finish high school.

Collectively, the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative has raised more than $7 million in private and public money to pay for these programs, and its work has inspired similar rural alliances across the state. The collaborative’s future, however, is uncertain, as federal pandemic relief funds that supported its creation soon expire. Advocates have started to campaign for a permanent funding fix and changes in state policy that would make it easier for rural schools to continue partnering with one another.

Jess Morrison, who stepped down at the end of July as the collaborative’s founding executive director, said the group — and others like it in Indiana and South Texas — demonstrates the strength of regional neighbors creating solutions of their own, together.

“It’s about our region not waiting on people to save us,” she said.

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Nationally, more than 9.5 million U.S. students — or about 1 in 5 students — attend a rural school. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that, compared with the U.S. average, students in rural schools finish high school at higher rates and even outperform their peers in cities and suburbs. But only 55 percent of rural high schoolers enroll in college, a much lower share than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural students make less money as adults and, compared to suburban students, are more likely to grow up in poverty.

In this part of southwest Colorado, where about half of students qualify for subsidized meals at school, employers have struggled to find enough workers but also to provide a liveable wage. Hoping to steer more high schoolers into high-skill and high-wage jobs, educators and superintendents from five school districts — Archuleta, Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio and Silverton — started to meet with representatives from Fort Lewis College and Pueblo Community College. In early 2019, they began working with the nonprofits Empower Schools and Lyra Colorado to formally create a regional collaborative and visited a similar project in South Texas.

Covid briefly disrupted much of that work, but in June 2020, tapping federal relief dollars for education, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced a nearly $33 million fund to close equity gaps and support students affected by the pandemic. Already poised to work together, the collaborative secured the largest award — $3.6 million — from the governor’s fund to help students explore environmental science and the building trades, two areas in which the number of jobs was projected to increase.

Despite that demand for workers, none of the school districts offered a single class in HVAC, electrical or plumbing, according to Morrison, nor did any of the nearby higher ed institutions. “We were a complete desert,” she said.

In 2022, the collaborative began piloting summer institutes, employers started hiring students directly from those programs and Pueblo Community College began offering electrical certification at its southwest campus. Woodworking instructors from different districts started to gather monthly, comparing lesson plans and creating wish lists for new classes and equipment. New CNC routers, laser cutters and electric planers arrived at teachers’ classrooms. Soon, teachers will pilot an HVAC course for high schoolers.

Over time, the collaborative added four additional school districts: Dolores, Dove Creek, Mancos and Montezuma Cortez. It also formally partnered with two tribal nations, Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute, while expanding its college and career tracks to include education, the health sciences and hospitality/tourism.

As of 2023, nearly 900 students across the nine districts — of about 13,000 total for the region — had participated in environmental, agriculture and outdoor recreation courses, according to the collaborative’s annual report. Approximately 325 students have completed a building trades course, with 40 so far earning industry certificates. Another 199 students finished a welding course, and 77 students also took college-level classes in that field.

Joshua Walton just finished his 11th year teaching science at Bayfield High School. He’s seen the changes firsthand: His classroom today has clinometers, game cameras and soil-testing equipment on its shelves. Walton often reserves the collaborative’s mobile learning unit, a 14-passenger van converted into a traveling science lab, so students can run experiments along the Animas River. He also prepares students to get their certification in water science.

“We’re giving students the opportunity where they can be an aquatic biologist or get a job doing water testing pretty much right after they graduate,” said Walton.

Tiffany Aspromonte, who works as academic advisor at Mancos High School, grew up in town and has raised her two children there. Her oldest son, a rising senior at Mancos High, regularly changes his mind about his future, she said.

He already earned a mini-certification in welding, and he’s taken courses in drones and — when he wanted to become an eye doctor — medical terminology. Now, he’s in love with hands-on engineering classes, but hates the bookwork, Aspromonte said. This fall, her son will spend Friday nights at Pueblo Community College for a wildland fire class.

“He’s not the exception,” Aspromonte said. “Just in our small school, a lot of kids can go really in-depth so they can get an idea of what they do or don’t want to do.”

And, she added, the rural brain drain — of ambitious students leaving a small town for college or better jobs — seems less pressing.

“There’s no pressure to leave home, unless you really want to,” Aspromonte said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Along the way there have been challenges. Since 2020, all but one of the founding five superintendents left their positions, reflecting the nationwide churn of school leaders during the pandemic. Deciding how to divide money among districts hasn’t always been easy, said Morrison, the collaborative’s former director.

