Summer School Innovations

Report Outline
College Boosters for the Disadvantaged
Extensive Growth of Summer Schools
Avenues to Educational Equalization

College Boosters for the Disadvantaged

Summer school—long the stepchild of American education —is rapidly becoming a vital, if not indispensable, part of the entire educational system. Its new importance is a product of the current campaign to overcome the so-called crisis in education—a drive marked by efforts to improve the quality and availability of education for all, especially for disadvantaged children of poor families and for gifted children in every rank of society. The drive has gained momentum because the government and private foundations, recognizing the nation's need for more highly educated manpower at all levels of employment, have appropriated large sums of money to attain that goal.

The new money comes to the educators at a time when their traditionally conservative profession has been in a ferment of self-criticism and under pressure for innovation, reform, and experimentation. Teachers are therefore enabled to institute many unconventional programs designed to meet the unprecedented demands on American education. Programs of this sort are likely to be launched in the summer, when freedom from the relatively rigid schedules of the regular term permits more experimentation. Many of the novel summer projects are closely linked to developments in education as a whole and may therefore become a permanent part of the total educational effort.

Summer Sessions at Yale for 11th Graders

One of the major new projects in summer education gives an advance taste of college life to selected high school students whose circumstances in life would normally make pursuit of higher learning an unlikely prospect. Many of these students have not had particularly good grades, and the odds are that they would not qualify for admission to college under the usual criteria. That leading colleges and universities should concern themselves with high school students who would not ordinarily be considered “college material” is in itself an indication of a remarkable change of outlook and policy in higher education.