Book reading over summer months proven to boost educational gains in kids
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Geoffrey Borman calls it the “summer slide.”
Borman, the Alice Wiley Snell Endowed Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, said the slide refers to the three-month period when children aren’t in school and don’t always have access to reading materials.
For more than a century, Borman said, there has been anecdotal evidence that children experience a “deterioration of learning skills” over the summer.
But Borman sought empirical evidence. So, with the help of the Milwaukee Public Schools District and Bernie’s Book Bank, a nonprofit organization based in Illinois that seeks to improve literacy rates by distributing books to at-risk children, Borman conducted a five-year study of 60 high-poverty schools in Milwaukee.
The results were published in the April 2026 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study showed that students at 30 of the schools that received a bag of books to read over the summer achieved educational gains of about two-thirds of a school year.
As schools let out and summer vacations start, ASU News talked to Borman about his study.
Note: Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What piqued your interest in doing a study like this?
Answer: I’ve always been concerned about this issue of summer slide. It’s kind of a uniquely American kind of thing where we have this really long, extended three-month period during the summer when kids are unable to conventionally practice reading and math skills. As a result, they forget a lot of the skills they learned during the school year. And when they return in the fall, they often show that they’ve either treaded water or lost ground.
So, one simple way to prevent that from happening is to just simply put books in the hands of kids so that they can continue practicing their reading skills over the summer months. It really struck me that this could be a very simple but effective way to prevent kids from falling behind, particularly kids from high-poverty communities that typically don’t have as much access to libraries and other sources.
Q: How did the study come about?
A: A program officer from the (philanthropic) Laura and John Arnold Foundation reached out to me and said he’d like to introduce me to a guy named Brian Floriani, who’s the founder of Bernie’s Book Bank. Brian wanted to do a true experimental study to see what the impact of his program that distributes free books to kids really is.
So we agreed to a study that you would typically see in the medical field where there’s an aim to test out a new vaccine or drug. Some groups of individuals begin receiving that new drug and the other half receives a sugar pill or a placebo. We tried to do the same sort of rigorous experimental control, but in the wild, so to speak.
We were able to recruit the Milwaukee school district to partner with us, and we randomly assigned 30 schools to receive the books every year and 30 to not receive the books.
Q: What type of books were distributed?
A: Each student received a bag containing eight books that matched the grade level and the reading level of the students. But they weren’t personalized necessarily to the students. One thing the (book bank) suggests is that schools should encourage their kids to actively trade the books if they want. So, if one kid gets a book about football and he prefers to read about baseball, then he can try to find a classmate who might be willing to make that trade.
Q: Your study was done in high-poverty schools. Why specifically those schools?
A: There have been observational studies going back 15 to 20 years suggesting that in low-income areas in Philadelphia, for example, researchers looked around in a neighborhood for bookstores or other places where kids might be able to access print material, and found in these high-poverty neighborhoods about one book for every 300 children. In a similar high-poverty area in Washington, D.C., it was one book for every 830 children. Even worse, in the Philadelphia example, those books were typically not even for reading. They were more coloring books. Organizations have referred to these areas as book deserts, where kids have very limited access to books.
Q: What about public libraries?
A: A lot of families in low-income communities tend to be distrustful of public libraries where they have to sign up with a federal or public institution. If they’re not a legally documented individual, they could be identified. So there’s a reluctance among a lot of low-income families to even utilize libraries if they do in fact even exist in those communities. There’s data suggesting that less than 10% of families from these low-income communities actually have library cards. So there are just very few opportunities for kids to access books.
Q: Is there a takeaway from your study, other than the fact children need to be reading year-round?
A: Yes. One of the most important variables that tends to explain the difference between children from higher- and lower-income homes is the number of books in the home. In terms of achievement outcomes, it taps into the parent’s ability to afford print materials, not to mention other resources that might advance the education of their kids. It also kind of signals an interest in academics and, from there, school success.
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