Student enrollment in shared courses never reached a point that would justify added costs, such as transportation. This fall, the alliance will limit the classes that high schoolers can take across district lines to education and health sciences. (Students can still take the courses in the building trades, environment and hospitality/tourism in their own high schools and at the local colleges. Each track will continue to include work-based learning.)

“We needed to simplify our approach,” Morrison said. “We started grand with all five pathways across all nine districts.”

And working with local business leaders has at times been challenging too, said Patrick Fredricks, the collaborative’s deputy director. Employers often want to give students tours of their businesses but, with the collaborative’s nudging, they can create real-world lessons: A popular bar and grill in Cortez reopened on a day off so students could host a pop-up restaurant. Dove Creek schools sent 20 kids to practice with staple guns and X-ray machines in the paramedic wing of the regional hospital.

Today, the collaborative regularly hosts career fairs with local businesses, matches students with employers to shadow on half-day visits to the workplace and helps arrange longer-term internships as well. Last school year, more than 200 students shadowed business leaders at 16 different job sites, including the local hospital, ski resorts and a cattle ranch.

The Colorado Education Initiative, a Denver-based nonprofit, has studied the impact of the pandemic relief money on students and plans to release initial findings this fall. In an early review of the data, released last November, the nonprofit found that projects funded by the governor’s office, including those of the collaborative, generally improved academic and social emotional outcomes.

The collaborative model has started to spread. Three remote districts in eastern Indiana recently created a “rural alliance zone” to get students into IT, advanced manufacturing, marketing and other career clusters. Last year, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly approved the creation of an annual $5 million pot of money to incentivize the creation of rural alliances in that state.

Back in Colorado, political allies of the collaborative have pitched the idea of dedicating state money for such partnerships or reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork needed to share funds among school districts. Eric Maruyama, spokesman for Gov. Polis, said in a statement that the Colorado governor “is committed to creating educational opportunities that give students the skills needed to thrive and fill in-demand jobs” but declined to say if he would take specific action.

Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, executive director of the Rural Schools Collaborative, a national network that operates in more than 30 states, said she’s optimistic that successful partnerships in rural communities like southwest Colorado will convince philanthropic and public funders to invest.

“It’s not very sexy to fund or make time and space for relationship building,” she said. “It’s also the right thing to do to benefit broader rural community vitality.”

In Silverton, an old mining town near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, kayakers called to the students sitting on rocks along banks of the Animas River. The teenagers circled around ice trays brimming with river water and tried to classify the swimming macroinvertebrates.

“Is that one squiggly like a worm?” BreAnna Bennet, a rising senior from Durango High School, asked her group.

At the start of the summer program, Bennet said she had no desire to do any job in the outdoors. By the third day, she often tailed the instructor and supplied a stream of questions about wetland restoration efforts and wildlife in the backcountry.

“This is fun. I like this,” Bennet said, looking up from the ice tray. “Your activity is my favorite so far.”

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LYNN, Mass. — In a middle school classroom in this Colonial-era city north of Boston, four 13- and 14-year-old boys were creating a poster with icons of their favorite apps. Ruler in hand, Enthonny Silva carefully delineated a box with the Netflix logo, while Guarionex Sanchez sketched the WhatsApp logo freehand.

None of the boys chose to be in school in the middle of July — they said their moms made them go. “She didn’t want me at home, sleeping all the time,” Guarionex said.

Yet all four said the program, which pairs project-based learning with enrichment in the arts and sports, is more fun than they expected.

Summer learning programs like this one, which serves low-income students who are typically two to three years behind in reading, have proliferated since the pandemic, buoyed by billions in federal recovery dollars doled out by the states over the past three years. Nationwide, more than 8 in 10 districts offered summer programs in 2023, many free of charge.

Yet summer programs still aren’t operating at a large enough scale to make a significant dent in the country’s Covid-related learning loss, researchers say, and the federal money is running out. Some programs are preparing to cut staff and services and reduce the number of students they serve next summer, while others, like the Dream MORE program for middle schoolers, in Lynn, are working to replace the recovery money with grants and donations.

Patrick Stanton, executive director of the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership, a nonprofit that supports after-school and summer learning providers, said he believes families are in for a nasty shock come next summer. Programs are going to close, he warned, and waitlists will grow even longer.

“We’re sleepwalking into a crisis,” Stanton said.

But it’s not too late for schools to double down on summer learning. Districts have until the end of September to allocate the remaining $34.1 billion of the money Congress provided in pandemic recovery funds. At least some of that money could go to summer programs.

