Time to Turn the Page on Stagnant Reading Achievement
I find myself asking people that I meet in
the education reform field whether they can remember a time when they could not
read.
Acquiring the power to read is so monumental that it rewires the brain in a way that cannot be undone and leaves a person forever changed. It is the sort of synaptic magic that both improves the human condition and creates greater opportunity for those who can do it well — which is why the stagnation of the nation’s reading scores is troubling, even though they trend favorably on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
The story of a nation is a novel being
written at all times and at all places. Its themes are powerful, and being able
to access them — to read them — is crucial to our social identity. Our
shared stories allow us to cooperate in groups larger than the tribal bands
from which we descend.
These realities — these stories — make nations possible as they have made America possible. That more
children are not being equipped to understand them at deeper levels is
troubling. That we would overlook this stagnation is even more alarming.
Finishing a book requires a continued turning of the pages. The story for us,
it seems, is that reading achievement has been stuck on the same page for too
many years.
Perhaps more important is how our children
see themselves in the world and how reading shapes who they can and might be
one day. Who were your literary heroes? What stories have stayed with you from
childhood? How have those dreams set your life’s course?
My childhood was enchanted by the British
and their myths, accessed through the fiction of long-dead authors whom I would
never meet. The country’s origin story — a boy mentored by a wizard who pulls a sword from a stone — had the sort of electricity that inspires
young people to read and dream. That I was inspired by Britain’s swords and
dragons is not particularly unique. That it happened while I lived on a rugged
corner of southwest Baltimore, however, is.
When children read, they open windows into
futures that otherwise are closed. This is particularly important for
low-income children — black, white,
or other — as they struggle
to imagine their own place in the world where what surrounds them seems deeply
constricted. The kind of near-stasis we see in NAEP reading scores (a
three-point gain over a decade) inspires little in the way of confidence if you
care about these young people who have many obstacles to clear in the fight to
become who they are meant to be.
On the other hand, there are schools that
are obliterating this stagnation. In just a decade, for example, Success
Academies in New York City have expanded from one school to 34, filled with
11,000 overwhelmingly black and Hispanic students whose test scores on reading
(and mathematics) place them in the company of students in the most rarefied of
America’s school districts. Choice unleashed “Success” — and similar examples of excellence across
the country — in a way that
traditional school bureaucracies either cannot or will not. That the force of
choosing is powerful enough to bring this much excellence into the world this
quickly is a lesson that everyone should take to heart.
If you believe we can and must do better for
our children, NAEP reading scores are merely a glass that is half empty. That
hope should drive all we do so that the next 10 years are not like those we
have just finished.
— Derrell Bradford is
Executive Director of the New York Campaign for Achievement Now
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