Literacy and Reading

Two years ago, when Jacqueline Jones was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as his senior advisor for early learning – a first-of-its-kind position –  the early childhood community celebrated. Recognition of the early years as educational years was long overdue, and Jones was an excellent choice given her work in New Jersey to create a high-quality system of early learning, beginning at age 3 and continuing up through 3^rd grade.

Then, of course, reality set in.

Once again we get a reminder of the poor state of American students’ abilities in reading and math: Only 34 percent of 4^th grade students scored at or above “proficient” (i.e. grade level) and 33 percent of students didn’t even meet the mark for having “basic” reading skills, according to data released yesterday by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

Since 2005, the amount of time that young children from 6 months to 6 years old spend reading or being read to has dropped by 10 minutes, according to new data released yesterday. The number of minutes those children spend with screen media has increased by 42 minutes.

A group of seven large education associations came together last week at the U.S. Capitol to call on Congress to reshape education policies to embrace early education. The group – known  as the Pre-K Coalition – wants to see pre-K included more robustly in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act coupled with policies that support a stronger more seamless education for students from pre-kindergarten through third grade.

Their report, Ensuring America’s Future, is an important signal of support for early education from groups that are not typically seen as early childhood advocates. 

Educators have long gone to battle over homework. Mostly, their debate revolves around the amount of homework schools assign to kids and whether or not they gain anything from completing it. But what if we could actually boost the effectiveness of homework without making it any longer, harder or more tedious for kids?

Educators have long gone to battle over homework. Mostly, their debate revolves around the amount of homework schools assign to kids and whether or not they gain anything from completing it. But what if we could actually boost the effectiveness of homework without making it any longer, harder or more tedious for kids?

Political observers say there is little chance of Congress passing a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) this year, but some legislators are forging ahead anyway. In the past month, Republicans and Democrats have put forward bills designed to be part of a redesigned ESEA, known to most as No Child Left Behind. 

The state of federal literacy funding is in flux these days, but a little-noticed announcement from the U.S. Department of Education last week showed that there are still a handful of states receiving new federal dollars to promote programs to help children learn to read.  The department declared six winners of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program: Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Texas.

By the end of this year, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will award grants of between $50 million to $100 million to states to improve early childhood education. The grants are part of a new competition called the Early Learning Challenge, a version of the Race to the Top education-reform competition launched in 2009. 

Countless studies have linked poverty and low socioeconomic status to low test scores, but some schools with children in poverty still do better than others. Resilient schools, as they are called, have better reading scores and higher poverty levels. New research in the July issue of American Behavioral Scientist looks carefully at factors that correlate with poverty, as well as school resiliency among 270,000 students in over 250 schools in Broward School District in Broward County, Florida. The author, Sara Ransdell, a professor in the Department of Health Science at Nova Southeastern University, had a twofold mission: tease out some of the conditions correlated with poverty to see how much they affect student performance, and target resilient schools and try to determine why they are outperforming their counterparts.

The results of the first part of study are almost disappointingly straightforward: Poverty was, by far, the biggest predictor of whether a child could read in the Broward School District at large.

Other factors, such as a child’s English Language Learner status or whether the child engaged in risky behavior, made “minor and often redundant contributions” to how a child performed in Ransdell’s analysis. After controlling for a myriad of different school- and child-related factors, including class sizes, teacher resources, and student ethnicity, the author was pointed back to the simplest explanation for why some children read better than others in school.