Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2005
In 2001, the Corporation, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, initiated Schools for a New Society (SNS), a five-year, $60 million urban high school reform effort, matched with local funds, aimed at promoting systemic, district-wide reform in seven cities. Encouraging partnership and collaboration with the community, including school officials and teachers, parents and students, and “community stakeholders” such as unions, business leaders, elected officials and higher education leaders, SNS has begun to address the issue of adolescent literacy in school districts in Boston, Chattanooga, Houston, Providence, Sacramento, San Diego and Worcester.
The following year, the Corporation launched Teachers for a New Era (TNE), a teacher education reform effort that seeks to develop new models of university-based teacher education rooted in research, the full engagement of arts and sciences faculty in the education of prospective teachers as well as collaboration between arts and science and education faculties and a view of education as a clinically taught practice. In both cases, while the original intent of the reform efforts was not to focus on adolescent literacy, or on the “dire data” that documents the inequalities in reading achievement among our nation’s students, it soon became clear that, ultimately, the success of SNS and TNE was intrinsically and vitally linked to the advancement of literacy.
In 2003, drawing upon what was learned through its work in redesigning the urban high school, Carnegie Corporation established the Advancing Literacy program, an initiative that would focus intensively on improving the literacy of students in grades four-to-twelve. Explains Daniel Fallon, Chair of the Corporation’s Education Division, “Our plan is to support ventures in research, policy and practice, while working to increase national awareness of the importance of teaching children not only to read words, but to understand what they’re reading.”
In a bare two years, this plan, designed and implemented by Andrés Henríquez, Program Officer in Carnegie Corporation’s Education Division, has been executed as if the future of the republic depended on it which, arguably, it does and, as of this writing, a total of thirty grants have been awarded to support projects designed to advance the literacy of middle school and high school students. Intense, focused, and exhaustively research based, the plan has been pursued with an extraordinary sense of urgency and purpose by literacy experts who are agreed on at least one point: teaching adolescent students to read to learn is not optional and, ultimately, subject teachers must assume the responsibility of helping their students to do so. Catherine Snow recalls a presentation she made to a group of subject teachers on the need to teach students the skills required to read with comprehension. To a science teacher who expressed consternation over the prospect of teaching reading to his students, she said: “If you want students to become science students, then you’ve got to help them to access the text.” How to get the job done, says Snow, is the challenge. “People are thinking a new pedagogy will solve the problem,” she declares, “but there is no one struggle, so there is no one solution.” The diversity of projects being carried out by the numerous reading experts who have signed on to become part of the Advancing Literacy initiative of Carnegie Corporation provides ample evidence that the struggles—and the solutions—are indeed many.