The Struggle to Keep Literacy Afloat in the United States

Dr. Barbara Swaby is a professor of education, director of Graduate Reading Program and the Graduate Reading Clinic. She has taught courses for Mind Extension University, the education network. Her Journey into Literacy series won a Telly Award in 1993 and an Angel Award of Excellence in 1994. Dr. Swaby is also the creator of the LOGO Project, which provides books for low-wealth children.

The Problem

In 2002, the Children’s Defense Fund published a report titled The State of Children in America’s Union. In that significant report, the authors referred graphically to “America’s fifth child.” This metaphorically identified fifth child highlights the fact that 1 in 5 of America’s children under the age of three lives in poverty. Today in the United States, 40 percent of our children live in poverty (NCCP 2006). This is a staggering percentage. When we isolate race within this statistic, we find that nationwide 63 percent of Hispanic children, 61 percent of African American children, 30 percent of Asian children, and 27 percent of white children live in poverty. Poverty does not mean the same thing today as it did three or four decades ago. Then, poverty did not carry with it the horrific negative predictions that it does today. We all clearly understand the academic advantages that money can provide. But poverty should not define educational destiny to the degree that it does today. The Children’s Defense Fund report identified several dire research-based predictions related to America’s fifth child. The most ubiquitous of these realities follow.

America’s fifth child

• will not grow or develop as quickly as other children, mentally or educationally;
• is twice as likely to repeat a grade in school;
• is twice as likely to drop out of school before graduation;
• is more likely to require special education services in school;
• is more likely to end up on welfare;
• is more than twice as likely to end up in trouble with the law;
• is more likely to begin school already thousands of words behind his or her middle class peers;
• is more likely to enter school not having been read to than his or her middle-class peers;
• is more likely to have fewer books in the home;
• is less likely to have had quality childcare, preschool, or early educational experiences.
   

The vast majority of these children enter school ill prepared, underskilled, and with dismal educational futures.

Research has demonstrated an unfortunate yet irrefutable relationship between academic performance in school and demographic factors such as poverty, race, and language  (Strickland 2003; Whitehurst and Lonigan 2003). For far too many years, children from low-income environments have performed at a significantly lower level than their average- to high-income peers in academic subjects. To some degree we can understand the practical reasons for this fact, and unfortunately much of our educational problemsolving time is spent rationalizing this relationship. The reality that is much more frightening and significantly less easy to understand is the fact that now in the United States this academic performance gap between children of color, particularly African American children, and their white counterparts is evident even in the highest socioeconomic brackets (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003). It is clear that there is an underlying dilemma relative to academic performance at all socioeconomic levels in minority children.

Graduation Rates

Reading performance is unquestionably the gateway to academic success. It is the fundamental skill that allows people to perform well in school. Because reading is so elemental to intellectual growth and development, children’s reading performance provides a clear and reliable view into their future educational successes. In 2003, the Nation’s Report Card (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported that 37 percent of all 4th graders and 56 percent of 4th graders from low-income families did not achieve the minimum reading standards (U.S. Department of Education 2003).

The real calamity in these statistics is the disproportionate representation of minority children. About 69 percent of African American 4th graders and 67 percent of Hispanic 4th graders are in this category. Nationwide, these percentages convert to about 4.5 million African American and 3.3 million Hispanic 4th graders. Clearly the country is in a literacy crisis. However, for children of color, this crisis escalated long ago to the level of a catastrophe. This catastrophe is even more frightening in light of a significant body of research suggesting that students who fall behind in reading performance by 3rd grade rarely catch up by 12th grade.

In a significant 1999 report, Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, Moats provides the following unsettling statistics:

• About 20 percent of elementary school children have difficulty in learning to read.
• At least 20 percent of elementary school children do not read fluently enough to find reading enjoyable.
• The rate of reading failure among African Americans, Hispanics, and limited English speakers ranges from 60 percent to 70 percent.
• One-third of poor readers nationwide come from college-educated families.
• About twenty-five percent of American adults are not able to read well enough to meet the requirements of the typical job.

These facts are certainly major links in the interpretations of the drop-out and college-participation rates, particularly for children of color. The table on this page shows the high school graduation rates in the United States. It is clear that these rates have a direct relationship to general proficiency in reading—the gateway to academic skill.

In spite of this tragic reality, a 2005 poll by Harris Interactive tells us that 89 percent of African American high school youth plan to go to college (JA Worldwide 2005). Sadly these plans go unrealized for many. African American males earn GEDs in prison more often than they graduate from U.S. colleges.

