How one tragedy sparked a literacy movement.

The proverbial middle of the night phone call. It’s a benign cliché, the stuff you read about in stories—until it’s your phone that rings at 4 a.m. My family’s middle-of-the-night call came on May 6, 1995. It was the police, calling to tell us that my sister Melissa, then a 22-year-old senior at Washington University, had been killed—just two weeks shy of her graduation.

I was 10 years old at the time, my brother was about to graduate from high school, and my parents couldn’t comprehend how the world’s natural order had been so jarringly disrupted.

Melissa and her friend were walking back to their car after a casual Cinco de Mayo dinner. Two teenagers approached Melissa and her friend at gunpoint and forced them into a car. They shot and killed Melissa, and proceeded to rape and shoot her friend. Miraculously, my sister’s friend not only survived but convicted them, ensuring that the two men would never again have the opportunity to destroy another life.

The exaggerated platitudes often used to describe someone once they’ve passed away were sheer fact when it came to Melissa. She was beautiful, vibrant, smart, funny, and kind, an adoring sister and daughter. It was beyond comprehension that two teenagers out for an evening of cruel entertainment could have snuffed out Melissa’s bright light in such a senseless, random act of violence.

Melissa’s death was unbearable and unfathomable to my tight-knit family. The grief was palpable, but we vowed that we would not live in fear, not allow evil to prevail. 

It was around a year later that the criminal process concluded and the jagged agony of loss started to subside into a dull sadness. My family was just learning to navigate a new world in which we had to contemplate acceptable answers to perfunctory questions, answers we still grapple with 15 years later: How many siblings do you have? How many children do you have? 

My parents decided to take action to prevent violence from causing this pain in others. Our family helped establish The Melissa Institute for Violence Prevention and Treatment—a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study and prevention of violence through education, community service, research support and consultation. With scientific evidence that violence is preventable, our mission is to promote safer communities through the application of research-based knowledge. It is unacceptable for anyone to live in a world where a violent crime is committed every 30 seconds, a murder every 30 minutes.

The Melissa Institute is in the midst of developing our most ambitious project to date—a literacy Web site that will prevent violence and save lives.
 
A few relevant facts: Up to 80 percent of incarcerated individuals are functionally illiterate; studies show that if a child reads on grade level by the end of 3rd grade, there is a 99 percent certainty that child will never be incarcerated; school performance, more than any other single factor, is a major contributor as to whether a youth becomes involved in drugs or violence.

Currently, we are allowing at-risk children to fall through the cracks and enter a path towards failure.

Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that teachers are only required to take only one or two undergraduate course in literacy instruction. If we are not properly educating teachers to teach reading skills to students, how can we expect our students to learn to read?
 
Dr. Dale Willows, a leader with more than 35 years of experience in the field and a member of the National Reading Panel, is developing this literacy web site for The Melissa Institute.

It will be a universally accessible, free program that will be used as a professional development tool for teachers of pre-K to third grade students. The program has been field-tested with astounding results in diverse sites, across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We have found, unequivocally, that the program works.

For instance, a school in Hialeah, Florida, went from having 37 percent of children passing the reading proficiency exam to 56 percent after the first year and 62 percent after the second year. Further, several schools in Jackson, Mississippi went from 65 percent proficiency in the base year to 83 percent in the first year and 96 percent in the fifth year.

This initiative will save lives—the lives of potential victims, and the lives of children who are destined to go down a violent path if we do not intervene. Beyond all else, we want to prevent another family from receiving that life-altering middle of the night call, and from unnecessarily losing a loved one to violence far before their time.

By Debra Viadero

Eighty-five percent of poor 4th graders in predominantly low-income schools are failing to reach “proficient” levels in reading on federal tests, according to a new study by a national foundation that is gearing up to lead a 10-year effort to raise 3rd graders’ reading proficiency.

“The evidence is clear that those students who do not read well have a very tough time succeeding in school and graduating from high schools and going on to successful careers and lives,” Ralph R. Smith, the executive vice president of the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, said in an interview. “The Casey Foundation is putting a stake in the ground on grade-level reading by the end of the 3rd grade.”

The report, which is due to be released this morning, lays out the statistical case for the foundation’s soon-to-be-announced, 10-year initiative to ensure that more children become proficient readers by the time they leave 3rd grade.

As part of the new campaign, the report says, the foundation plans to join with other philanthropies to finance reading-improvement efforts in a dozen states representing different geographic regions in the country. But Mr. Smith said details of that new venture will not be available for another two months.

The report, “EARLY WARNING!: Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters,” is the 21st in a series of statistics-laden Kids Count special reports by the foundation. While some of the foundation’s previous studies have emphasized its “two-generation” approach to improving the well-being of disadvantaged young children and their parents, the new report shifts the focus to getting children on the path to reading proficiency from birth through 3rd grade

Context Matters

Nationwide, the report notes that 68 percent of all 4th grade public school students scored below proficient levels on 2009 reading tests administered through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated testing program. But on a state-by-state basis, the percentages ranged from a high of 82 percent in Louisiana to 53 percent in Massachusetts.

