Children from middle and upper-income families continue to learn during the summer months even though they not in school. But children from low-income families frequently have the opposite experience. They can suffer a dramatic loss of knowledge and skills, according to research by Karl Alexander, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Educators call it the "summer slide."

Though Alexander's early research is not new, experts now say the loss accumulates year after year. And the slide, they say, is a determining factor in whether students graduate or drop out.

Improving the city school district's graduation rate by preventing the slide in summer learning was the focus of a public meeting last week at the Harley School.

There have been numerous community meetings concerning the city's graduation rates. (As one person said, there have been more meetings about graduation rates than graduates.) This one, however, was a reminder that poverty not only slows learning, but corrodes it.

One of four panelists at the meeting, Rochester Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard, called the situation a crisis. Barely half of all black and Hispanic students nationwide graduate from high school, he said.

Harley's director, Tim Cotrell, described his school's collaboration with Horizons, a non-profit that designs summer programs for children from low-income families. More than 1,000 students, most of them from the city school district, have received scholarships to the six-week Horizons at Harley Summer Enrichment Program. Ninety percent of Horizons' students, Cotrell said, graduate and go on to college. Someone on the panel joked that that city school students get to spend the summer at Harley while Harley students spend the summer in Europe. That's probably as good a summation of Alexander's research as any.

Harley has applied for a $26 million federal education grant to expand the program.

The cost isn't surprising. But Rochester itself seems to suffer from a form of summer slide. As often as the community has discussed the issue, improving graduation rates invariably confronts the same obstacle: money.

Overcoming the influence of poverty is costly, but worth the investment.