Corporation
of New York
Vol. 2/No. 1
Fall 2002
Moving Beyond Storybooks: Teaching Our Children to Read to Learn
Carnegie Corporation in Africa
Also in this issue:
Privacy in the Information Age
Studying Ways to Protect Privacy in an Era of Terrorism
Carnegie Corporation Holds a Journalism Forum
Past Issues:
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Moving Beyond Storybooks:
Teaching Our Children to Read to Learn
After a year of research, discussion and planning, the Union City reformers began to institute fundamental changes aimed at immersing students in a language-rich environment and providing instruction across the curriculum that was literature-based. The district built up an inventory of books reflecting themes identified as important by the teachers who would actually use the texts. Often, the books reflected topics close to students’ lives, which allowed teachers to introduce exercises such as starting conversations with the students about what they had read. Other ideas were also brought into the learning mix, including methods for helping children to develop enriched vocabulary skills. All the ideas that produced results were outlined in great detail by the Elementary Literacy Committee, which produced guidebooks that correlated texts, page numbers, suitable activities, proficiencies and state standards. They presented as much information as possible in one place, helping teachers plan their activities and strive for specified outcomes.
Fred Carrigg also credits the use of technology as a real catalyst for bringing about fundamental change in the Union City schools. With funds provided by New Jersey’s Quality Education Act (which enabled the transfer of funds from wealthier school districts to poorer ones) and support from the National Science Foundation and corporate partners such as Verizon (Bell Atlantic), Union City not only bought computers and software, but also developed a high-speed, district-wide network of voice, video and data that interconnected classrooms throughout the city, along with local libraries and even a daycare center. Students, teachers, administrators and even parents can now interact across the network via e-mail and other programs. Today, children are learning research skills by accessing the Internet and using CD-ROMs, but the focus remains on literacy; in fact, teachers have noted that computers offer support for the process of writing and rewriting, and so help to stimulate the development and acquisition of language skills.
Still, Carrigg says, the process “isn’t about technology, it’s about education. I can’t imagine adding technology in a meaningful way without reforming curriculum.” And he adds what is perhaps his most important point about why Union City’s schools have made such remarkable strides: “We are a district,” he says, “that believes every child can succeed.”
Literacy as a National Issue
Schools like those in Union City and the Clarkstown Central School District are the success stories, but they are too few and far between. Fortunately, there are signs that Congress and the federal government have begun to recognize the importance of gaps in literacy achievement as a national problem that requires national attention. Accountability is the overriding theme of a $26 billion education bill signed by President George W. Bush. The bill mandates the annual, standardized testing of children in reading and mathematics in grades three through eight. If schools with poor performances fail to show improvement after two years, management changes will be mandated and parents will be provided with federal funds for tutoring.
Schools will now be required to separate out the performances of minority groups. The intent of this practice of “disaggregation” is to prevent schools from hiding lagging test scores in larger averages.
These policy changes come not a moment too soon, for we have ample evidence that the overwhelming majority of students in our urban schools who do not develop the comprehension skills necessary to read to learn—poor, minority children and children whose first language is not English—never recover. We know that as adolescents they continue to descend into an educational free fall in high school. By the time U.S. students reach the tenth grade, only a third are reading proficiently. Nearly half of 17-year-olds are unable to read at the ninth grade level, and in 35 of the nation’s largest cities, almost half of the high schools graduate only 50 percent of their students.
Andrés Henríquez, program officer in the Corporation’s Education Division, focuses on early childhood education, including upper elementary and middle schools. The phenomenon of the middle school slump, he acknowledges, is immensely complex, and there is no single education model that can address the tangle of socioeconomic, race, gender, language and cultural issues in which the urban literacy challenge is embedded.
Moreover, in this unruly “nonsystem” of American education, in which school districts are continually grappling with local issues, and internecine political struggles are frequently the rule, “There is no magic bullet,” Henríquez explains, “and there is no one-size-fits all approach.” However, what we do know with absolute certainty, he adds, is that, “It’s not a language arts problem. It’s everyone’s problem.”
A Lot at Stake
“During the past century,” notes Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, “the nation could absorb a 50 percent dropout rate from our high schools.” But no longer is such an extravagant waste of human resources feasible. Declares Gregorian, “In the 21st century, a century of global competition—a knowledge-dominated, rather than a sweat-dominated era—our nation cannot afford to lose half of our high school graduates.”
Gregorian’s observations are confirmed in a recent report, Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension, issued by the RAND Reading Study Group, a panel of 14 reading experts charged with recommending to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement ways of honing the quality and relevance of research and development related to improving reading comprehension.
According to the report, we are living at a time when the availability of blue-collar jobs has grown scarcer, and many service-related jobs require a high school diploma. In such a time, a more advanced literacy has become an economic necessity for U.S. citizens. Despite this, NAEP data indicate that the level of reading skills of most Americans has stagnated over the last 30 years. Moreover, internationally, U.S. eleventh graders perform close to the bottom, behind students from developing nations such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil. The poor performance of U.S. middle and high school students in international mathematics and science comparisons is attributable to their poor performance as readers.
“Students who are good comprehenders,” the RAND Reading Study Group points out, “use strategies in reading to learn new concepts, get deeply involved in what they are reading, critically evaluate what they read and apply their new knowledge to solve practical as well as intellectual problems.” At the same time, “Adult reading involves reading for pleasure, learning and analysis, and it represents a prerequisite to many forms of employment, to informed participation in the democratic process, to optimal participation in the education of one’s children, and to gaining access to cultural capital.”
In short, in the twenty-first century more than ever before, a great deal is riding on America’s success in teaching its children to read to learn. Advanced literacy is essential to providing all the rights and joys of full U.S. citizenship. Paolo Freire, the late Brazilian educator and writer, put it this way: Literacy, he said, is nothing less than “the practice of freedom.”
For fourth-grader Lauren, however, avid and engaged reader that she is, at this point in her life reading is something else, something at once simpler and more substantial than what the experts say. Unaware that she is well on her way to developing advanced literacy, and to enjoying the benefits of full citizenship, Lauren only knows that reading is a really fun thing to do.
Intermediate and Adolescent Literacy: The State of Research and Practice
Anne Grosso de León writes about education. Formerly the director of public affairs at the College Board, she has also held positions directing public relations and development at the SUNY College at New Paltz and at Hostos Community College, CUNY, in the South Bronx.