 National results for the 2009 NAEP reading tests were released in March, and the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday is scheduled to release results in reading from the Trial Urban District Assessment, which compares the performance of 4th and 8th grade students in 18 of the largest U.S. school districts.

The foundation adds a new wrinkle to those analyses, though, by breaking out passage rates for disadvantaged students in the nation’s neediest schools.

The figures show how poverty and different school contexts can exacerbate the proportion of students having trouble mastering reading. While 83 percent of poor black students in schools with moderate to low levels of poverty failed to hit the grade-level reading target, for example, the corresponding percentage for low-income African-American students in schools with high concentrations of poor students was 90 percent. For economically disadvantaged Hispanic students, the percentage of students falling short of proficiency drops from 88 percent in the schools with the most poor children to 82 percent in better-off schools.

The nation’s reading problem is also worse than it seems, the foundation says, because many states, facing pressure to boost students’ scores on state exams, have lowered the “cut scores,” which are the number of items that students must answer correctly. To underscore that point, the report cites an earlier study by the National Center for Education Statistics, which showed that only 16 states set their proficiency standards at levels that met or exceeded NAEP’s lower “basic” standard.

It’s crucial that children master grade-level reading by 3rd grade, the report says, because that’s when instruction moves from a focus on learning to read to reading to learn.

Room for Improvement

The report also offers several recommendations for improving children’s reading, including targeting absenteeism—an aspect of schooling that is often overlooked. Nationwide, the report says, an average of one in 10 kindergartners and 1st graders miss 10 percent or more of the school year because of excused or unexcused absences. In some districts, the ratio is as high as one in four for children in grades K-3.

“Because we generally thought about it in terms of truancy, we haven’t really done the math,” Mr. Smith said. “When you do that, you find that for many reasons we have not completely built a culture of attendance.”

The report also targets the disproportionate learning losses experienced by poor children over the summer as another area ripe for improvement.

To underscore that point, the report cites research showing that low-income children fall behind during the summer by as much as two months in reading achievement, while middle-income students tend to make slight gains in that subject over the same period. That’s because more-affluent parents can better afford books, computers, summer camps, and other learning opportunities that keep students learning when school is out, the report says.

The report also makes a pitch for developing a coherent system of early care and education that “aligns, integrates, and coordinates what happens from birth through 3rd grade,” so that children enter 4th grade healthy and better able to understand the more-complex reading tests they encounter at that level.

Context Matters

Nationwide, the report notes that 68 percent of all 4th grade public school students scored below proficient levels on 2009 reading tests administered through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated testing program. But on a state-by-state basis, the percentages ranged from a high of 82 percent in Louisiana to 53 percent in Massachusetts.

National results for the 2009 NAEP reading tests were released in March, and the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday is scheduled to release results in reading from the Trial Urban District Assessment, which compares the performance of 4th and 8th grade students in 18 of the largest U.S. school districts.

The foundation adds a new wrinkle to those analyses, though, by breaking out passage rates for disadvantaged students in the nation’s neediest schools.

The figures show how poverty and different school contexts can exacerbate the proportion of students having trouble mastering reading. While 83 percent of poor black students in schools with moderate to low levels of poverty failed to hit the grade-level reading target, for example, the corresponding percentage for low-income African-American students in schools with high concentrations of poor students was 90 percent. For economically disadvantaged Hispanic students, the percentage of students falling short of proficiency drops from 88 percent in the schools with the most poor children to 82 percent in better-off schools.

The nation’s reading problem is also worse than it seems, the foundation says, because many states, facing pressure to boost students’ scores on state exams, have lowered the “cut scores,” which are the number of items that students must answer correctly. To underscore that point, the report cites an earlier study by the National Center for Education Statistics, which showed that only 16 states set their proficiency standards at levels that met or exceeded NAEP’s lower “basic” standard.

It’s crucial that children master grade-level reading by 3rd grade, the report says, because that’s when instruction moves from a focus on learning to read to reading to learn.

Room for Improvement

The report also offers several recommendations for improving children’s reading, including targeting absenteeism—an aspect of schooling that is often overlooked. Nationwide, the report says, an average of one in 10 kindergartners and 1st graders miss 10 percent or more of the school year because of excused or unexcused absences. In some districts, the ratio is as high as one in four for children in grades K-3.

“Because we generally thought about it in terms of truancy, we haven’t really done the math,” Mr. Smith said. “When you do that, you find that for many reasons we have not completely built a culture of attendance.”

The report also targets the disproportionate learning losses experienced by poor children over the summer as another area ripe for improvement.

