Can Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL), an intensive summer learning program, improve the reading skills of low-performing elementary school children? Through a lottery system, a set of 1st through 6th grade students from Boston and New York City radnomly assigned to use the BELL program or to a control condition. Students offered the BELL program received intensive math and reading instruction with activities designed to enhance academic self-concept and increase community involvement. Standardized reading tests, interviews, and observations were used used to measure student outcomes.

The study found that children in the BELL treatment group gained about a month's worth of reading skills more than their counterparts in the control group during the summer. This is a modest, yet notable increase in reading skills for a six-week program. The study also found evidence of positive impacts on the degree to which parents encouraged their children to read. No impacts were found on academic-self perceptions or social behaviors.

These findings support claims that academically focused summer programs and (more generally) out-of-school time programs can have substantively important impacts on student academic outcomes. They also provide some support for investments in out-of-school time programming for low-income children during the summer, such as that currently provided by the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program and the Supplemental Services provisions of Title I of the No Children Left Behind Act. Most notably, these findings were cited in the “STEP UP Act of 2007,” introduced by Senator Barack Obama and signed into law by President Bush. The Act “authorize(s) resources to provide students with opportunities for summer learning through summer learning grants.”

The investigator suggests that future research could look at issues related to whether these impacts last through to the end of the following school year and how the impacts of summer school compare to after-school programs of similar cost.