Stopping the Summer Slide: It's a Matter of Access

Link to August 3 New York Times article, "Summer Must-Read for Kids?  Any Book."

Excerpt: The researchers wanted to study whether providing books to young children during the summer would affect school performance over the years. At the start of the study, 852 randomly selected first- and second-graders attended a school book fair in the spring, where they were allowed to browse from 600 book titles.

A variety of books were offered, ranging from those about celebrities like Britney Spears and “The Rock” to stories of fictional characters like the spunky troublemaker Junie B. Jones. Children could also select from culturally relevant books featuring African-American characters, as well as from books in Spanish.

The children chose 12 books. The researchers also selected at random a control group of 478 children who weren’t given reading books. Those children were offered free activity and puzzle books.

The book fairs and activity book giveaways continued for three summers until the study participants reached the fourth and fifth grades. Then the researchers compared reading test scores for the two groups.

The June 2010 issue of Reading Today notes that stopping the summer slide is a matter of access.

There are many reasons for this disparity in summer reading, but the main one is probably access to books. Research by Susan Neuman and others indicates just how pervasive the access issue is. Typically, middle–class kids have many more books in the home than low–SES children. They also have better access to bookstores and libraries. In fact, Neuman's research found that overall access to reading materials in one large urban city was roughly 10 times greater in higher income neighborhoods than in lower income neighborhoods.  [Emphasis added.]

Why does that matter? Not surprisingly, research supports the common–sense notion that access to books affects rates of reading. "When kids don't have easy access to books, they don't read very much," Allington says.

Cutting library hours and closing library branches certainly isn't helping the situation.  And eliminating school librarian positions only compounds the problem.