The Two Sides of Summer School

Students at San Marino High School don’t slow down when the school year ends--they start a scholastic sprint toward September.

Vacation for them means sharpening skills for the year ahead through the school’s fast-paced summer program. Mornings are spent on activities such as drilling in Latin and Greek vocabulary, or learning C++, a computer programming language normally taught in colleges.

“In most summer schools, kids are just working to make up courses they’ve failed. At San Marino they’re working to get ahead,” said Bob Sumpter, who has taught U.S. history in San Marino’s summer school for eight years.

San Marino’s summer school flies against the traditional notion of summer school as a place for poorly performing students to catch up--and endure almost as a form of punishment--while poorly paid teachers put up with those students in order to make some extra money.

In this wealthy San Gabriel Valley community, parents readily pay for the opportunity to enroll their children in summer school, seeing it as way to give them a leg up in the stiff competition for admission to top colleges. Teachers, meanwhile, take advantage of driven pupils and more flexible schedules to try out more ambitious lessons.

Students and teachers may don T-shirts and shorts in the summer, but there’s little else relaxed about the classroom atmosphere. And the intellectual climate is hotter than the swelter outside.

During the just-completed six weeks of summer school, a mock trial of Richard Nixon was conducted in a U.S. history class, with students playing the roles of Daniel Ellsberg, John Dean and others. Around the corner, students in an advanced class in English as a second language eagerly searched for the right words with electronic translators, hoping to break into the standard curriculum by fall.

About 650 of San Marino’s 1,100 high school students--nearly 60%--enroll in summer school. Only three of the 22 summer courses offered are remedial.

Although summer school has been popular for decades in San Marino, this is the highest enrollment ever. Teachers attribute the increase to the pressure to bolster academic records for college admissions.

“All of the colleges are a lot more competitive now,” said John Imamura, who has taught an oceanography class at San Marino for 20 summers. In addition to enrolling in courses such as his, many of the students take Scholastic Assessment Test prep classes or go to sports clinics, leaving little time to relax. “It’s kind of ugly. I don’t envy kids these days,” he said.

Until about five years ago, Imamura said, many of his summer students were juniors or seniors who were either making up a low grade in a science course or trying to get a tough course out of the way to have an easier regular school year. Now his class is filled with incoming ninth-graders who want to take more advanced courses when they begin high school.

Bobby Shih, a burly 17-year-old with a relaxed demeanor--and a straight-A average--is typical of San Marino’s summer students. He said he spent past summers sleeping or traveling but, with his senior year approaching, decided to take U.S. history this time so he would have room in his fall schedule for another advanced placement class--which he hopes will boost his chances of getting into Stanford or a similar college. “AP classes look good on your record,” he said.

Education experts believe the differing summer experiences help widen the already considerable performance gap seen in the United States between rich and poor school districts. It’s another way the rich get richer, in effect.

In addition to summer school at their own campuses, more affluent students also have the option of private tutoring or summer programs for high school students at prestigious colleges such as Harvard and Cornell.

“What it boils down to is low-income kids tend to lose a lot of the material they’ve learned in the school year over the summer, while well-to-do students may enter school knowing more than they did the previous spring,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

That’s one reason some less affluent or urban school districts, such as Long Beach Unified, have made summer school mandatory for more students who are falling behind. But using the summer for advanced academic enrichment is not something all districts can afford. In California, the state funds summer school for no more than 10% of a district’s enrollment.

To provide classes for the large number of students who want them, San Marino parents founded a private group to run the program. Students pay up to $335 to attend summer school, which is not a problem for parents in a city with a median annual household income of more than $100,000.

Many parents move to San Marino--sometimes from other countries--to get their children into its highly regarded school system. Asian Americans now make up 62% of the district’s enrollment.

San Marino is not alone in having a summer school dominated by advanced courses and high-achieving students. In La Canada Flintridge, another wealthy community, nearly 800 of the high school’s 1,200 students enroll in summer school--75% of them taking enrichment classes. Honors English classes draw more than 150 students, according to summer school Principal Michael Leininger.

Unlike San Marino’s, the La Canada Flintridge summer school is funded with state money and provided free. But the district cannot take all students who want to enroll, and uses a lottery for admission to popular classes. About 10% of students wishing to enroll in those classes are eliminated by the lottery.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only about a fifth of students take summer school programs offered in grades 6 through 12. Roughly two-thirds of the classes offered to those 60,000 summer students are remedial, however, according to district officials.

Yet the fact that there’s still summer school at all should not be taken for granted.

When school funds are tight, summer session budgets are cut and programs are sometimes eliminated altogether. Philadelphia’s school system, for instance, has not offered summer school since 1992.