A new read on teen literacy
The needs are clearly most urgent in failing big-city districts, where students often enter secondary school reading several years below grade level. But many literacy experts point out that even capable and advantaged kids benefit by learning strategies that enhance comprehension. "We all eventually hit a wall," says Sharon Kinney, the reading specialist at Springhouse Middle School (who underscores her point by handing skeptics an article on "Thermonuclear Reaction Rates in Stars"). According to John Guthrie, head of the literacy research center at the University of Maryland-College Park, only the top 20 percent or so of readers move through school automatically mastering the skills necessary to find meaning in difficult texts--to suss out causal relationships, evaluate relevance and bias, and draw conclusions using multiple sources, for example. Many of the rest, he says, begin to languish as their reading assignments become too formidable.
That's a syndrome all too familiar to college profs. One recent study by researchers at the Manhattan Institute found that only 34 percent of high school grads are equipped for the rigors of a four-year college; many of the rest are forced to enroll in remedial courses. When Achieve recently asked professors and employers how well prepared high school graduates are for college or work, 70 percent of professors (and 41 percent of employers) said students' inability to read and understand complicated material is a serious deficiency.
Progress. It's too soon to know how much of an impact these adolescent literacy programs will have on student achievement. Veterans caution that there's a long slog ahead. "I'm not going to tell you our reading scores [immediately] went way up," says Beth Lacy, principal of Cedar Ridge Middle School in Decatur, Ala., which saw only incrementally better results for several years after joining the statewide Alabama Reading Initiative in 1999. But Cedar Ridge, where all sixth graders take a reading class and content teachers reinforce what they've learned, has watched its writing scores improve quite sharply, and the most recent reading assessment showed significant progress, too. After introducing a literacy program plus extra instruction on Saturday and after school, Granite Park Middle School in South Salt Lake City has seen even its math and science scores--once the lowest in the district--rise considerably in the past two years.
There's a message in this reform movement not only for education policymakers but also for parents: If your son's grades in science or history have gradually slipped from A's to C's, the fix may lie elsewhere than a stern talking-to and a tightened social schedule (box). "Parents need to work with their kids until they're out of the house, making sure they're reading and comprehending," says Andres Henriquez, a program officer at the Carnegie Corp. of New York, copublisher with the Alliance for Excellent Education of a recent report on literacy. That's what Martha Machado did. When her daughter Stefanie entered seventh grade at Springhouse last year reading at a sixth-grade level and unhappy with her grades, Machado signed her up for Sharon Kinney's Reading Seminar, 45 minutes every other day of individual time with a novel and class deconstruction of a range of texts. By June, Stefanie was reading with the skill of a 10th grader--and in eighth grade, she's getting A's and B's.
LAGGING LEARNERS
About two thirds of middle and high school students test below the "proficient" reading level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
[labels]
GRADE 12 (2002)
Below proficient 64 pct.
Below basic 26 pct.
Basic 38 pct.
Proficient 31 pct.
Advanced 5 pct.
GRADE 8 (2003)
Below proficient 68 pct.
Below basic 26 pct.
Basic 42 pct.
Proficient 29 pct.
Advanced 3 pct.
Source: U.S. Department of Education
USN&WR
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