Our county's children must learn to read well
Today's editorial, written by Doug Clark in the wake of our latest One Guilford leadership conference, March 12, at UNCG. We particularly welcome your comments on this very important issue.
Students should not advance through the grades without reading well. More early intervention and better assessments will help children keep up.
A simple, powerful question was asked of panelists during last month's One Guilford program at UNCG:
Why are children promoted if they can't read at grade level?
The audience heard Kathy Baker Smith, vice president for educational support services at GTCC, report that nearly 40 percent of the students enrolling directly from Guilford County Schools don't read above the eighth-grade level.
Smith High School Principal Noah Rogers noted that two-thirds of new students arrive there with less than sixth-grade reading skills.
How does that happen? No satisfactory answer was offered, and maybe there isn't one.
It's not a simple question, school board member Nancy Routh said last week. What's considered "grade level" is determined according to arbitrary standards that vary from test to test. Results often aren't reliable.
"If I wanted to know if a child could read, I'd sit down and listen to him read," said Routh, a retired principal.
"The majority of our kids do read, and they are good readers," she added.
Those who aren't good readers should get remedial instruction outside normal classroom time in early grades, Routh said. But holding students back a year is the wrong solution.
"There's no evidence that retaining kids improves their achievement," she said. "Sometimes they actually regress."
Another school board member, however, said too many children are promoted without reading well.
"How do they get into middle school?" Garth Hebert asked. "How do they pass the third grade?"
Hebert recalled attending a disciplinary hearing for a 13-year-old sixth-grader who had passed only one subject in his entire school career -- a D in a third-grade course.
Students like that often are advanced to avoid bottling them up in already crowded elementary school classrooms, Hebert believes.
That's possible when students "pass" state reading tests that may be too easy. Guilford County's 2007 passing rates range from 79 percent for third-graders to 88 percent for eighth-graders. Numbers that high invite skepticism.
Like Routh, Lewis Ferebee believes standardized tests do a poor job of measuring students' abilities.
An instructional improvement officer for Guilford County Schools, he's a former principal at Fairview Elementary in High Point.
Assuming that a label of "proficient" on a standardized state test means a child is reading at grade level is "one of the things that has gotten us in trouble," Ferebee said. "I think that's an illusion. It's one way children fall through the gap."
Ferebee won notice for raising achievement at Fairview by initiating a schoolwide emphasis on reading, including a home reading component.
"The thing about reading is, the more you do it the better you get," he said. But many children read too little at school and at home, for studies or for pleasure.
Ferebee said schools are putting more emphasis on early intervention with small-group reading instruction and, "if possible, one-on-one support." He'd also like to see reading "imbedded in all our content areas."
The system is developing new assessment models to determine "who's actually reading on grade level and who's not," Ferebee said.
Hebert said he'd support an independent reading evaluation of every first-grader, with appropriate responses to correct deficiencies.
Maybe the Routh method would help: Spend enough time with each child to find out how well he or she reads and comprehends, then devise a strategy to meet individual needs.
Solutions like that are expensive, but the cost of failure is higher. At best, it's paid in providing remedial instruction at GTCC and other colleges and universities. More expensively, it requires trying to teach ninth-graders who can't read at a sixth-grade level, which invites frustration, discipline problems, drop-outs and too many young people leaving school without the skills they need to gain meaningful employment.
Hebert, an accountant, knows the cost of failure and says too little is being done to prevent it. "We do not invest in remedial reading, we just pretend we do," he said, adding that more teaching assistants and volunteer tutors are needed.
"We have to do everything we can to teach them," he said. "If we can't teach reading, what the flip can we teach?"
More to the point: If students don't learn to read in elementary school, when will they learn? How will they ever learn anything?
Not reading is not acceptable.
Comments (8)
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Mindboggling! I've been here for 35 years, and for most of those 35 years I've been reading about the continuing failures of our incredibly expensive government schools. The reasons are many, but the solution is always the same, the need to extort even more money from taxpayers to fix an obviously unfixable institution. It would be easier to resurrect Enron!
As I began reading the editorial I asked myself, "when do I get to the part where the answer to the problem is an outisde, very expensive, commission or panel of some sort?"
It didn't take long! I'll bet all you folks who think it is a good idea to keep investing more money in our government schools, are the ones buying Carbon Offsets to save the planet!
Posted on April 6, 2008 1:22 PM
"Why are children promoted if they can't read at grade level?"
My doctorate is in education and my MA in Reading; I was an inner-city teacher, a GSO City Schools teacher, a Competency Test remedial reading teacher, a private school principal and an adjunct prof at GTCC and A&T and in almost every case, I taught children/adults who did not read well, including at the CC and University levels. I could rant; I'll try not to again.