Schools can also try to tap into other federal funding streams to sustain summer programs, according to consulting firm EducationCounsel, which created a guide for districts.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free  weekly newsletter  to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

The pandemic set back students from all income levels, with the average third through eighth grader losing the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a year of learning in reading between the spring of 2019 and 2022.

But low-income students saw steeper losses than wealthier ones, and the achievement gap between rich and poor districts grew.

Massachusetts schools consistently rank among the best in the country. But the state saw the biggest widening in the gap between districts serving low-income and high-income students, and among richer and poorer students within the same district, according to an analysis by The Harvard Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project.

No district was harder hit than Lynn, where three-quarters of students are low-income, and where the share of English language learners rose 75 percent over the course of the pandemic, to 43 percent today. Students in this city of 100,000, whose now-shuttered shoe factories provided a gateway to the middle class for immigrants in the industrial age, lost the equivalent of two years of learning in math and 1 1⁄2 in reading, the analysis shows.

The $122 billion in pandemic-relief aid that Congress included for K-12 schools in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act was supposed to turn things around for districts like Lynn. The law required states to spend 5 percent of their share of the funds on “evidence-based interventions aimed specifically at addressing learning loss,” and set aside 1 percent of the money specifically for summer enrichment programs. It directed local education agencies, which received the bulk of the aid, to spend at least 20 percent of it on efforts to address learning loss.

Summer learning was the most popular strategy chosen by districts, with 3 out of 4 including it in their spending plans.

By February of this year, $8.1 billion in rescue plan dollars for schools had flowed to after-school and summer programs, along with another $2.1 billion of the aid sent to state, territorial, local and Tribal governments, according to estimates by the Afterschool Alliance. That influx of money allowed after-school and summer programs to serve 5 million new students between 2021 and 2024, the Alliance says.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Massachusetts has funneled close to $20 million in rescue plan dollars to after-school and summer programs through nonprofit intermediaries, with the majority of the money going to low-income districts like Lynn.

Even so, some low-income districts, including Lynn, have fallen further behind their wealthier peers, with learning losses continuing into the 2022-23 academic year, the Harvard and Stanford study found.

That doesn’t mean that summer learning programs aren’t making a difference. One recent study found that a program created by Bloomberg Philanthropies (which also commissioned the study) since the pandemic has helped students at public charter schools in eight cities recover 31 percent of Covid-related learning loss in math and 22 percent in reading.

But another study, which looked at the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts, found only modest gains in math and none in reading. To recover to pre-pandemic levels in math, the average district would need to send every student to a five-week summer school with two hours of math instruction for two to three years, the study found.

The problem, it appears, is that too many students are skipping out of  summer learning, said Miles Davison, a research scientist at NWEA, a testing organization and one of the authors of the study. An average of just 13 percent of students in the districts surveyed in the study enrolled in summer programs.

Davison and other experts believe that’s partly because families haven’t fully grasped how far behind their kids remain academically.

Related: Why schools are teaching word problems all wrong

The mention of “summer school” often elicits groans from students. The term conjures up images of struggling students toiling away in un-air-conditioned classrooms while their more fortunate classmates escape to summer camps and vacation homes.

Many of today’s “summer learning” programs are different, though, blending hands-on projects with fun activities. Unlike traditional summer school, students aren’t forced to enroll –  they’re enticed to by free meals and transportation, and by lessons like the ones Lynn offers in cooking, dance, drama, sports, and song and video production.

“If summer school and summer camp had a baby, you’d get summer learning,” said Aaron Philip Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association.

At its best, summer learning is an opportunity not only to help kids catch up academically, but to get them re-engaged and re-connected to school, said Erik Peterson, senior vice president of policy of the Afterschool Alliance. And given the strong connection between student engagement and attendance, summer learning has the potential to bring down chronic absenteeism rates that have spiked since the pandemic, Peterson says.

Students in Lynn’s Dream MORE program, a partnership between the district and the nonprofit LEAP for Education, have shown gains in social emotional skills such as self-regulation and engagement, which are correlated with academic achievement.

The program lets students choose from a half dozen project-based learning experiences, including robotics, cyberbullying and “Life as a Young Teen,” the course in which the boys were making the poster about apps. Newcomer students are steered toward “Migration Stories,” while environmentalists might opt for “Eco-Warriors.”

In a recent class on “Culture and Cloth,” students watched a video about Navajo weaving, then sketched a design for a miniature weave they’ll create on a popsicle stick frame.

