Forty percent of Atlanta eight-grade students tested Below
Basic proficiency in reading on the 2009 edition of the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal exam of academic
achievement. Essentially two out of every five Atlanta students
heading into high school are functionally illiterate — unable to
comprehend a work as simple as Anne of Greene Gables or
even complete mathematical word problems
such as “Marty has 6 red pencils, 4 green pencils, and 5 blue
pencils.”
Atlanta isn’t an isolated case. Twenty-eight percent of
Georgia’s eighth-graders — one in every four — read Below Basic
proficiency. This is a problem with nearly every
race, age, and social class. Thirty-four
percent of eighth-grade boys tested Below Basic in reading, as
did one in every five white students and 40 percent of black
students. The low levels of literacy also aren’t confined to the
Peach State: Twenty-six percent of America’s eighth-graders and
one in three fourth-graders are functionally
illiterate.
If you’ve wondered why 1.3 million students drop out every
year, why six million students languish in the nation’s special
ed ghettos, or why girls outnumber boys on campus by as much as
two-to-one, just take a look at America’s abysmally low levels of
literacy. Far too few children, no matter their socioeconomic
background, can read well enough to function in an economy in
which literacy is more-important than ever. Boys are especially
hit hard, often trailing their female peers in reading and
falling far behind in other academic studies by the time they
reach middle school.
Although the problem may begin at home, America’s public
schools and education policies have also exacerbated the literacy
problem. Few teachers at the elementary level are well-skilled in
teaching children how to read; theories such as whole language —
which emphasized reading whole books without dealing with phonics
or understanding the context behind sentences and paragraphs —
have also wreaked havoc on reading instruction.
The latest concerns over literacy have been,
in part, spurred on by the Obama administration, which
unveiled a project called Reading
for Understanding Research Initiative to help improve
literacy. Under the program, the U.S. Department of Education is
awarding $100 million in grants to six groups of researchers
(including those from the Educational Testing Service, the
administrator of the SAT college entrance exam) to conduct
research on how teachers can improve classroom reading
instruction. This, in turn, marks the latest of several efforts
(almost all ill-fated) by federal officials to improve how
reading is taught in America’s schools.
But concerns about reading have become especially acute
because of one of the most-troubling trends in higher education:
The dearth of young men on campus. Between 1995-1996 and
2007-2008, the percentage of men on college campuses declined
from 48 percent to 43 percent, according to the American Council
on Education; there are now 1.39 women for every male on campus.
Women now make up 55 percent of overall enrollment within the
State University of New York system. The gaps are even larger
elsewhere: At some colleges, women account for as many as 70
percent of the undergraduate population. Society is only grasping
the consequences of this achievement gap, including the high
rates of unemployment among males (especially those without high
school diplomas) to the rash of more men living at home with
their parents. The new gender gap has also become the subject of
one of the hottest books in education, Why Boys Fail, by
Education Week blogger Richard
Whitmire.
But many students are failing to develop all the skills for
proper reading. As a result, they are falling behind long before
they reach sixth grade. One out of every three fourth-graders
read Below Basic proficiency, according to NAEP; although
slightly lower than the 36 percent of fourth graders reading
Below Basic in 2002, the average reading score remains almost
unchanged. Black and Latino students — the latter of which
include first-generation Americans from immigrant homes — do
poorly; 53 percent of black fourth-graders and 52 percent of
their Latino counterparts are reading Below Basic. The illiteracy
levels know no income barrier: Forty-nine of poor students read
Below Basic proficiency while a (less-abysmal) 21 percent of
wealthier students also have poor reading comprehension
skills.
Boys, in particular, are struggling mightily in reading, no
matter the race or income level of their parents. Thirty-six of
all male fourth-graders tested Below Basic in reading, trailing
their female peers by six percentage points. One out of every
four male high school seniors with college-educated parents
suffered from functional illiteracy.
The consequences of the failure to achieve full literacy
are wide-ranging. The very skills involved in reading (including
understanding abstract concepts) are also involved in
more-complex mathematics including word problems and algebra.
Being a
good reader may not mean being equally skilled in math, but
poor readers tend also to fail in math computations as well.
Fifty-four percent of Atlanta eighth-graders scored Below Basic
on the math portion of the 2009 NAEP, equivalent to the low
reading levels. Nor are students likely to improve over time. The
result is usually the path to dropping out of school and into
welfare and prison.
Poor reading also partly explains the 63-percent increase
in the nation’s
special education population (now 13 percent of the nation’s
public school enrollment) between 1976 and 2006. Among the
largest categories of special ed students include developmental
delay — which can just as often mean that the child wasn’t
taught to read at home, dyslexic as it may mean that a child
suffers from cognitive damage — or emotional disturbance (which
can also be caused by the natural rebelliousness arising from
frustration over poor reading skills). Reid Lyon, an education
official under George W. Bush, determined in 1997 that most black
boys landed in special education because they struggled in
reading. As Stanford University Researchers Deborah Stipek
and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels
in first grade are strong predictors of long-term disciplinary
problems.
CERTAINLY READING PROBLEMS CAN begin at home. Families at
all income levels who spend less time reading and engaging in
conversation with their children — especially those from
impoverished households whose parents tend to be poor readers
themselves — will produce children with low reading skills. But
it’s not all about income or interaction. Forty percent of all
kindergarten students can only learn to read if they are
specifically taught syllables, words, letter sounds and spelling.
Boys, in particular, struggle because the area of their brains in
which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of
their female schoolmates.
Educators have understood these problems for decades;
reading experts have spent years developing new ways to help
lagging students improve reading before they reach fifth grade
and work with boys to get them up to speed. This includes
identifying poor readers early on and intensive teaching of
linguistic skills every day. Few schools have implemented such
practices in their classrooms.
The low quality of America’s teaching corps — the biggest
reason for the nation’s dropout crisis — also affects reading
instruction. Few university schools of education (which educate
most of our teachers) do a proper job of teaching aspiring
students how to address reading. Just 11 of 71 ed schools
surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2006
taught teachers all that they needed to provide adequate reading
instruction.
A four-decade war over whether reading instruction should
emphasize phonics and spelling or Whole Language (a system by
which students should learn the meaning behind sentences) has
also fueled the literacy crisis. During the 1970s and 1980s,
states embraced Whole Language and ignored phonics, forgetting
that kids need to know how to also sound words. Only after states
saw reading scores decline did they reverse course. Most reading
experts argue that phonics and Whole Language are both needed in
order to learn reading. But schools aren’t doing a good job
instructing in either area.
Federal efforts to improve reading instruction —
most-notably President George W. Bush’s Reading First initiative
— have either fallen to seed amid controversy or haven’t gained
traction. The best solution may start at home: Parents could buy
a copy of Hooked on Phonics and organize
community reading sessions. It may be a while before public
schools actually learn how to teach reading correctly — and
improve literacy.
