You Can’t Compensate for Not Reading

Read on your own, and you are in a strong position. If you do not do this, you’re in deep trouble. 

This is my constant thought about my students. Recent data from my classroom and an eye-opening new book, African Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores, have borne it out. 

 
 

The data from my classroom has been consistent. At my school, we administer math and English “interim assessments” three times a year. The teachers create the exams, often drawing upon practice SAT, AP exam, and state tests. Within 48 hours of the testing, teachers have run the students’ scores through the in-house Scantron machine and printed out data reports. Then the Friday of interim assessment week is set aside as a student-free professional development “data day” in which the entire cohort of teachers serving a grade-level scours each kid’s test and open-ended responses. We discuss patterns, draw up action plans, and identify students of concern. It’s a model of using data to drive instruction.

Every single one of these data days is an occasion for hand-wringing. The lower-achieving students rarely display meaningful progress. Their essays are often cringe-worthy. For some 11th- and 12th-graders on the cusp of heading to college, their lack of mastery of the English language can be downright scary.

I have a clutch of students who read for pleasure, yet bizarrely hand in assignments only sporadically. Let’s call them “Readers.” These are the kids who take home The Kite Runner and read the whole thing in two days—then never write any of their journal responses. Their grades do not reflect their abilities. However, these students always score at or near the very top of the class on these standardized tests.

I have many more students who hand in almost all of their assignments, yet they— according to their own pronouncements— dislike reading and never do it except when forced. They are the moaners and groaners when new books are distributed in class. They are always at or near the bottom of the statistical heap. Let’s call them “Worker Bees.”

The most recent data day sent me into a tizzy of bafflement about how to boost my Worker Bees. An hour of Amazon.com book browsing (my new addiction) led me to order Clark Atlanta University professor Veda Jairrels’s scarily titled African Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores. I devoured the 140 pages in one sitting.

Jairrels, a lawyer and an education professor, gave me little hope for the upward mobility (academically and professionally) for most of my non-reading Worker Bees. She lowers the boom in her introduction:

I believe African Americans score the lowest… because of a lack of long-term voluntary reading. Voluntary reading is also referred to as reading for pleasure… This emphasis on reading should begin at birth (i.e. parents reading to their infants). The amount of reading that children do in connection with school assignments is often not enough…

When I tell African American parents about the importance of taking their children to the library, they sometimes reply, “My child has plenty of books at home.” My unspoken response is, “No, you don’t. You just think you do.”

Ugh. She goes on to lay out extensive, sobering data reflecting African Amercans’ poor performance relative to other groups on tests. For example, the mean score for African American college-bound seniors whose parents earn more than $100,000 on the 2007 SAT Writing test was 469; The mean score for white students whose parents earned less than $10,000 was higher, at 474. At the household income of $100,000 or higher, the mean score for white students was 540. And so on.

Jairrels claims the core reason for this disparity is an accumulated deficit of skills and knowledge from not African American children not reading enough for pleasure. Reading teaches you words; it shows other places and perspectives. It broadens one’s world. She wants parents to be getting kids pumped about reading from birth, and for schools to immerse students in reading opportunities from the moment they first enroll.

After finishing a recent unit using the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, James, one of my Worker Bee 11th-graders told me, with a real sense of accomplishment, “Mr. Brown, this is the first book that I ever really read.”

I was proud of him. James’s effort in class this semester has been strong. He still remains woefully behind his Reader peers. If he somehow caught up, he’d be a statistical anomaly.

Reading is everything. When kids don’t read at an early age, they fall behind.  I believe that all children can learn, but when, for many, valuable years of reading and learning have been squandered, those students awaken in the upper grades at a tremendous deficit. Veda Jairrels sees it, and I see it in my classroom every day. 

No meaningful education reform can ignore this.

Comments

[Claus]

Fascinating. How do you think the whole discussion of on-line reading and social networking fits in here? Is it a substitute for the more sustained types of book reading you're referring to?

