Each year, once the school year ends, many students start to lose the gains they made. This “summer slide” has serious consequences: for low-income students, it can accumulate into a three-grade learning gap by fifth grade. In the years since the pandemic, amid uneven academic recovery and widespread absenteeism, this seasonal loss has only become more consequential.
But in Texas, something different has been happening.
For the past five years, more than 30,000 students across 85 school systems have taken part in state-supported summer learning programs, built not as remediation, but as meaningful extensions of learning time. This statewide push is one of the largest in the country and is reshaping what summer means for kids in Texas.
What makes Texas stand out is not just the scale of the effort — it’s the strategy of pairing funding incentives with evidence-based design principles and hands-on implementation support so that districts can build summer programs that lead to summer gains rather than losses.
And the path to this moment started more than a decade ago, in Dallas.
Proving the Power of Summer
In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched the National Summer Learning Project, a $60 million, multi-year effort to understand what high-quality, voluntary summer learning programs for low-income students could look like and whether they could meaningfully improve academic outcomes. As part of the project, the RAND Corporation evaluated programs across five school districts, including the Dallas Independent School District (ISD), the second largest school district in Texas.
During this time, Mike Morath, then a member of the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees, saw firsthand through the project the potential of well-designed summer learning programs to improve student learning. His experience in Dallas — and later his role at the state level — would inform the path Texas eventually took.
In 2016, RAND published its findings. When summer programs included specific components — academics plus enrichment, small class sizes, certified teachers delivering at least three hours of academics daily, and free meals and transportation — students with consistent attendance made substantial academic gains.
After one summer of high attendance (20+ days), students achieved 15% of typical annual gains in math.
After two summers, they achieved 20-25% of typical annual gains in both math and reading.
For the first time, there was rigorous evidence showing that district-run summer learning programs could reduce typical summer learning loss and support academic gains, and a clear roadmap for how to build effective programs.
This is also where our team at The Learning Agenda (TLA) enters the story. We partnered with Wallace to support participating communities and share what works so others could benefit — including resources like the Summer Learning Toolkit that later informed Texas’ approach.
Texas Goes Big in Summer Learning
Fast forward to 2019. The Texas Legislature passed H.B. 3, providing $6.5 billion in new funding for public education. A key piece was the Additional Days School Year (ADSY) initiative, which financially incentivized districts to add up to 30 instructional days, including summer days, for elementary school students.
By this time, Mike Morath was serving as the Texas Commissioner for Education. Shaped by his experience in Dallas, he recognized the opportunity that H.B. 3 created to support students through evidence-based and enriching summer learning experiences statewide.
H.B. 3 created ADSY, which provides formula funding to any school district meeting its minimal instructional day requirements. But the Texas Education Agency went further, establishing the ADSY Planning and Execution Program (ADSY PEP) to help districts design programs aligned with the evidence-based principles identified by RAND and The Wallace Foundation.
With support from The Wallace Foundation, ADSY PEP Summer, run in partnership with the Texas Impact Network along with research and technical assistance partners, provides two to three years of support for participating districts. The Learning Agenda created evidence-aligned tools and led a community of practice for the first four years. Then, as part of the state’s sustainability plan, we supported a phased transfer of responsibilities to Texas Education Service Centers (ESCs) Regions 1, 11 and 20 who now lead the initiative with TEA and with support from our team in targeted areas.
ADSY versus ADSY PEP
ADSY provides funding from H.B. 3 for eligible school districts that add instructional days – including summer.
ADSY PEP offers multi-year support to help districts build evidence-based summer learning programs informed by RAND’s design principles.
Both ADSY and ADSY PEP are improving student outcomes, but tying implementation to evidence-based practices through ADSY PEP is driving even bigger gains:
In math: Students in ADSY PEP campuses gained +10 percentage points versus students in ADSY campuses gaining +5 percentage points versus +2 for non-participants.
In reading: Students in ADSY PEP campuses gained +3 percentage points versus -1 for students in ADSY versus -3 for non-participants.
As of late 2024, 75 school districts had participated in ADSY PEP, and more than $115 million in state, philanthropic and federal funding had been invested in the effort. Participating districts range from large urban systems to rural and suburban communities and include both independent school districts and charter schools. And the number continues to grow.
This pairing of funding incentives and implementation support for evidence-based programs is changing the landscape of summer learning in Texas.
Results Drive More Funding in 2025
This spring — for the first time since H.B. 3 — the Texas Legislature approved major new education funding that builds on ASDY’s success. Key updates include:
Allowing school districts with 175 instructional days (previously 180+) to qualify for funding.
Extending eligibility to sixth through eighth grades (previously pre-K - fifth only).
Increasing funding from ½ day to ¾-day for districts offering 200 or more full days instructional days, for example through 175 regular instructional days and 25 summer learning days.
These updates expand the number of districts that can participate — and the number of students who can benefit. Seeing proven results, Texas is strengthening and extending its investment in expanded learning time.
What Texas Can Teach Other States
No other state has combined expanded learning time funding, evidence-based design principles, and multi-year implementation support at the scale Texas has in recent years. In Applying Summer Learning Evidence: How Texas State Policy Supports Strong Programming, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) draws lessons from Texas’s approach, showing how state policy can create a compelling, practical model for making summer a time of learning and growth rather than loss for tens of thousands of students. Our Learning Agenda team continues to work with states nationwide to translate these lessons into their own policy and practice contexts. We’re also partnering with Results for America on a learning series — kicking off this week — to help local school districts from around the country design, fund and implement evidence-based summer learning programs.
More learning time won’t solve every challenge in public education. But Texas is showing that when summer learning is done well and at scale, it can be a powerful tool for states seeking proven ways to improve student outcomes.
Great article and nice work Hillary!