Response of the Educational Community

This academic and reading dilemma faced by far too many of our nation’s children and by a disproportionate number of children of color has not gone unnoticed in the educational community. Billions of dollars have been spent on massive, large-scale intervention programs such as Title 1 and Chapter 1. Most recently, programs emerging from the No Child Left Behind Act have resulted in further huge economic, curricular, and instructional investments. Unfortunately these programs have not produced substantial improvements. At least 20,948 schools across the nation failed to meet the “adequate yearly progress” in 2004–2005, and more schools were found “in need of improvement” in 2005 than in 2004 (NEA 2005). In fact, sad to say, research suggests that the longer that students received Chapter 1 services, the further they lagged behind their peers (McGill-Franzen and Goatley 2003).

These topics of inadequate reading performance and the performance gap in learning have been well discussed in the research of the past decade. Many researchers and authors have put forth well-reasoned and research-based solutions to both problems. Rosa Smith (2005), the president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and a well-known author who addresses the performance of black boys, suggests that this current plight can be changed with organic links among school boards, administrators, educators, and parents. She states that the effects will be positive when superintendents are willing to make the following commitments:

• Focus on producing high academic achievement and improvement for low-income and minority students.
• Align district resources with a laser-like focus on support for teaching and learning.
• Embrace parents, the faith community, and business leaders as required ingredients for student success.
• Formulate student-focused policies that both promote adult accountability and reward student success.
• Develop contract language for superintendents and other administrators that addresses specific academic goals to be achieved, using the success of the district’s most vulnerable students as the requirement for pay raises.
• Create a system of education that begins with universal access to high-quality preschool options and full-day kindergarten options.
• Require evidence that effective and ongoing professional development takes place frequently for teachers of children who lack support at home.
• End the over-representation of children of color in special education programs.
• Increase student attendance rates and lower teacher absentee rates in lower-performing schools.

In addition, a wide array of suggestions has been made specifically related to instruction in reading. Bonita Grossen’s 1997 landmark synthesis of research on reading from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development makes the following important suggestions for effective reading instruction:

• Begin explicit instruction in all aspects of phonemic awareness in kindergarten.
• Teach every sound-spelling correspondence explicitly.
• Teach frequent, highly regular sound-spelling relationships systematically.
• Show children exactly how to sound out words, and provide many opportunities for them to do so.
• Use connected decodable texts for children to practice the sound-spelling relationships they learn. (Decodable text is composed of words that use the sound-spelling correspondences the children have learned, as well as a limited number of sight words that have been systematically taught to them.)
• Use interesting stories that are read to children to develop comprehension, especially in the early stages of reading acquisition.

In spite of the volume of excellent suggestions for improvement, the achievement landscape remains relatively unchanged, and the achievement gap widens.

The solutions to this continuously metastasizing educational problem cannot be achieved by any one group, entity, or set of interventions. The problem is fed by a number of corrosive arteries including poverty, insufficient linguistic vocabulary and experiential knowledge, and parental uninvolvement. Unfortunately, inadequate and ill-prepared teachers also contribute to the problem. Teaching at Risk, a 2004 report by the Teaching Commission, discusses the urgent need to improve the quality and pay of K–12 teachers. Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the chair of the commission, states the following: “The quality of teachers in our schools affects every aspect of our society, from jobs to national security…. The nation will not continue to lead or to create new jobs if we persist in viewing teaching—the profession that makes all other professions possible—as a second-rate occupation.” The report suggests that the field of education does not adequately reward excellent teachers, and the report also states that it is not surprising that half the number of new teachers leave the profession after just five years.

Indeed, a chasm exists between classroom instructional practices and the research knowledge-base on literacy development.

In Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, prepared for the American Federation of Teachers, Moats (1999) discusses the difficulty of bringing proven research findings into the classroom: “Indeed, a chasm exists between classroom instructional practices and the research knowledge-base on literacy development. Part of the responsibility for this divide rests with teacher preparation programs, many of which, for a variety of reasons, have failed to adequately prepare their teacher candidates to teach reading.”

Reading teachers are facing increased criticism for their lack of reading instruction knowledge. Schifini (1999) notes that many reading teachers are inadequately prepared to teach reading. Snow and Shattuck (Snow 2002) state that “teacher preparation and professional development programs  are inadequate in the crucial domain of reading comprehension, in part because the solid, systematic research base that should undergird teacher preparation does not exist.”

