Below, Jason Richwine writes about how a rigorous experiment about whether school summer-reading programs help narrow inequalities in education (poor kids generally lose more ground during the summer than their peers, a problem educators have been tangling with for a while). There’s little evidence from this study, alas, that they do, as Jason explains. That’s doubly unfortunate because it turns out educators have been searching for a way to improve reading skills for a while. The relatively small, but real, improvements that education reform has brought in some places across the country over the past decade or two have often concentrated in math.

Kathleen Porter-Magee recently argued that this may be attributable to the fact that higher or better standards, which have been tried in most ed-reform-friendly states, work better for math than they do for reading: Math skills and achievements are pretty easy to define (can you do long division?) while reading ones are not (can you identify the main idea of a text?). The Common Core standards are supposed to address this by emphasizing elements of curriculum that aren’t quite standards: a “content rich” curriculum, for instance.

The good news is that there are plenty of things besides better standards that ed reformers have been pushing hard for: Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, for instance, found impressive gains in reading skills by placing kids in private schools in the district (at lower cost than educating them in the public schools), while math results weren’t terribly impressive. The optimistic way to look at the disappointing result Jason highlighted: It suggests one thing didn’t work, but there are lots of other strategies still to try.