GSE Theses and Dissertations

The achievement gap between high- and low-income children in the United States widened considerably in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Seasonal comparison research suggests that this gap widens primarily during summer vacation: While high- and low-income children learn at similar rates during the school year, high-income children learn more during the summer. The widening income achievement gap may have been driven in part by increasingly divergent summer experiences of high- and low-income children, as in recent years, high-income parents have increased their investments in their children’s cognitive development. However, we have no evidence on how high- and low-income children’s summer learning and activities have changed in recent decades. In Study #1, I examine how kindergarten children’s summer learning and enrichment activity participation changed between 1998 and 2010. Second, while the growth of academic achievement gaps during summer vacation is a widely documented problem, little research has examined how socioeconomic gaps in children’s social-emotional and executive function skills change over the summer. In Study #2, I address these questions. Thirdly, our understanding of effective policies to ameliorate low-income children’s summer learning loss is limited. In Study #3, I conduct a randomized experiment of a home-based summer mathematics program aimed at improving low-income children’s summer home mathematics engagement and reducing summer learning loss. Taken together, these three studies inform our understanding of how children’s out-of-school environment contributes to educational inequality.

There is a legacy of institutional oppression in our country’s public schools that results in achievement and opportunity gaps. These gaps include predictably lower academic achievement and graduation rates, higher drop out and suspension rates, and fewer college and career opportunities for students of color than for their white peers. In the 2018 - 2019 school year, I worked with the Somerville Public Schools (SPS or the district) to acknowledge and confront the lingering legacies of oppression throughout the district. This capstone draws on that experience to explore how a district might execute transformational change to disrupt inequities at all levels. It examines the role of policy in transformational change efforts, as well as what conditions must be in place in order for policy to alter longstanding practices. My strategic project focused primarily on working with the Somerville Public Schools School Committee (SC) to draft and pass an equity policy that would then be the foundation for new district initiatives to increase equity. Creating an equity policy is important to institutionalize efforts towards a more equitable school system for all students. However, in order for transformational change to occur in the district, key stakeholders, especially practitioners, must be co-creators and invested in the plan. The identities and positionality of the decision makers also matter when considering topics of equity. This capstone therefore also discusses how equity-focused leaders show up in all aspects of their identity, and how that identity impacts their work.