Match More: Ending the Summer Slide

During every recess period, Carla reads and talks about a new book with Ms. Davis. A year ago, she arrived in sixth grade two grade levels behind in reading.  She refused to read aloud in class. Every minute of guided reading makes the difference to her, and she's now only six months behind grade level. What Carla needs is a summer filled with trips to the library, museums and a guided reading program to help her select, read and talk about books.  But last summer, she visited the library only once and hung out at home. 

During sixth grade, Kevin was eager to do well in school and to make his parents and teachers proud.  But things changed the following year. There was stress at home and the family budget was too tight for him to participate in the local baseball league. His drive to excel faded to underperformance in school. Kevin needs an idyllic summer camp where he can be a kid and can get back in touch with his hopes and dreams and re-imagine himself.  He told us he was a little “bored this summer."  

Unfortunately, these stories are all too common.  Stories like Kevin and Carla’s have inspired us to launch a new initiative called Match More, that will aim to give all our students access to amazing summer experiences. 

Research compiled by the National Summer Learning Association show that during the school year, lower-income children’s skills improve at close to the same rate as those of their more advantaged peers. But over the summer, middle and higher-income children’s skills continue to improve, while lower-income children’s skills stall.  What happens when all the summers of "hanging out" pile up? Summer learning loss, also known as the “Summer Slide” or “Summer Setback.”

The impact of summer learning loss is serious academic and life consequences for our kids. Consider the research.

• Two-thirds of the ninth grade achievement gap between disadvantaged youth and their more advantaged peers can be explained by the unequal access to to summer learning opportunities during the elementary school years (Alexander et al, 2007). All the losses pile up, contributing to an achievement gap that can make the difference between whether students set out on a college path or decide to drop out of high school.
• By the time a low-income student reaches 6th grade, she has had 6,000 fewer hours of learning time than her middle- and upper-income peers.
• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).
• Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
• Children lose more than academic knowledge over the summer. Most children—particularly children at high risk of obesity—gain weight more rapidly when they are out of school during summer break (Von Hippel et al, 2007).

Our mission at Match More is to give all our students access to amazing summer experiences - in the great outdoors, sports, academics, the arts, service and beyond.  

For students like Carla, an academic program is essential this summer. She needs a program like Summer Ink at Simmons College where she'll go on interesting field trips and end her day writing about her experiences. For students like Kevin, an overnight camp like Brantwood, situated in the great outdoors with a focus on leadership development, will re-ignite his passion to learn and make good choices.  

In a parent survey of Match families this fall, 90% of families stated that cost as the #1 barrier to enrolling kids in summer programs.  Here is what Match More does to help:           

• We identify high quality summer programs across New England.
• We partner with these programs to secure free or subsidized placements for Match students.
• We work with families to identify the right opportunity for their child, and we help them apply.
• We raise funds to cover partial tuition, transportation and other incidental costs.

Help us end the summer slide for Match students. Click on MatchMore to donate and become a fundraiser.

Food for a Thousand

The vast majority of our 1,000 students eat breakfast and lunch with us every day. At Match, we do our best to offer kids healthy meals. The last couple of years, we've done that with help from our partners at Revolution Foods. What follows is a Q&A with Joshua Birdsall of Revolution Foods, about the company's philosophy, menu and how many apples they go through in a week (hint: it's a lot). 

What’s your philosophy?
Our mission is to build lifelong healthy eaters by making kid-inspired, chef-crafted food accessible to all. We believe that high quality, real food can be fun, flavorful, and good for the body and for the mind!
 
Who creates your menu?
Our menu is a true partnership between our dedicated team of chefs, nutritionists, and local representatives.  
 
What food can’t kids get enough of?
Our food needs to be delicious first, and healthy second. Not to say that healthy isn’t important to us, because it truly is. But our experience has been that you can serve the healthiest school lunches in the world, but none of it will matter if kids don’t want to eat it! To that point, our strategy is to put a better-for-you twist on kid-favorite meals.

It’s hard to pick an absolute winner, but some of our kid favorites this year have been our chicken potstickers (steamed in a whole wheat dumpling wrapper), our inside out cheese pizza (think healthy calzone!), and our all-natural hot dog.

You guys refer to your food as “real food." What does that mean?
Real food can mean so many different things to so many different people, which is why we’ve created a detailed list of ingredient standards for our meals. At its core, though, real food means simple, unprocessed, freshly-prepared food. Research shows that this kind of food is naturally rich in essential nutrients and does not contain empty calories from added sugar and fat or excess salt. Our menu focuses on whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, and lean protein. We do not allow artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or sweeteners, in addition to over 52 other “never ever” processed food additives and ingredients.

