Every Kid Deserves a Baller Summer

Not just the rich ones. This is America. This is our thing.

Let’s start here: Contrary to what you’ve heard a zillion times, schools did not begin taking extended breaks during the summer months so kids could work on farms.

Farming doesn’t work that way. The busy seasons are spring and fall. Early American schools in agrarian communities generally held their sessions in the winter and summer for this reason.

New York City, circa 1900

The origins of summer vacation are urban, not rural. As East Coast cities like New York and Boston became crowded, dirty, and unhealthy during the 1800s, wealthy families decamped during the hottest months for seaside destinations. Progressive educators argued that all kids should have similar opportunities to frolic and play outside like “hedonists.” School calendars adapted accordingly.

But poor city kids weren’t winging off to the family estate in Newport for pastoral romps. They were trapped in sweltering tenements. They played stickball in the street or courted trouble or watched the paint peel.

This has always been the problem with summer vacation. It is magical. It is perfect. And for 150 years, it has been mainly for rich kids.

Can we do anything about it? Let’s discuss options.

Summer vacation is awesome

We’re dealing with a basic trade-off. When kids aren’t in school, they don’t learn. In fact, their skills generally erode somewhat from the last day of a given school year to the first day of the next.

But the magnitude of “summer slide” is largely manageable. Most students catch up fairly quickly when school resumes.

In exchange for the missed opportunity to continue growing academically, kids spend their time doing other things - almost all of them associated with positive long term outcomes.

Some examples:

• Jobs. Teenagers who participate in summer employment programs earn more money, complete high school more often, and get arrested less frequently.

• Travel. Family trips are more than an excuse for dads to drag race supermodels on the highway.¹ They improve academic performance, with greater gains in literacy from cultural attractions (museums, art galleries) and larger benefits in math from attending sporting events. Plus, family vacations are super fun.

• Sports. When the weather is warm and the days are long, kids spend more time outside doing things that aren’t feasible in the winter. Unsurprisingly, researchers find that the volume and intensity of physical activity are higher in the summer months - and sedentary behavior is lower. Taking advantage of summer flexibility to join a team sport is particularly beneficial, as those kids see massively better psychological and behavioral health outcomes.

• Overnight camp. Spending a few weeks in a buggy cabin with random bunkmates is associated with a host of social-emotional outcomes including self-esteem, leadership, lower anxiety, and skill at making new friends.

In short, the bargain works. Kids lose about two months of instruction; they gain the best memories of their lives - and skills they will later rely upon. At least, some do.

Less privileged kids don’t get the same deal

These great rites of summer? They are far more accessible to kids whose families have $money$.

Gallup reports that lower income families are less likely to enroll their kids in any type of structured summer programming - and cost is the main driver.

It’s getting worse. From 2019 to 2024, inflation drove up the price of day camp by over 25% to about $530 per week, per child. For day camp.

Overnight camps generally run $1,000 to $2,000 per week, a figure that increased by about 25 percent annually in recent years. How many families have that kind of money? Very few.

Maybe teens from households with more modest incomes are working instead of attending fancy sleep-away camps. Nope. The kids most likely to hold summer jobs are those whose parents make the most money. Getting hired requires things like knowledge of what’s available, references, and reliable transportation. Guess who has those things?

So how do low income kids spend summer?

Some are on screens. In 2013, Seth Gershenson found that lower income children spent about two hours more per day watching television than higher income children.²

Others are just looking for something to eat. Of the 28 million students who get federally subsidized meals at school, only 5 million continue their participation in the summer months due to barriers such as transportation. Studies confirm that hunger spikes, leading to negative health consequences.

Summer for less privileged kids is a far cry from The Sandlot.³

We need to make a true investment in summer

This dynamic has been needling me. Summer vacation does exactly the job educators envisioned back in the 1800s. Big win. But the net effect is to widen opportunity gaps - not to shrink them.

We can’t get rid of summer break and make school year-round. Nobody would support it.

