Research Brief: Summer School As a Learning Loss Recovery Strategy After COVID-19: Evidence from Summer 2022

This research brief summarizes findings from the Road to COVID Recovery (R2R) project on the effectiveness of summer school as a strategy for addressing pandemic-related learning loss, using data from summer 2022 programs across eight large school districts serving roughly 400,000 students. The brief reports that students who attended summer school experienced improvements in math achievement but not in reading, with math gains averaging about 0.03 standard deviations, consistent with prior research when accounting for program length and instructional time. The analysis highlights that most math gains were driven by elementary students, while impacts were broadly similar across student subgroups. It also finds that adding tutoring within summer school did not clearly improve outcomes beyond standard summer programming and that participation was higher when programs were located at students’ regular schools or when students were actively recruited. Despite these positive math results, the brief concludes that summer school at its current scale offsets only a small fraction (about 2–3%) of total pandemic learning losses, underscoring the need for districts to expand and layer recovery strategies to meaningfully accelerate student learning.