To underscore that point, the report cites research showing that low-income children fall behind during the summer by as much as two months in reading achievement, while middle-income students tend to make slight gains in that subject over the same period. That’s because more-affluent parents can better afford books, computers, summer camps, and other learning opportunities that keep students learning when school is out, the report says.

The report also makes a pitch for developing a coherent system of early care and education that “aligns, integrates, and coordinates what happens from birth through 3rd grade,” so that children enter 4th grade healthy and better able to understand the more-complex reading tests they encounter at that level.

Children who visit at Santa Rita and Glenn Dyer Jails this summer will have an opportunity to participate in the summertime fave.

More information to come…

by Marian Wright Edelman

Adults often start conversations with children by asking them what they want to be when they grow up. We tell them to dream big, and encourage them by giving them pretend doctor’s kits, fancy dress-up clothes, and other toys that let them imitate adult life.

Now, imagine you’re a parent, and in the middle of your neighborhood, there is a playground. Of course you’d want that playground to be a joyful, creative space. If your neighborhood were a crowded public housing development in the middle of a city, the chance to bring your children to a small outdoor sanctuary where they could stretch their bodies and imaginations would be even more precious. You might hope the jungle gym would include a pretend steering wheel, storefront, or spaceship, like the equipment in thousands of playgrounds across the country. Imagine, then, if instead the “sanctuary” the city provided for your children featured a pretend jail.

That’s just what happened in New York City, where for years toddlers living in a violence-racked neighborhood in Brooklyn were encouraged to dream they were in jail at a city-funded playground. When the Reverend Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, the executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s New York office, first heard about the design of the playground at the Tompkins Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant this spring, she had to visit and see it for herself. The photographs she took show the shameful truth: sure enough, the center of the play structure featured a bright orange square with the word “JAIL” in bold capital letters, cutout bars on a pretend window, and the image of an exaggerated lock on a child-sized door. She immediately called a local reporter to add her voice to the parents and community advocates demanding to have the playground jail removed. As soon as the story began receiving media attention, workers quickly arrived to try to paint over the words and images. But the damage had already been done.

The city’s response after the news coverage about the playground came only after a long struggle and disgust among parents. A spokesperson for the mayor said no one in the community had complained earlier about the play jail, but residents said that wasn’t true; they had spoken up, but no one was listening to them. One mother even recalled painting over the word “jail” herself twice, only to have workers restore the offensive label both times. Just as troubling as the jail’s presence was the question of why in the world the decision was made to build a pretend jail for the Tompkins Houses playground in the first place. Playground designers said among the hundreds of structures they had seen, they couldn’t remember another jail. City officials said they couldn’t determine who originally ordered it or why, but for its opponents this didn’t feel like an accident. The Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Crusade has been sounding the alarm about our nation’s pipeline to prison, and the toddler jail at the Tompkins Houses looked and felt like a literal symbol of this crisis.

The most dangerous place for a child to grow up in America is at the intersection of poverty and race despite a gifted African American President and Oprah Winfrey reigning over the airwaves. Nationally, one in three Black and one in six Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime. While boys are five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls, there also are a significant number of girls in the juvenile justice system and their rate is growing. This rate of incarceration is endangering countless children at younger and younger ages, and disproportionately affecting youths of color from impoverished communities. This is America’s pipeline to prison — a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment, and often premature death. The Tompkins Houses are in a neighborhood that is one of the largest feeders into New York’s juvenile justice system, a system where Black children in New York City are 32 times more likely to be incarcerated than White children. The children who live there are already at risk of entering the pipeline to prison themselves. Giving them a pretend jail to start playing in as preschoolers seems to symbolize that some adults in power have already given up on trying to save them. That’s something we can’t ever allow to happen.

The play jail may be gone now but the real jails are teeming with our sons and brothers and fathers. We still lack enough positive structures needed to help shape these children’s lives and help them play college and doctor and engineer. They lack preventive supports and access to quality early childhood development and education services and accessible, comprehensive health and mental health coverage though the Administration’s budget and stimulus investments give us new tools. The systems that provide such services need to be fixed as well. In New York, the state juvenile justice system is not only broken, it is a hugely expensive program that almost guarantees re-arrest and re-incarceration. At a cost of almost $210,000 a year per youth, and a re-arrest rate of 75 percent within three years of release, New York is funneling money into one of the surest pipelines to the adult prison system. But there are proven solutions that provide better outcomes for children and cost 15 to 100 times less. In these budget strapped times, we should be investing in quality community alternatives that work, especially since most of our youth are jailed for nonviolent offenses. We know what works. It’s time for all of us to focus on strategies for dismantling the real pipeline to prison for good.

Too few books and too little time are adding up to a disaster for some of the nation’s youngest learners.