Rising sixth grader Savannah Nolan, who had already sketched a black spider on the back of her hand, practiced drawing on the nail of her friend, Sarahi Valerio. Savannah said her mom told her she could quit the program after the first day if she hated it, but she’s decided to stay.

“I’ve met so many friends,” she said. “I like that we do projects, and they let us use our phones” — something regular school forbids. She added, “We’re going to go on field trips if we behave.”

“And we’re good kids, so we’re going to,” chimed in rising sixth grader Sarahi, who is sketching a rainbow and a lollipop. (“It’s going to be Candyland,” she explained. “All pink.”)

Dream MORE, which opened virtually in 2020, benefitted from $25,000 in pandemic recovery dollars in 2022 and 2023. The program tapped into its reserves this year, and is ramping up fundraising for next year, said Linda Saris, executive director of LEAP. But competition for donations from individuals, foundations and corporations “will be intense,” Saris said.

A 2022 survey by the Afterschool Alliance found that programs that received recovery aid used the money to hire more staff, serve more students and expand program offerings.

That growth is now at risk, with more than half of superintendents in a separate survey reporting that they’ll be forced to cut spending on summer programs when the federal dollars run dry.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Summer school programs too short and not popular enough to reverse pandemic learning loss, researchers say

But there’s still time to postpone some of those cuts for at least a year. Though Congress gave schools only until the end of January 2025 to spend down their remaining recovery money, the Education Department is allowing districts to apply for an extension that would give them another 14 months to liquidate the funds.

If granted an extension, districts could continue to pay outside providers of summer programs through March 2026.

Still, researchers who have been tracking students’ post-pandemic academic recovery say districts and states need to be thinking longer term, and tackling learning loss from multiple angles — not solely through summer learning. If they don’t, the setbacks that students have suffered as a result of the pandemic could follow them into adulthood, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University who co-leads research on learning loss at the university’s Center for Education Policy Research.

“It’s pretty clear that the high-poverty districts in Massachusetts will not have caught up by the time the money runs out,” Kane said.

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Inside a small, mural-covered building just outside Indianola, Mississippi, 14-year-old Tamorris Carter made the rounds, bouncing lightly on his heels.

He stopped frequently to explain objects of interest; pictures of class field trips to civil rights monuments, or a poster he made on “social dominance orientation,” a term that describes one’s tolerance for social inequality. Even in moments of pause, Tamorris found a way to remain in motion. He would smooth down the cap on his head, lean forward to pinch the bubbles of a rainbow-printed fidget toy, and trace the words of his poster.

Tamorris was giving a tour of the Sunflower County Freedom Project, an after-school and summertime educational program where he’d been a student for a little over two years. The Sunflower County Freedom Project is one location of the Freedom Project Network, an organization that gives Mississippi students “holistic and liberatory education experiences.”

At the Freedom Projects, students — called “Freedom Fellows” — learn about Black and Indigenous history, math, reading and public speaking. The program also prepares students for college. Freedom Fellows range in age from third to 12th grade.

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Most Freedom Fellows at the Sunflower County location are from Indianola, the county seat. Around 9,000 people live there; 84% of them are Black. Almost a third live in poverty. The town center is ringed by cotton fields, which in July, are low to the ground and bright green. In certain places, neat rows of small plants extend to the horizon. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, a place once described by historian David Oshinksy as “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War,” is a short drive from Indianola. Last year, the town made national news when an Indianola police officer shot an unarmed, Black 11-year-old in the chest.

Other educational programs might prepare students to leave towns like Indianola. But the Freedom Project Network is “not an organization just trying to get kids into college,” emphasized LaToysha Brown, the organization’s executive director. “We are not trying to bring kids in to separate them from the community.”

Instead, she hopes Freedom Fellows will use their education to change their communities for the better.

An education that empowers

By early July, the Sunflower County Freedom Project was wrapping up its summer program. Tamorris and other Freedom Fellows moved from class to class in different parts of the building.

“This is our library,” Tamorris announced, cutting through a small room filled with books on Black history, social critique, philosophy, and young adult fiction. From there, he reached a large open area with mats on the ground. “This room is kind of like a gym,” he said. “This is where we do taekwondo.” He paused briefly to demonstrate a move, a decisive punch to the air.

Tamorris walked through a door at the back of the gym, which connected to a classroom with blue walls. A third-grade math class was in session, so he dropped the volume of his voice to a whisper. The classroom’s walls were covered in homemade posters left behind from student presentations. Among others, there were posters with information about historically Black colleges, “The Myth of Racial Progress,” and the signs of ADHD.

