More on literacy in the popular press
Do you think prominent discussion of issues will help improve outcomes?
I’m dropping links here to two recent publications in widely read media that feature what I consider to be important perspectives on literacy, reading, and reading instruction, I’m interested in SET readers’ “takes” on them, so please drop comments.
In the venerable New York Times, Emily Hanford (fine journalist about reading that she has proven to be again and again and again and again) (published a September 2022 ) an editorial about the purpose of schooling. She argued that “School Is for Learning to Read.” I think she’s right. Learning to read may not be the only reason that we subject our precious young children to an understaffed, underappreciated, institution called “school,” but it has to rank right there in the top group of reasons. Ms. Hanford, as usual, makes a compelling case.
In Newsweek, Baker A. Mitchell, Jr., who is the leader (and founder) of a cluster of charter schools called the Roger Bacon Academy (with home offices in Leland, NC, US; it’s in the Wilmington, NC, area), published an editorial about how COVID-19 affected the Academy’s population after about February of 2020. One of Mr. Mitchell’s points is that, because the Academy stayed open while public schools closed, it saw a substantial increase in enrollment, but that’s not the point I’m after here. Mr. Mitchell also explained that the ~500 children who enrolled during the early pandemic times were woefully underprepared; they were on the road to failure. The Academy employs Big DI instruction. When they got the influx of students with the beginning of the pandemic, they assessed the students’ language and literacy competence; they found that (don’t hold your breath) lots of the students has substantial deficits. So—and here’s the happy part—the Academy had to provide intensive fundamental instruction…and students progressed! Read Mr. Mitchell’s account to get the word straight from him.
Now, because I’m the editor of SET, I’m going to grant myself some leeway here and allow me to assert some observations about these publications by Ms. Hanford and Mr. Mitchell. I’ll hope I stay within the rails!
First, I am quite pleased that the topics of these reports were deemed important enough that editors at the New York Times and Newsweek published them. I understand that the US and other countries face substantial concerns about (a) governance (will countries be governed by people chosen by a cabal or by the people themselves?), (b) finance (how should countries address changes in prices and wages?), (c) security (including both safety in our neighborhoods and protection from international bad actors), and (d) myriad other issues. So, there’s a lot to do…and reading makes doing them possible.
As Thomas Jefferson (for all his faults) noted, education is of critical importance, and one cannot gain an education when one cannot read. He wrote, “no one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in it’s effect towards supporting free & good government.”
If we humans on Earth are going to have a future, we need an educated (i.e., a reading) populace coming along after us. Teaching children to read is a substantial investment in the survival of our species (and probably every other species on the planet). Teaching our children well (i.e., effectively) is a human duty.
I hope that Ms. Hanford’s and Mr. Mitchell’s opinion pieces help promote acceptance of that responsibility and clear-sighted focus on accomplishing it.
If anyone except Prof. Lloyd had solicited comments on the apparently unending “reading wars,” I would have ignored it and gone back to learning how to paint with watercolors.
I don’t know when the “wars” began, but publication of Rudolf Flesch’s cry of outrage, “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955), when I was in 3rd grade and probably through with Dick, Jane and Spot, is most often cited as the education history equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Regardless how war broke out, it is still going on, soon to rival the Hundred Year’s War spanning the 14th and 15th centuries.
Consider Nicholas Lemann’s “The Reading Wars” in the November 1997 issue of The Atlantic. Or, Natalie Wexler’s 2018 “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read — and What to Do About It” in Forbes magazine. Prof. Lloyd cites two very recent articles in the popular press to hammer the point, perhaps, that reading, instruction while critically important to everyone’s welfare, is still being hotly debated. The classroom battlefield, unfortunately, is made horrific, not by the fates of journalists, politicians, or academics, but rather by the lives of children.
In all this time, after repeated and earnest reform, there is no change. The latest NAEP data, while bemoaning the large reading achievement loss presumptively related to pandemic disruptions in teaching, does not mention that the trend during the 52 years of national testing results for 4th graders have been rather discouraging, perhaps 12 points higher on average than in 1971. Although we may softly applaud this very slow gain over 50 years, it hardly seems like cause for celebration considering how critical reading skill is to everything … everything…else and the massive investments we say we’ve made. Moreover, all of the traditionally observed gaps between various groups of vulnerable children and those with substantial social class advantages still persist after half a century of “prominent discussion”.
A reasonable person would conclude that prominent discussion, while always desirable, has moved the ball hardly at all.