Also, does this expand education reform into the realm of cultural reform--and not for any particular ethnic group but for ALL ethnic groups? How do we manage that?

[Karen]

Great article! Couldn't agree more.

[Veda]

Thanks for the mention of my book.

I've started The 2000 Book Movement for the purpose of enhancing academic achievement. Please read the goals of The Movement at www.vedajairrels.wordpress.com and do whatever you can to "spread the word."

[Alita Mantels]

As a young civil rights activist, knowing that a real education is the only road to real equality, I began teaching in 1972. After nearly four decades of trying to "level the playing field" for "at-risk" students in Arkansas's public high schools, I heartily agree with your comments and those of Veda Jairrels.

[K.A. Koskela]

Any school librarian will just nod in agreement....no argument at all! I am also interested in any response to the question about how online reading and social networking involvement fits in - and whether nothing can really take the place of actually reading a book!

[Julie Niles Petersen]

PM wondered how online reading & social networking involvement fits in. There have been several articles going around lately discussing how we are reading more, but we are not becoming better readers. The reason is that we are reading more text on social networking sites, but it is filled with basic conversational vocabulary about basic social settings. This does not improve our vocabularies or our knowledge of the world. This is exactly what this great post is talking about. If kids are to do better on the tests (and in life), they must improve their vocabularies and their knowledge of the world.

Here is a link to one of the articles from the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/why-doesnt-reading-more-make-u.html

[T. J Shaw]

I am alway suspect when people try to take correlational data and conclude cause and effect relationships. I am sure that reading for pleasure is a variable in a person's success, and I whole-heartedly support encouraging the practice. However, Jairrels' own data quoted above should encourage people to look for additional, more influential variables. Knowing that family practices in child raising have more to do with income level and education than race puts into question the size of the influence of reading for pleasure. "The mean score for African American college-bound seniors whose parents earn more than $100,000 on the 2007 SAT Writing test was 469; The mean score for white students whose parents earned less than $10,000 was higher, at 474."
Something else is probably a more significant variable to produce these differences.

[Joseph Salmon]

As educators, we must look for ways to address this issue at school, and I believe that there are severals ways that this can be addressed. Students must have independent reading time during school, after-school programs must provide resources and time for literacy experiences, media centers should have multicultural books that interest all students, and books should be provided that spark the interest of boys whose reading scores are significantly lower. These simple ways of building a desire to read works. Many people do not become interested in reading until later in life. The literature supports "effort intelligence" and this process can begin at any time.

[Linda Saleski]

In working with court-involved young women ages 11 through 17, we find that all students that are identified as truant have significant reading and/or writing deficits. It's a vicious cycle that they are trapped in--they go to school, don't "get" what they are being taught, fall behind, can't or won't ask for help (that will be inadequate to solve the larger problem--their reading and/or writing deficit), so they stop going to school, they get in trouble (for not going to school and other things), they are ordered to go to school, and the whole cycle starts over again until they are "kicked out of school". Since we are a residential school, we have purposed to develop a culture of reading and writing outside of the school day, whether it's dialogue journals with counselors, reading for "pleasure" (30 minutes a night, every night), as well as staff and students sharing books and making recommendations about "good reads." We find sometimes, students surprise themselves by awakening a reading and writing habit that they didn't know they had.

[Dick Allington]

WE have to admit two things. First, it isn't just A/A kids who struggle with reading. It is poor kids regardless of race or ethnicity. On the federal NAEP poor 12th graders perform at the identical level with middle class 8th graders. And by 12th grade almost half of the poor kids have dropped out of school with those enetering high school reading at the 3rd and 4th grade levels the most likely to have left. So a true score for poor 17 year olds would be lower than 8th grade level but many of the lowest kids are no longer in school and so don't take the NAEP test.

