America’s Literacy Challenge:
Teaching Adolescents to Read to Learn

Editor’s Note: This edition of the Carnegie Results reviews a relatively new initiative for Carnegie Corporation of New York: the Advancing Literacy program, which focuses on improving the literacy of students in grades four-to-twelve. Though the effort was only begun in 2003, it has already made important inroads in tackling the challenge of improving adolescent literacy and in highlighting what has been done and what still needs to be done in this area. We thought that an early look at the issues and directions the program is pursuing as well as some preliminary “lessons learned” would provide useful insights for all of us who are concerned about how the ability of our nation’s youngsters—who, after all, are tomorrow’s potential leaders—not only to read, but also to understand the content and depth of what they read, may affect the future of our nation.

All the reading experts agree. America is having an awful time teaching its middle school and high school students how to read with comprehension. Counter-intuitive and oxymoronic as such a notion appears to be (after all, what does reading without comprehension mean?), it is nonetheless true. The track record of America’s schools in teaching their children to read is, in a word, abysmal. Indeed, a glance at what Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, refers to as the “dire data” very quickly leads to the conclusion that, when it comes to student literacy, the nation is clearly on the wrong track. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than eight million of America’s schoolchildren in grades four-to-twelve are “struggling readers.” Meanwhile, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state assessments reveal that the gap in reading achievement continues to widen between subgroups of students disaggregated by race/ethnicity, low income and students with limited English proficiency and disabilities. The Alliance for Excellent Education has reported that each day in America 3,000 high school students drop out. Perhaps most alarming of all is the following: among those high school students who enter college as freshmen, approximately fifty-three percent enroll in remedial courses. British economist Richard Layard reports in his new book, Happiness: Lessons from A New Science (Penguin Press HC, 2005), that people without skills are “much more likely” to be unemployed and low-paid. Literacy is arguably the most basic skill of all, yet Layard points out that “In Britain and the United States roughly one in five of the population is functionally illiterate: for example, they cannot read a simple instruction on a medicine bottle. This contrasts with roughly one in ten in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands.”

Written by: Anne Grosso de León. De León writes about education.