Toward a Set of Possible Solutions The Home Environments

Certainly, superintendents, administrators, and teachers are all part of this network of solutions. I believe, however, that it is a grave error to see those groups as the panaceas or even the immediate catalysts for change. Institutional change takes time, and the process moves slowly. But time is a luxury that today’s children cannot afford.

In my opinion, the fundamental solutions need to begin with the realization by parent —particularly by the parents of children of color—that education resides first in the home. It is important to realize that all the societal and educational maladies discussed above affect all racial and ethnic groups in our society. One group, however, seems less negatively affected by these ill effects than all the others. That group is the Asian Americans. As a group, they are the highest performing faction within our society. It would be useful to ask ourselves why this is so.

One set of answers can be found in the New York Times article “Sisters Think Parents Did O.K.” by Alex Williams (October 16, 2005). He reports on two highly successful Asian sisters, Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim. These sisters were the children of hard-working middle-class immigrants from Korea. In their home, there was a rule: read one book from the library this week; receive a candy bar next week. “We read the book, and we got the candy,” said Dr. Abboud, who is a  surgeon and clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. In their book (2005), the sisters discuss growing up in a structured household in which their parents spent hours every day educating their children, access to pop culture was limited, and the children were taught that their failures reflected poorly on the family. The sisters state that traditional Asian methods seem to work in an age in which competition to succeed is significant and American parents are spending thousands of dollars on tutors and counseling for their children.

Their position is certainly supported by the facts that although Asian Americans make up less than 4 percent of the population they make up 25 percent of graduates at top universities like Stanford and have a median household income that is about $10,000 higher than the national average. The sisters make a point to say that they were not academically gifted students. In the New York Times article, the sisters identify a number of family habits that contributed to their commendable success. These include the following:

• Their parents insisted that they learn not only on a daily basis but on an hourly one.
• The entire family reviewed every grade and report card as a group and strategized about how each child could address his or her weaknesses.
• Their parents insisted that they come straight home to study after school instead of hanging out with their friends.
• They saw their friends on weekends only.
• Television was limited to one hour on weekdays.
• Phone calls were limited to 15 minutes each day.
• Homework was completed each night, and additional work was assigned by their parents if there was time.
• Their parents were willing to sacrifice their own leisure time to micromanage their children’s educational progress.
• Their parents expected both effort and results.

Ms. Kim, 29, who has a law degree from Temple University and works as an immigration specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the New York Times reporter, “Our parents viewed competition as a necessary and unavoidable part of life. They wanted us to embrace, not fear, it.” Until more parents and specifically more minority parents begin to raise more academically responsible children, create more academically supportive home environments, and create more planned time for the reinforcement of academic information, the dismal condition of education is not likely to improve. These changes, I believe, should form the foundations of the changes that are necessary in the schools.

The School Environments

Clearly, the groundwork of academic learning needs to be laid in the home. Needless to say, however, this foundation has been severely neglected and often completely ignored in far too many homes. This sad reality makes it imperative for school administrators and particularly for teachers to compensate for anemic home literacy foundations by effectively creating, teaching, and cultivating literacy among all students, particularly among high-risk students. The first step in this process is for all teachers to become highly skilled in the direct and appropriate instruction of reading.

At the start, teachers must understand that they cannot rely on any reading curriculum or program to teach all or even most children to read. All programs are created for relatively average learners and must be modified, often significantly, to meet the needs of many children and certainly of most high-risk children. Instead of relying on any program, teachers must be trained, skilled, and resourced in such a manner that all children are guaranteed daily vertical growth. This growth should be built on the knowledge base of the instructor and not dependent on the reading curriculum. In other words, the real key to teaching literacy is the quality of skill possessed by the artisan as opposed to the tools that the artisan uses. It is imperative that teachers understand reading and not just do reading. Proof of this requirement is the fact that the national reading scores of children remain comparatively low and show relatively little progress in spite of the following circumstances:

• The purchase and use of the latest and most research-based, well-publicized, and expensive curricula
• The purchase and use of the latest, most research-based, and popular support materials
• The presentation of the most current and frequent staff development opportunities

Why is there relatively little progress in spite of these circumstances? One critical reason is that all curricula are written with a particular population in mind. In order for any curriculum to meet the needs of all your students, the following questions must be asked:

• Have your students’ learning characteristics been identified?
• Have your curriculum demands been identified?
• Does your student population meet the mandatory requirements of your curriculum? In other words, do your students have the prerequisites demanded by your curriculum?

