Education expert shares the paradox of summer vacation for kids — and its growing inequality

It’s over 110 degrees and some schools are starting across the Valley this week. Kids across the state are saying goodbye to long summer days, camps, road trips and cookouts.

But as summer vacation comes to a close, we’re bringing you one last conversation about its value — or lack thereof — for some students.

Tim Daly is CEO of Ed Navigator as well as the author of the Substack “The Education Daly.” The Show spoke with him more about the paradox of summer vacation for kids — and its growing inequality.

Full conversation

TIM DALY: It's a persistent myth that summer vacation is scheduled so kids could work on farms and in reality it was quite the opposite. It started because East Coast cities were crowded and hot in the summer, and families that had the money to do so wanted to leave the city and take their kids to seaside destinations. So that was the origin of summer vacation. It wasn't about farming kids at all.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK. So you say progressive educators said, you know, this isn't fair. We need to let kids who aren't rich basically play outside in the summer as well, and the summer break is born.

DALY: That's exactly right. And it was kind of the intent was to give all kids the same experience, so to speak, that rich kids had.

GILGER: Interesting. But you argue that that's never been the case, that rich kids have always had the upper hand when it comes to summer and in lots of ways kind of been the only ones who benefit from it.

DALY: That's right. It's never worked for families that don't have means because parents are frequently working and activities cost a lot of money, vacations cost a lot of money. And so for the most part, sleep away summer camps and other great opportunities that we often associate with summer vacation, those are largely available to upper middle class and wealthy families, and pretty inaccessible to lower income families.

GILGER: Yeah, so I want to talk more about that in a moment, but let me back you up for just a second and talk about the trade-off in summer breaks, right? Like, is it worth it? Do we have any data on whether or not we should even have summer breaks if kids are losing too much in progress and education in that time?

DALY: It's a really interesting question because kids do lose some ground academically. Some kids can afford to lose a little bit of ground because they're in really good shape, so they lose a bit in the summer, they gain a bunch of really interesting experiences and then they come back in the fall and pretty quickly they make up the ground that they lost. It's a more difficult question for kids who are behind because there is really good research suggesting that when students are academically behind and they participate in high quality summer programming, it's a great way to catch up.

So I think it, it's fair to describe summer as a trade-off, and you could argue that getting to participate in summer jobs and cultural experiences like going to museums and, and maybe doing sleepaway camp, make it worthwhile, but it's It's most worthwhile for kids who are academically in pretty good shape and who don't need summer to catch up.

GILGER: Right. You mentioned summer jobs and I want to pause there for a moment because you pointed out something really interesting in your piece that surprised me about summer jobs that you assume that kids who don't have as much money are the ones working summer jobs, but you said that's actually the opposite.

DALY: That's exactly right. Kids who are most likely to have employment during the summer are wealthy kids because they're the ones who are able to, for example, have transportation to where their employment takes place and jobs also require things like recommendations and resumes and things like that. And teen employment has been dropping for decades, so teens today are much less likely to work during the summer or the school year than kids a few decades ago.

GILGER: Interesting. So let's talk then about what this looks like for those kids who aren't from wealthy families. Like what do they end up doing with their summers?

DALY: They spend an enormous amount of time on screens. That's a pattern that's emerged over the last 10 or 15 years. We talk a lot about the concern with rising screen time for children and adolescents, and it's very much tilted lower income kids to spend much more time on screens than higher income kids. And in the summer, the least expensive activity is to just be inside and either on a computer or a tablet or a phone or watching TV. So I think the number one thing is lots of screen time.

GILGER: It's interesting because here in Arizona summer are incredibly hot, so I mean like you can't even let kids go outside and play in the way that you know you might not be able to let kids go outside and play in the winter on the East Coast.

And lots of cities are getting hotter like it's becoming less safe for kids to play outside all the time whether or not they're in the middle of the desert like we are. Do you think that could make summers less enriching for kids who aren't rich going forward?

DALY: yes, absolutely could make a difference, and I think the kinds of summer activities that are positive are typically structured and they're social, so it's not, you know, kids inside by themselves. It's groups of kids, playing team sports together, taking trips together, those sorts of things are really rewarding and to the degree that that extreme heat makes it harder for families to do anything but just keep their kids inside. I think that that probably is a risk factor going forward.

GILGER: And we should mention at the same time, the price of formulating a plan for your kids has just shot up, right? Like whether it's, you know, expensive travel, but even just day camps.

DALY: That's right. Over the last couple of decades, wealthier parents have just poured more and more money into their kids in many different forms. They pay lots of money for academic enrichment. They pay for their kids to play on travel sports teams and they pay more money for things like summer camps.

So the gap between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to summer has only gotten bigger because there is this market out there for really expensive summer activities that are out of the reach of most of them.

GILGER: All right, so then let's talk about solutions, potential solutions, which you, you have some ideas for whether it's subsidizing programs that wealthy kids get to do and letting other kids go to them as well, job programs, scholarships, etc. What are some of the ideas on the table?

DALY: We absolutely should have more employment opportunities for kids beginning at age 13,14, 15, and some cities are investing that. The research has shown that when kids are employed during the summer, not only do they earn more money, but they seem to pick up habits that make it less likely for them to be chronically absent from school the next year and less likely to drop out.

One thing to think about is how to subsidize local employers to take on more teen employees for those short term summer months. That can be done in lots of different ways, but, I think one objective certainly should be more kids in the workforce.

GILGER: OK. You also dropped the V word. What are summer vouchers?

DALY: So they are in the new federal bill that was passed this summer, the one “Big Beautiful Bill Act,” there is a substantial federal subsidy for education scholarships, so essentially vouchers, and states have to choose to participate in that program. Some states will probably choose to do it and, and some states won't. It's a little bit different. The state level vouchers because this would be all federal money and an open question is whether states could choose to use those vouchers specifically for summer programming.

So there are certainly states that are unlikely to adopt traditional vouchers, generally blue states like New York or California or Illinois. They're probably not going to be interested in participating in a traditional private school subsidy program, but it's not clear right now that they couldn't elect to accept those vouchers and restrict their use just for summer. And if they did that, they potentially could provide pretty lucrative vouchers worth several thousand each to every family with school-age children, that would, almost instantly level the playing field in terms of affordability for summer activities.