Springfield Public School Students administers a reading assessment called the Fountas & Pinell Benchmark Assessment (F & P) System which measures reading and literacy skills and determines various levels of proficiency for a student based on a correlated grade level expectation. Students take this test at the beginning, middle, and end of a school year. Comparing scores for the same student between the Spring of one school year and Fall of the following school year allows us to measure whether an individual student's reading and literacy skills improved, remained the same, or deteriorated over the course of the summer vacation. The percent of all entering 3rd grade students whose skills remained the same or improved between the end of 2nd grade and the beginning of 3rd grade is measured in this indicator.

According to the National Summer Learning Association, "For the more than 25 million low-income public school students in America, summer is often anything but a vacation. Instead of a relaxing break to explore new interests and places, it’s often a time when children, youth and families struggle to find and afford food to eat and a safe place to be. Summer learning loss, the phenomenon where young people lose academic skills over the summer, is one of the most significant causes of the achievement gap between lower and higher income youth and one of the strongest contributors to the high school dropout rate. For many young people, the summer “opportunity gap” contributes to gaps in achievement, employment and college and career success." (http://www.summerlearning.org/)

This indicator helps capture how much this summer learning loss phenomenon is actually occurring for students in Springfield and how well the existing summer programming and work of the families is preventing the summer slide.

Source: Springfield Public School District