Practice Makes Perfect operates during the critical summer months to ensure that students engaged in our program do not suffer from the summer learning loss. According to a Johns Hopkins research study on the summer learning loss, we learned that students living in inner-city neighborhoods are susceptible to losses as great as 2.5 to 3.5 months of academic learning. To put this in perspective, the average school year is only 10 months long. If a student loses 2.5 months it is equivalent to 25%. Imagine an average student who masters only about 85% of the material s/he is supposed to learn during the school year. If the student loses 25% of that during the summer, then they return to school the following year with only 60% of the material they were expected to master. The loss compounds from year to year and by the time a student gets to 8th grade, they are reading at a 3rd or a 4th grade level.
With the increased pressure to meet national benchmarks for progress, it is increasingly important that the students entering your class are on grade-level. Otherwise, your evaluation will suffer because of a previous teacher’s inability to provide a meaningful year of instruction for his/her students.
This sort of problem makes teaching difficult. With the increased push for teacher evaluation to be linked to compensation it is increasingly important that your students are ready. The model we have built at Practice Makes Perfect allows us to provide our services at costs lower than summer school and any perceivably comparable summer enrichment program on the market. However, we need help marketing that. Work with us to help you make your job easier. For information on how to get us into your school or district, please contact us atinfo@pmpnyc.org.
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