But we also know that the schools are more important than parents in this outcome. That is, we have created a few schools where poor kids read as well as middle class kids and a few schools where middle class kids read as poorly as the typical poor kid. The key variables are classroom libraries, book clubs, and school libraries along with teachers who use all of these resources extensively. Given that the data show that only every other free lunch kid home has even a single age appropriate book, while the typical middle class home has over 100 age appropriate books, we must create schools where lots of interesting books are at kids fingertips. In Guthrie's meta-analysis of some 25 studies of improving reading comprehension two factors were most important: easy access to interesting books and student choice of books to read. It is simply hard to find schools with many poor kids where every teacher has a classroom library of 1000+ age appropriate titles and where school libraries meet the ALA standards for numbers of books available.

I could tell you about our distribution of free books over a three summer period at schools where A/A kids were 80+% of the students and where free lunch was basically universal because all the kids were from poor families. All it took to close the achievement gap between poor A/A students and their non-poor peers was giving these kids a dozen free books each summer. Books the kids selected from some 600 titles we made available for them.

I could go on, but stop blaming A/A parents and look to the schools those kids attend for the real source of the problems of low reading proficiency.

[Veda]

Regarding Dick Allington's comments, my book is not about blaming African American parents. It is about enlightening them.

See "I Depend On Me" on my blog at
www.vedajairrels.wordpress.com

[August]

I find that some people (especially so-called education reformers) resist the idea that just reading makes a huge difference because it seems too simple to them. They want a "program" that looks "scientific." They want an "intervention" that can be "implemented." Imagine if Arne Duncan said the number one "turn-around strategy" for failing schools should be getting good books in kids' hands.

[Dorene]

Timely discussion about free choice reading in a scripted and test-driven culture. I whole-heartedly agree that independent reading is a crucial component for all my students (including my middle class AP English students) because it is one of the most authentic and effective ways to improve kids' overall knowledge base and verbal skills. I regularly devote time for free reading in all my classes.

[Ariel Sacks]

Reading for pleasure is such a key factor AND indicator of learning and intellectual growth because when a child reads voluntarily he or she is focused on the reading experience and not the grade or desired test score or approval of the teacher. Our schools and school system is built around the idea that kids will respond to extrinsic motivators. Research shows that extrinsic motivators (incentives, grades, etc) work when the task is very simple, not requiring critical thinking. But when the task is more complex and requires critical thinking, the extrinsic motivator has a negative effect on the learning. That is because it moves the child's focus to the grade or desired outcome, instead of the content and experience itself. (See Daniel Pink's new book, Drive, for this research.)

Back to reading for pleasure: the Readers are having genuine intellectual experience in their reading, whereas the worker bees are just trying to earn the grade and/or please the teacher or other people in their lives and are far removed from the real process of learning.

Reading for pleasure is not the only way kids can develop and work off of intrinsic motivation, but it is a really important place to start. I agree with Jairrels that including the parents in the process is extremely valuable (I want to say essential, but some students really do not have family situations that allow this, and they can still become readers). Some of my most rewarding experiences as a teacher have been when I've connected with parents around my reading curriculum, so that parents understand their child's reading interests and actually get involved in their reading lives. In a few cases, I've witnessed the moment when the parent gets involved and something clicks for the kid--they are not the same student afterward. Thanks, Dan, for this discussion.

[Stephen]

ARG....Hulk....want...numbers!

Of course I agree with the posting: it feels so true and reinforces my beliefs about so many things. But good faith requires looking deeper than what feels right and there are too many holes in the argument and too many exceptions to the assertions to give it more weight than any other opinion.

For starters:
Do all of the students who regularly do assignments hate reading?
Do all of the students who love reading fail to hand in assignments?
So what percentage do "readers" and "worker bees" account for 100% of the population?

What other groups are not included in the article? How about:
a) loves to read and usually hands in assignments
b) hates to read and never hands in assignments
c) indifferent to reading and occasionally hands in assignments.

The posting asserts that a significant percentage of students will score at the top of the test without doing assignments; "readers" you called them. And another significant percentage, your "workerbees", will fail despite doing your assignments. So:
(% of readers) + (% workerbees) = % of students for whom the assignments are meaningless.