The Freedom Project Network takes its name from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Schools of 1964, whose alums are celebrating the schools’ 60th anniversary this year. The original Freedom Schools opened to educate young Black Mississippians on Black history and political activism. Charlie Cobb, the SNCC member who proposed the idea, wrote that segregated schools in Mississippi were “geared to squash intellectual curiosity and different thinking.” By contrast, Cobb hoped the Freedom Schools would provide Black kids with an education that empowered them. Eventually, these students would use their education to advocate for racial justice in Mississippi.

In 1998, three decades after the last Freedom Schools closed, a group of community members and Teach for America fellows established the Sunflower County Freedom Project.

Related: 7 realities for Black students in America, 70 years after Brown

LaToysha Brown, 28, grew up in Indianola and is a Freedom Fellow at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. From her perspective, the need for the Freedom Project Network was obvious.

“In Indianola schools, students do not receive a quality education,” she said. “When I was a student, we didn’t receive new textbooks, and we weren’t challenged to read many books. Our teachers were amazing with the resources they had. But our schools were under-resourced.”

In Indianola schools, “you’re never going to have an in-depth conversation about enslavement,” Brown said. Instead, the history of racial injustice is limited to “a paragraph or two” in a textbook.

The Freedom Project gave Brown an education she would not have received at school. Now, Brown works with students who attend that same school system — kids like Tamorris.

Filling in gaps

A photo of Tamorris Carter sitting next to a statue of Rosa Parks while on a field trip to Dallas hangs on the bulletin board at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Tamorris became a Freedom Fellow in eighth grade. By that point, he’d already gained an awareness of injustice, even if he couldn’t label it as such. He remembers looking around his middle school one day and noticing something strange — “I thought, ‘all I see is Black people.’”

He suddenly realized all his classmates were Black, as were the teachers and administrators at his school. This didn’t bother him, exactly, but it did make him wonder: Where are the white kids?

Related: As a 6-year-old, Leona Tate helped desegregate schools. Now she wants others to learn that history

After he joined the Freedom Project, a guest speaker gave him the answer he was looking for: Most white students in Indianola still attend the private Indianola Academy, established to maintain segregation in 1965. Each year, around 400 students attend Indianola Academy. In 2012, then-headmaster Sammy Henderson admitted to The Atlanticmagazinethat the school only enrolled nine Black students, but added that “we also have Hispanic, Indian, and Oriental students.”

For Tamorris, learning about Indianola Academy was a revelation. He had suspected his education was shaped by racism, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice those thoughts. “I didn’t want to be one of those guys that makes everything a conspiracy,” he said. But the guest speaker “gave me reassurance.” He felt — or, allowed himself to feel — that the reality of his life had been kept secret.

He began to see racism throughout his education. At school, teachers had barely mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer, who was born and raised in Sunflower County. They had not taught Tamorris about Juneteenth, either.

Indeed, it started to feel as though his entire life had been shaped by oppression. Tamorris’ mother sometimes struggles to afford food; before, this was an unfortunate fact of life. Now, Tamorris understands it as a symptom of a larger system of racial capitalism. “Screw capitalism,” he said with a grin. “Capitalism is what keeps me broke.”

This kind of thought process is a part of the Freedom Schools’ “liberatory pedagogy,” a teaching style that takes for granted that, according to Brown, “People already know what’s happening to them. They just need the language.”

Brown acknowledges that Tamorris is an extraordinary student. Still, she said, “a lot of our students walk into our space feeling like something just isn’t right in their lives. We fill in the gaps. We give them language. We allow them to share their experiences with each other about what’s happening in their community.”

On July 12, Tamorris and a few other freedom fellows gathered to present a project of their choosing to their family members and supporters. Tamorris gave a presentation on social dominance orientation, which he argues plays a role in the continuation of oppressive systems.

These presentations are a major aspect of the Freedom Project’s teaching style; they are intended to get Freedom Fellows comfortable educating their community members. From Brown’s perspective, a student like Tamorris is perfectly capable of analyzing society by himself, without the assistance of the Freedom Project. But to Brown, analysis is only part of the process.

“I said, ‘Great, you have this great big analysis of the world,” said Brown of Tamorris. “‘Now, I want you to apply that. How can you use that analysis to organize with the people around you?’”

Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth and juvenile justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.

This story was written by MLK50 and reprinted with permission.

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