How many meals/snacks do you make a day for Match?
Between its campuses, we make an average of 600 breakfasts, 885 lunches, and 785 snacks a day for Match!

How do you get it to us? 
A day in the life of a Revolution Foods meal starts early! Our local culinary teams hand-prepare our meals daily, then ship them overnight and deliver them in the morning to each school site by truck.  

Do you freeze your food? 
This may not sound intuitive, but frozen food doesn’t necessarily go against our ingredient standards. Once fruits and vegetables are harvested, the plant will essentially starts to eat itself (and its essential nutrients) in order to stay alive. This means the longer that produce sits unused, the less nutrient dense it will be. Freezing fresh produce can actually be a great way to preserve the nutrients, which is why we sometimes use frozen vegetables.

Apples are the icon of school lunch. How many pounds of apples do you use in a week?
It changes every week, depending on what’s menued. But to give you a rough idea, next week we’re projecting around 600 cases of apples, that 84,000 individual apples for our clients in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Proving Ground

[Photo credit: Maya Dukmasova]

The Fall 2015 issue of University of Chicago Magazine includes a piece, “Proving Ground,” about the work of Match tutors in UChicago’s Education Lab. (This work was also the subject of a New York Times article last January, “Closing the Math Gap for Boys.”) We think it’s a great story about how day-to-day work in schools can fuel broader policy change. In fact, the author does a such a good job untangling the challenges and decisions a district or school leader faces, we thought we’d respond directly to a few of the most salient bits. Here goes:

““In any school system, the differences in students academic skills grow larger and larger as they progress through grade levels…no amount of pressure on high school teachers to teach algebra better will help their students working at a third-grade level who haven’t yet mastered multi-digit arithmetic.” ”

You may know that Match was founded 15 years ago, as a high school. We’ve since expanded to enroll students in the middle and elementary grades -- we wanted to serve more students, but we also believed enrolling children earlier on in their academic careers would translate to better results. These days, our preschoolers talk about college and many of our sixth graders are already planning to take AP Calculus. Are all of our students performing at grade level in Math and ELA? No. But we’re tracking in that direction. Less catch up, more mastery – that’s the trajectory.

““The challenge has been not abut solving a pedagogical problem so much as an economics problem: how to give Oxford-style instruction at Chicago Public School prices.

“Match Education may have found a way. ‘The key a-ha moment Match had,’ says Ludwig, ‘was to realize that teaching one or two kids is fundamentally different from teaching 25-30 kids. What you need to be able to do to be a good tutor is massively different from what you need to be a good classroom teacher.””

The Ludwig quoted here is our friend, Jens Ludwig, co-director of the Education Lab and a UChicago professor of social service administration, law and public policy. He’s right: training someone to be a great tutor is a lot easier than training someone to be a great teacher, primarily because being a tutor is just a much simpler job. (Tutoring is about building relationships and helping students master content; it’s not about pedagogy, classroom management, performance, high-volume decision making, data analysis and all the other things one needs to be a stand-out teacher.) It’s also effective. As the author notes, “About half way through the study, the students in Chicago Vocational Career Academy’s Math Lab doubled the amount of math they would have been expected to learn without tutoring…”

Starting in 2nd grade, Match students receive one to two hours of tutoring every day in Math and English Language Arts. That consistent, personalized attention is a big driver of our students’ achievement (alongside outstanding teachers, a commitment engaging parents and a joyful and orderly school culture) and a big reason why parents choose to join our community.

““Our theory of change is if you can show the government how to spend $200 billion better, or it’s $500 billion better, that’s how you start to have a really big impact.”- Jens Ludwig, co-director of the Education Lab and Chicago professor of social service administration, law and public policy”

We like that. The theory of change Ludwig talks about is the reason underlying Match Export. It’s also one of the things that differentiates Match from other high-performing charter organizations, like our friends at KIPP and Uncommon Schools. Once we max out our school enrollment (1,250 students), our plan isn’t to start another school – it’s to do the best we possibly can for the students we have, and to figure out better, more efficient, more engaging ways to share what we’ve learned with anyone looking to improve outcomes for kids: large urban school districts, charter school operators, traditional teacher prep programs and policymakers. Match Minis are the latest, and arguably coolest, thing we’ve done so far.

One final note: Match is no longer in the business of exporting our high-impact tutoring model to other cities – that important work has been taken on by our friends and former colleagues at Saga Innovations.