Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2005
No wonder Bill Gates is angry—and scared. In
a keynote address delivered at a meeting of the National Governors Association
on February 26, 2005, the Microsoft chairman focused his fury on the American
high school system, which he described as “obsolete” and responsible
for “ruining the lives of Americans every year.” He explained:
“When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling
abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science,
our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth
grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. By twelfth grade, U.S.
students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations.”
Education experts might differ as to the reasons why, but reading experts would point out that the decline Bill Gates describes in science and math achievement closely parallels a similar decline in reading achievement, which is the fundamental prerequisite to all academic achievement. In the fourth grade, their beloved storybooks now a fond memory, students experience what has been described rather poignantly as “the fourth grade slump.” The decoding skills developed in grades one-to-three—i.e., recognizing and sounding out words—which have helped them to learn to read are insufficient to help them read to learn. The fourth graders are now being handed texts laden with new vocabularies and more complex content in science and mathematics, but also in social studies and literature. The reality of the situation, however, is that middle and high school subject teachers generally do not see the teaching of reading as their responsibility, nor are they trained to do so. Catherine Snow explains that the common perception among teachers is that “Reading instruction after fifth grade is remediation, not instruction”—and subject teachers don’t teach remedial reading. Without any meaningful instructional intervention, reading experts say, the slumping fourth grader will continue an inexorable decline, ominously edging toward “the eighth grade cliff,” struggling all the while with increasingly diverse and complex texts. By twelfth grade, according to NAEP assessments, only forty percent of students are performing at or above a level of reading proficiency. What of the other sixty percent? If they haven’t already joined the sad cohort of 3,000 high school dropouts a day, some will “join” the workforce in marginal jobs that lack the security that Richard Layard says is so fundamental to human happiness. Others, against all odds, will enroll in college and find themselves summarily directed to remedial courses, painfully aware that they have begun the most challenging educational experience of their young lives severely handicapped.
All in all, the world’s remaining superpower appears to have an awful mess on its hands. Far from despairing, the response of Carnegie Corporation of New York has been to intensify its historic commitment to the advancement of literacy, a commitment that, through the years, has taken many forms. In 1955, following the publication of the best-selling Why Johnny Can’t Read (Harper & Row, 1986, ©1955) by Rudolf Flesch, the phonics-whole language controversy became part of a passionate public debate on the teaching of reading. In 1959, John Gardner, president of Carnegie Corporation (1955–1967), observed in the Corporation’s annual report that it was time to determine through research “whether Johnny can or cannot read—if so why, if not, why not.” Toward this end, the Corporation awarded a grant to Jeanne Chall of the City College of New York to conduct research that would inform, if not settle, the reading debate. Determining that there were distinct advantages to programs that included systematic phonics instruction—particularly for poor children—in 1967 Chall published her groundbreaking work, Learning to Read: the Great Debate (McGraw Hill, ©1967). Later, at Harvard University, Chall developed a conceptual framework to identify the stages of reading and clearly distinguished between “learning to read” and “reading to learn.” Nearly forty years later, Chall’s research has lost none of its relevance. At the same time, recognizing the huge potential of television as a vehicle for public education, in 1969 the Corporation provided support for the internationally acclaimed public broadcasting program, Sesame Street and, more recently, the PBS series, Between the Lions.