If the total were 100%, well, we could close the schools now without influencing test results. (Or at least the classes described here.)

Finally, I have known a lot of people (Chinese and Japanese men in particular) who performed very well on standardized tests and almost never read for pleasure, and had a girlfriend who scored over 1500 points on her SATs yet only ever read assigned books and now almost never reads for pleasure. Lucky for her, the books that were assigned were the right books.

(heh heh, note how I criticized you for lack of data then quantified my own info with "a lot"?)

[Roxanna Elden]

Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU... for shedding light on a problem obvious to so many of us. Test prep using passages about turtles and flower pots will never replace reading actual books.

[Joe Bower]

If your goal is to increase African Americans's intrinsic love for reading, then that is an admirable goal. If you want to do this SO you can increase test scores, then you are still missing the point.

[Heather Widener]

I agree. And I am cognizant, as an educated person and an educator, that my own children need to see me reading for pleasure as an example, in addition to keeping them away from too much TV, exposing them to great stories, reading aloud to them, and doing the myriad other tasks a "good" parent is "supposed" to do. But as an overwhelmed mother of three boys under the age of 10 who attend three different schools, I often find that I read - if I find time to at all - it is after the kids are in bed, or when they are out of the house. To add to to-do list: institute family reading time...... Thanks for the insights in this blog post. I appreciate them.
Heather
http://www.rootsoflearning.com

[DanBrown]

I'm so sorry I've been offline while these excellent comments have been going up. (Can I still use my 4-week-old as an excuse?)

To Stephen's interesting point about data, of course I don't have it in regard to my "Worker Bee" and "Reader" categories. My Readers who don't hand in assignments are not model students, busting down all of the doors of opportunity. They are, however, independently proficient in pretty much all of the senses necessary to earn a diploma and be considered college-level achievers on tests. Doing more assignments would of course give them important boosts, but they (and their families) have already gotten themselves to proficiency. They are not using all of the school's resources, yet they are literate and confident. I'd like them to be even more literate and more conscientious.

I work to push my Readers as much as I work to push and encourage all of my students. I'm not satisfied when Readers miss work. I'm just less worried that they will have a meltdown when their first college syllabus is handed to them and it (of course) contains copious reading.

My anecdotal observation is that the more you read, the better position you put yourself in. There is little chance of surviving (and no chance of thriving) academically without reading. The assignments are important too, and the more you do, the better. I want it all from my kids (reading + assignments). I turn myself inside out in the classroom, trying to get it all. It often doesn't happen. In this less than ideal reality, I believe that reading is paramount, and the Readers have a significant edge.

[Mary A. Lindsey]

My daughter is an avid reader and is a member of an online group call Girls Just Reading. From a very early age, I read to her and took her to the Library every Saturday morning where there was a story hour and time for children to read books quietly and check out those they wanted to take home with them. She was never without a book. As an adult now, her love of books can be seen in her home where there are shelves and shelves of materials she has read. Regardless of culture, reading to your child(ren) and encouraging reading can be the difference between academic success and failure. I am proud to be the mother of an Avid African American Reader.

[Steven King]

Interesting...look at Jairrel's background - you will get a much better impression of "why" she's accomplished. Read to your kids? Absolutely. Require them to perform? Absolutely.

[Gaby Chapman]

I was struck by your comment about your "readers" who don't do much homework, get poor grades, and score high on tests. This is so familiar to me. Since I have kids for several successive years, I notice that these "readers" eventually do become very good writers. If you are interested, I would like to send you a complimentary copy of my recently published book:LET THEM HAVE BOOKS: A FORMULA FOR UNIVERSAL READING PROFICIENCY. letthemhavebooks@gmail.com

[קלאב מד]

Discuss models, develop action plans and to identify students of concern. This model uses data to drive instruction.

[סוכנות נסיעות חופשת סקי]

Your contribution is very good according to children education, if they are not reading properly so they can be leave happy.

[לחץ כאן]

Discuss models, develop action plans and to identify students of concern. This model uses data to drive instruction.