If we do not pass children who don't read well, what SPECIFICALLY do you want "the schools" to do with or for them? There is no self-contained, small group classroom available everyday for them. There is no money for more teachers or tutors to work with them with any of many learning strategies tailored for their individual needs. Either they go back into the same grade classroom or the next grade classroom but it's still a classroom with 25 students and a teacher and maybe a PT assistant. Maybe. And probably in a trailer.
"The schools" are faced with complexities in students that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from the 50s and have less ability to demand anything from equally complicated family situations. Kids do not enter on level playing fields but we say they do and treat them as if they do.
My old song? Schools cannot continue to be visioned as they are now if we are to succeed with students who are different from the model for which schools were designed. In the very olden days, we expected students to drop out and get jobs (when there were such jobs) and be quiet about it, silently reinforcing the fact that there will always be poor people without education and that's just the way it is. We don't accept that anymore but we have the same school model but with vastly different expectations. How in the heck is THAT supposed to work?
It is not simply a matter of throwing money at it. "The schools" have to be re-imagined and restructured into an arena that meets the needs of families and that includes early and late day care, health facilities, real nutrition, tutors and mentors, male and female role models and much more. I try very hard not to sound like a socialist, but continued demanding that "the schools" meet every single child's (and family's) unique needs when those needs are so much more complex and different and our expectations are so vastly changed is simply hollering down a rain barrel.
When do we want to have serious discussion about what "the schools" can possibly become instead of bemoaning that we're getting exactly what we built Dewey's schools to accomplish?
Posted on April 6, 2008 6:40 PM
Sue,
After your lengthy rant, I saw no solution provided.
Posted on April 7, 2008 8:27 AM
Sue, Tony, the problem is not money, it is a lack of leadership. Missed priorities down on Eugene Street. Parenting...or lack of.
As a future school board member (hopefully), I plan to stress parenting, and increasing the role and partnership parents play in their child's lives. The school can't be the mother nor the father, and neither can teachers. It is up to all of us, but especially our parents to play a bigger part and accept a larger role in their child's education.
Getting a diploma and not knowing how to read is unacceptable.
I'm hosting a virtual Town Hall meeting online this Wednesday from 7-9pm. I hope to discuss this and more. All are invited.
Posted on April 7, 2008 11:10 AM
Ian, apparently I was unsuccessful at "not ranting." But to propose a solution:
One solution is to stop thinking of "the schools" like we do but to think of education as a new institution. A new shape. A new building (or set of buildings) offering new services. Instead of tacking on breakfast to the jobs of traditional school employees, create an area where families and children can be fed in the morning, managed by professionals in that field.
Health? If kids are sick, send them to the doctor (on the grounds) where they can be treated and can rest till parents come home, separated from healthy children.
After-school homework sessions: not only rich kids should be tutored. Pay tutors to help kids who aren't doing well (any kid) and make sure there are men and women who can both tutor and mentor children who need that.
Play? Kids need to play. Get the supervisors needed (not teachers, they're busy teaching) and have organized and not-so-organized play time and space for kids. Let them burn off energy before going back to a traditional class.
Can't read? Take that child out of a 25-student class and put him/her into a small group with a teacher trained to develop reading skills (same for other subjects, but reading is the topic above).
Will that cost money? Sure. The war is costing multiple billions per month. One-two months' worth of that could build new schools that I vision above.
Do YOU have a solution, Ian?
Posted on April 7, 2008 9:14 PM
Sue:
Your ideas provide a thoughtful look at a difficult problem. I would just ask several questions: 1) do we need to have publicly funded boarding schools to raise children who are ready for school and can continue to participate appropriately and 2)where is all the money to come from to do what you suggest and 3)given the probability that the money pie will not grow much, how can the average to above average children get what they need if the most fragile are receiving the vast majority of the revenues available? Read the ETS report "The Family: America's Smallest School" which outlines the causes of the crisis in American education and what can be done. You are so right that it's not all on the schools to fix everything!
Posted on April 8, 2008 1:28 PM
no more social promotion
Posted on April 9, 2008 6:10 PM
Wow, you people must not have kids in school. My daughter is in first grade, and can hardly keep up. It's not because of lack of effort either. The amount of work these kids have is crazy! My child is reading and spelling what I was doing in the 4th grade, when I was school. We need to get back to our roots of learning and not expect everyone to be a genius! Or to put ridiculous demands on 7 year olds! My child has 15 spelling words a week, (and I don't mean words like cat and dog) a poem to memorize every week. Atleast 2 pages of homework everyday and no less than 30 minutes of reading a day. Does not not seem extreme to you? My child cannot go out and play after school, because we have hours of homework to do!
Posted on April 13, 2008 2:14 PM