The only way to achieve maximum growth in reading for the overwhelming majority of your students is to have a teaching staff that can compensate for the inevitable mismatch between your students and your curriculum by modifying the instruction to meet the needs of all your students. Most teachers are unable to make these modifications because they lack a strong, basic understanding of literacy in general and teaching reading in particular. You may ask, “Why do teachers lack this understanding when they receive so much ongoing staff development?” Reflect on this. Outstanding consultants are brought to your school. They present very well-prepared, current, relevant, research-based, exciting information to your staff on several days throughout the year. Given the fact that the average human being requires about 70 repetitions of information before that information is stable in long-term memory (Biedalak, Murakowski, and Wozniak  how much of the consultant’s information do you think teachers retain (or are able to apply) after each presentation? In addition, are there built-in measures that hold teachers accountable for the  information presented and that provide for them assistance and feedback in the application of the newly learned material?

One Reading Solution

A part of the solution to the reading crisis in our country is the reading tool that I have developed and taught for many years. I believe that it presents a reasonable, meaningful, manageable, and productive way to develop instructional skills in increasing literacy. This tool is called Let’s Teach Our Children to Read. The system does the following:

• It presents 26 hours of basic, current, research-proven reading strategies for teacher training, provided in meaningful and manageable segments. Topics include What Is Reading? What Is Important in a Reading Program? What Is Important in a Reading Lesson? Facilitating Vocabulary Development, Developing Phonemic Awareness, Developing Literal Comprehension, and Developing Nonliteral Comprehension.
• It provides information that is not tied to any one philosophical or curricular position. It provides information that every teacher at any level using any instructional approach should know.
• It makes the information available on CD-ROM, CD, DVD, or VHS formats so that teachers may view the modules at any time, as often as they need to.
• It provides a Web-based support system to all users.
• It provides a Literacy Evaluation Instrument for use by principals or by any teacher evaluator for the assessment and evaluation of instructional practices that focus on literacy. This evaluation tool also provides principals and evaluators with several suggestions for teachers based on a wide variety of literacy devices.
• It supports school-to-home connections by providing 4 hours of literacy training for parents.

An important component of the literacy learning system I have developed is the parent component. It assists parents in becoming necessary supports to the reading program of their child’s school. It provides strategies that will ensure literacy development when they are practiced at home.

Administrators can use the literacy training system in the following ways:

• They can observe, evaluate, and coach teachers on all aspects of their instructional skills by using the Literacy Evaluation Instrument.
• They can pose questions to and receive answers from a literacy expert (Dr. Barbara Swaby) by using the online discussion board designed for administrators.
• They can track their teachers’ progress regarding participation in the literacy learning system.
• They can provide comprehensive content for staff development meetings by using the system’s 10 classes with 43 modules designed for teachers.

Teachers can use the learning system in the following ways:

• They can review literacy classes either in a group setting (staff development meetings) or in a self-paced one by viewing the system’s 10 classes with 43 modules designed for teachers.
• They can pose questions to and receive answers from a literacy expert (Dr. Barbara Swaby) by using the online discussion board for teachers.
• They can take posttests to demonstrate that they understand the information they reviewed.

Parents can use the learning system in the following ways:

• They can review literacy classes either in a group setting or in a self-paced one by viewing the system’s 1 class with 6 modules designed for parents.
• They can pose questions to and receive answers from a literacy expert (Dr. Barbara Swaby).

Conclusion

The fundamental solutions involve more and better academic support at home and more and better appropriate literacy instruction in school.

We are all observing and participating in a significant literacy crisis in the United States. This crisis has become cataclysmic for minority youth, especially for African American youth. It will take Herculean efforts by all adult groups in our society to turn this tide to a reasonable and acceptable conclusion. Parents, administrators, teachers, and all related educators must be consciously involved in creating solutions. Minority students are particularly at risk. Their futures at this point are in grave danger. The fundamental solutions involve more and better academic support at home and more appropriate and better literacy instruction in school. These factors are not choices. They are requirements if we desire our youth to survive well in the society that they indeed will inherit, carve, and propel.

I welcome the opportunity to form a partnership with you in addressing the educational plight of urban, minority, and poor children through the vehicle of Christ-centered education. I know that by the love and grace of our heavenly Father we can make a difference in the lives of His children.

All references are available in the attachment below.

The Meantime Volume 5 Number 3