Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
Many children in the USA are too busy, too distracted and, in some cases, too tired to read books for fun, according to a survey to be released today by Scholastic, suggesting that schoolwork, homework and the inability to find a book they like may keep them from regularly digging into more than required reading. USA 
Today’s Greg Toppo got an early look at the results.
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You knew it was coming, and today Sol Stern dissects the IES study documenting the “failure” of Reading First, describing it as neither rigorous nor comprehensive.
“The study found that students in a small sample of Reading First schools showed no greater improvement in reading comprehension than those in a similar group of schools that applied for the program but didn’t get federal grants. The IES’s poorly designed study, together with sloppy media coverage of its findings, will likely cause irreparable damage to Reading First—the only federal education program that requires schools receiving federal grants to adhere to instructional approaches backed by evidence and science.”
Another sign that not all is lost. While the conventional wisdom says teens aren’t readers, they are actually scooping up novels in unprecedented numbers, Newsweek reports. “Young-adult fiction (ages 12-18) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children’s Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre,” the magazine notes.
While Harry Potter gets all the press, any 4th- to 8th grade teacher can tell you there is an extraordinarily rich body of work currently in print for kids, most of which is virtually unknown outside of schools. Ask someone who’s not a tween, teen or teacher if they’ve heard of Jerry Spinnelli, Katherine Paterson, Kate DiCamillo or Louis Sachar. Be prepared for blank stares.
“This is the second golden age for young-adult books,” author David Levithan tells Newsweek. “Levithan and others cite several reasons for this perfect storm for teen lit, the most obvious two being the increasing sophistication and emotional maturity of teenagers and the accompanying new freedom for writers in the genre to explore virtually any subject. Another is that bookstores and libraries are finally recognizing this niche and separating teen books from children’s books.”
The Newsweek piece follows a report issued two weeks ago, What Kids are Reading: The Book Reading Habits of Students in American Schools, which was touted as the first comprehensive report to provide detailed information about the books school children are actually reading.
Readers of certain age probably remember with fondness The Electric Company on PBS. At the very least, it was acceptable “educational” TV for 6 to 9-year olds who had outgrown Sesame Street. The New York Times reports PBS is reviving the show, although it will have to work harder to find an audience in the increasingly crowded, (if content-free) kids media arena:
“Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).”
Now if someone would only revive Schoolhouse Rock, which probably did more to get me interested in social studies than any of my teachers. More than 30 years later, I still know all the words to those songs.
Those who want to be early childhood or elementary school teachers in Connecticut will have to pass a test to prove they know how to teach reading. The State Board of Education added the requirement to Connecticut’s teacher certification requirements last week.
The test will be required for certification for early childhood and elementary school teachers beginning July 1, 2009, according to the Hartford Courant. Massachusetts requires the same test for certification.
Over at the Teacher Leaders Network Blog, a question and a discussion that seems obvious to Core Knowledge teachers, but causes endless head scratching elsewhere: Why don’t more teachers incorporate Social Studies into Language Arts? “Now that science will be tested annually at our elementary level, social studies has officially taken the lowest spot on the totem pole,” complains a district coordinating teacher for S.S.
One teacher replies with common sense: “Language Arts is not a subject. Instead, it is a set of skills that one uses to learn other subjects. So when we’re selecting texts to read, we select social studies texts and incorporate reading skills into our lessons. When we’re looking for topics to write about, we select social studies topics.”
This simple idea could do more to improve reading scores than any other measure: stop sacrificing content on the altar of language arts. The connection between content knowledge and comprehension is established enough that the idea should start to gain some traction. There’s a law of diminishing returns in abandoning content instruction in favor of yet more reading strategy lessons.
We need a snappy way to get this idea to stick. How about “Domain Understanding Helps”…DUH!
“Teaching comprehension strategies is not the same as equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.” — Sara Mead, Early Ed Watch
Nice to see Sara Mead at Early Ed Watch pick up on what E.D. Hirsch and others at Core Knowledge have been arguing, that reading is not a skill that exists in a vacuum. All the reading “strategy lessons” in the world won’t help if you don’t have background knowledge to apply to what you’re reading.
Mead weighs in on Reading First noting the IES research released last week “raises serious questions about Reading First’s effectiveness, but it’s worth taking a closer look before writing the program off entirely.”
“Finally, we should ask whether the person who should really be declaring victory here is not Reading First’s critics, but E.D. Hirsch,” Mead notes “This study focused on one indicator of children’s reading performance: student reading comprehension as assessed by the Stanford Achievement Test. The researchers did not assess children’s phonemic awareness, decoding ability, or fluency, for example. That makes sense because comprehension is, in the researchers’ words “the essence of reading.” But it’s also problematic because, as Hirsch has argued passionately in recent years, reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must also have a rich content knowledge that enables them to connect what they read to existing knowledge. (Hirsch is fond of citing an article describing a baseball game as an example here: Poor readers who know a lot about baseball will comprehend the article better than excellent readers who have never seen a baseball game.) Teachers observed in this study spent substantial time teaching children reading comprehension, but teaching comprehension strategies is not the same and equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.”
The way we teach reading—endless focus on comprehension strategies—has limited efficacy as Dan Wilingham and others have shown. If we really want our kids to succeed, we’ll arm them with decoding skills, then a content-rich curriculum that gives them broad background knowedge. Teaching content isn’t something to do after kids have learned to read.
Teaching content IS teaching reading.
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