We can’t pay for low income students to participate in the high quality programs that wealthier students are accessing. It would be totally unaffordable.

Hold on - are we sure about that?

After all, per pupil spending has climbed steadily over the past decade - while student performance has dropped. As new tax revenue becomes available, the argument for funneling most or all of it into K-12 systems has gotten weaker. There are legitimate questions about how additional dollars would be spent. Chad Aldeman has done a tremendous job of showing that districts have continued to hire far more staff even as enrollment has declined. The political toxicity of closing schools has led districts to pour massive resources into keeping half-empty buildings open.

It’s hard to imagine the public will foot the bill for these strategies forever.

Alternatively, states could focus more resources on giving each kid a chance at a great summer. A rich kid summer. They should consider good ideas that come from across the political spectrum:

• Jobs programs. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson is one of America’s least popular mayors, but he is steadfastly committed to growing the number of 14- and 15-year-olds who participate in One Summer Chicago internships. Johnson has grown the initiative, which started successfully under Rahm Emanuel but atrophied during COVID, by 40 percent in two years. He deserves more credit than he gets. Other cities and states should be doing the same thing.

• Access to cultural attractions. Kansas offers Sunflower Summer, which provides free admission for pre-K through 12th grade students - and one adult guardian - to more than 230 museums, zoos, arboretums, etc. over the summer. It’s so popular, they had to reduce the length of the program this year to fit within budget constraints because only $3.5 million was appropriated by the legislature. That’s a pittance. Memo to Kansas: Take the win and fully fund the whole summer. Memo to other states: You need to follow Kansas’s lead with this type of initiative and you need to do it ten minutes ago.⁴

• Summer vouchers. Some readers just rage-dropped their phones into their coffee mugs at the mention of the v-word. Stick with me for a moment. President Trump’s recently signed One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains federal tax credits for individual donations made to scholarship-granting organizations. Those scholarships are essentially vouchers. States can opt in or out. For blue states, it’s a tricky choice: conform to the administration’s preference for vouchers or forego large federal financial subsidies that will accrue to taxpayers in states that sign-up. When full regulations are written, the administration should allow states to focus exclusively on scholarships for summer activities if they wish. Such states could offer a few thousand dollars to low- and moderate-income families to cover camp registration, cultural tourism, apprenticeship programs, sports teams… all the good stuff we are talking about here. States could claim their full share of resources without privatizing their school systems. The administration could brag about expanding “vouchers” to every state. Someone commission a poll. Wouldn’t this approach have broad appeal with parents?

The alternative

We can change absolutely nothing about summer. That’s an option. The status quo has hummed along happily for decades. So far as I’m aware, there is little policy momentum for a re-think.

If we go that way, though, wealthy families will continue spending gargantuan amounts on their children - a sort of social capital trust fund. Less fortunate kids will get a few summers of loosely organized day camp at their local park district and thousands of hours indoors doing nada.

That would be unfortunate.

The most American thing we can do is to celebrate that this is our season. We own it. The Fourth of July. Road trips. Cookouts. Baseball. Fireflies. Family reunions. Capture the flag. Huck and Jim rafting down the Mississippi. This is our DNA.

Every kid deserves a real American summer. Not just the rich ones.

1. You were going to look it up anyway. I’ll save you the trouble.

2. In 2025, we can probably assume television has been eclipsed by other forms of screen time but the general trend is similar.

3. Now seems like the right time to issue a verdict on the best movie ever made about summer vacation. There are the partisans for camp-set classics like Meatballs or Wet Hot American Summer. They’re great. We’ve already referenced The Sandlot and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the latter of which rules the family roadtrip sub-category by a wide margin. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is quite good. But the clear and incontestable winner is Stand By Me. Discuss.

4. There is a federal program, Every Kid Outdoors, that provides passes to national parks, lands, and waters for fourth graders and their families. It’s fantastic but it presupposes that families have the resources to travel to those destinations.