Dallas City of Learning Longitudinal Analysis of Student Outcomes, July 2025

Longitudinal Report of Dallas City of Learning Outcomes over a 7-year period finds that summer program participation is linked to meaningful and age-specific benefits.

Big Thought, serving as the backbone agency for Dallas City of Learning (DCoL), has continued its focus on enhancing out-of-school time (OST) programs for youth in Dallas. By offering a broad spectrum of support to program providers, DCoL aims to increase access, dosage, and quality across the ecosystem while fostering community engagement and uplift.

This report from The Addy Foundation Center on Research & Evaluation (CORE) at Southern Methodist University summarizes a series of analyses designed to explore whether students with high dosage, more consistency, and more variety of summer learning engagement consistently outperform lower-engagement groups. CORE looked for differences in effects across grade levels and for different outcomes (e.g., school attendance, grades, test scores). The analyses are structured around four dimensions:

Groups of students: 9 (Group A=highest engagement…down to no engagement)
Cohorts: 3 (K-6th grade, 2nd-8th grade, 6th-12th grade)
Outcomes: Attendance, course grades, standardized test scores
Time: 7 school years

Overall, CORE found that summer program participation is linked to meaningful and age-specific benefits. Students who took part in more summer programs tended to do better than those who did less or none. Key Takeaways include: