Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2005
Other grants awarded by the Corporation focus on key issues such as the
role of the family in fostering literacy, the training of literacy coaches,
the use of technology and the special needs of English language learners
(ELLs). Included is a grant to the National Center for Family Literacy
to plan for the design and testing of programs and strategies that engage
parents in the literacy development of their adolescent and pre-adolescent
children. The project, which focuses on minority students, ELLs and students
living in poverty, aims to create and perpetuate a new cycle of literacy
to replace generational cycles of literacy deficits. At the same time,
in an effort to address the growing use of “literacy coaches”
by school districts to increase the instructional capacity of middle and
high school subject teachers so they can incorporate literacy instruction
into content teaching, the Corporation has awarded a grant to the International
Reading Association (IRA). Working with the National Council of Teachers
of English, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National
Council for the Social Studies and the National Science Teachers Association,
IRA has focused on developing standards to define what effective literacy
coaches must know and be able to do. A grant to the University of Michigan
also focuses on literacy coaches and involves the development of a web-based
tool designed to support and inform the work of literacy coaches who work
with subject matter teachers in middle and secondary schools. CAST Resources,
Inc., received a grant that resulted in the development of “the
Strategy Tutor,” a multimedia program designed to provide individualized
mentoring and support in reading comprehension to students as they attempt
to “read to learn” from the Internet. Grants to the Center
for Applied Linguistics (CAL) by Carnegie Corporation of New York and
the Rockefeller Foundation have enabled CAL to develop a language acquisition
and academic literacy model—the Sheltered Instruction Observation
Protocol (SIOP)—for middle and high school ELLs. SIOP is an approach
to teaching content to students who are learning English that focuses
on developing “academic language” to aid them in learning
academic subjects. Still another project supported by the Corporation
that focuses on the special literacy needs of ELLs is ExC-ELL (Expediting
Comprehension for English Language Learners), a project of the Center
for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) at
Johns Hopkins University. ExC-ELL is a ten-step, research-based professional
development program for middle and high school teachers of English, science
and social studies that focuses on vocabulary, fluency, writing and the
strategic processing of texts.
Clearly, the projects aimed at advancing adolescent literacy funded thus far by Carnegie Corporation are in a nascent state but taken together, these projects, the dissemination of critical research contained in documents like Reading Next and the formation of distinguished working groups such as ALFF and the Carnegie Advisory Council for Advancing Literacy make a powerful statement that the responsibility for advancing adolescent literacy is no longer just an orphaned concern.
An unconscionable number of American adolescents are functionally illiterate?or uncomfortably close to it. Few would disagree that citizens unable to read and follow instructions on a medicine bottle will never be productive players in the global economy in this digital age nor be able to navigate the information superhighway. Indeed, they will never fully grasp the significance of clichés such as these that have become part of the verbal currency of American society. So the sense of urgency that prompts Susan Frost to wish out loud that things speed up with respect to advancing adolescent literacy is perfectly understandable. It is the same sense of urgency that moves Donald Deshler and his colleagues to ask the following question in their summary of the Advancing Literacy project: What makes one [urban] school so successful that children and adolescents bloom like wildflowers in the harsh environment of a desert, and what makes others struggle just to survive and often times fail completely to thrive? It is this sense of urgency that keeps a dedicated cadre of reading experts and literacy advocates in a state of almost perpetual motion, crisscrossing the country to spread the word on the ramifications for our students of the dire data floating ominously like a large black cloud over the nation. Finally, it is this sense of urgency that has inspired Carnegie Corporation of New York to invest its resources, its professional expertise, its leverage in the funding community and its long track record as a leader in American education reform on behalf of advancing the cause of adolescent and pre-adolescent literacy.