By Lisa Moran, Parenting

The Vanda Early Learning Center in Lubbock, TX, sits between two cotton fields, with a bright-blue sign out front and a globe painted on the sidewalk. It’s a cheery spot for the children who come here, nearly all of whom qualify for the federal free-lunch program. With its state-endorsed kindergarten-readiness program, it also represents a critical opportunity for them to avoid ending up like the 22 percent of adults over age 25 in Lubbock who don’t have a high school diploma.

Zadrian Rodriguez was at high risk of becoming one of those statistics because his mother, Amelia, was struggling to raise three young kids on her own. “I was working long hours and I didn’t have time to sit down with them or read to them,” she says. Like more than half of the families whose children attend Vanda, Rodriguez also didn’t have any books at home. And those are huge problems.

Research has repeatedly shown that access to books and one-on-one reading time is an important predictor of future literacy skills. Reading to your baby from infancy on exposes her to the alphabet, to the sounds that words make, and to the idea that print letters translate into spoken words. Talking to your child about a story boosts understanding and vocabulary. In contrast, not having this language and literacy exposure can quickly set kids like Zadrian and his siblings up for failure. Many children who enter kindergarten without pre-reading skills in place never catch up, according to “America’s Early Childhood Literacy Gap,” a 2009 report from Jumpstart, a national early education organization dedicated to advancing school readiness in low-income communities. “By second grade, we can predict with reasonable accuracy who will go on to higher education and who will not, based on their literacy skills,” says Jumpstart board member Laura Berk, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Illinois State University.

A parade of experts echo this sentiment: If a child isn’t caught up by third grade, “it requires intense intervention to close this gap,” says Janice Im, senior program manager at Zero to Three, a nonprofit that promotes healthy development in babies and toddlers.

“We have faith in education and how it works, but the truth is that these kids don’t catch up no matter how good their schools are,” agrees Adam Ray of the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the media giant, which helps fund Jumpstart’s work.

Having reading difficulties also increases the odds that a child will drop out of school and have a criminal record. States like California and Indiana have even factored in the number of third-graders who are not reading at grade level when planning future jail construction. But the news isn’t all bad: There’s a growing understanding of the urgent need to help young kids develop literacy skills, and organizations like Jumpstart are stepping in to help.

Click here to read more

We are pleased to announce that the Alameda County “Start with a Story” Project has been selected as one of three institutions in the country to receive the Coretta Scott King Book Donation Grant.

The Coretta Scott King Review Books Donation Grant was created to help build collections and bring books into the lives of children in latchkey, preschool programs, faith-based reading projects, homeless shelters, charter schools and underfunded libraries. An enduring message of the Committee’s Public Awareness Campaign is that books and reading can only add value to children’s lives if books are present in their lives along with opportunities to read and be read to. The Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee believes children lives must be saturated with books and reading opportunities. The Review Books Donation Grant addresses these objectives.

“Start with a Story” will receive 80 titles for children and young adults that were submitted to the American Library Association for consideration of the Coretta Scott King Book Award.

These books will be used to establish a permanent storytime collection for “Start with a Story”.

Launch a National “Read To Kids” Campaign

In the U.S. today, a stark disparity exists between the reading abilities of low-income and higher-income children. Only 50% of low-income 4th graders read at or above the basic level according to the Department of Education’s 2007 Nation’s Report Card. The implications of the growing literacy gap extend beyond the walls of our homes and our classrooms. According to Dr. G. Reid Lyon, Chief of Child Development and Behavior at the National Institute of Health, “surveys of adolescents and young adults with criminal records indicate that at least half have reading difficulties, and in some states the size of prisons a decade in the future is predicted by fourth grade reading failure rates.”

According to the National Commission on Reading report, Becoming a Nation of Readers, “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”  However, The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that only 36% of kindergarten students of a low socioeconomic status were being read to every day by their parents.  In total, low-income children hear only half to one-third as many spoken words as children in more affluent households. 

By reading aloud with low-income children, we can help bridge the literacy gap. To accomplish this, we need a national campaign that emphasizes the importance of parents, teachers and community volunteers reading aloud to children at least 20 minutes a day from birth through high school. Similar to the national physical activity campaign that encourages kids to get their 60 minutes of physical activity every day, we need a similar campaign aimed at encouraging kids to get their 20 minutes of reading aloud every day.

By reading aloud with children, we can improve their interest in and attitudes toward reading and improve children’s fundamental literacy skills, including reading comprehension, vocabulary, reading ability, listening comprehension, attention span and ability to articulate thoughts. Being read to by an adult also helps build a child’s self-esteem and confidence.

A national “Read to Kids” campaign could engage national and local literacy organizations, schools, teachers, parents, authors, publishers and nearly every sector of business and society that understands that our nation’s future depends on our children’s literacy skills.

Michael Salmonowicz

on January 25, 2010 at 6:00 am PST

Imagine if you went to your doctor’s office with a heavy cough, and upon examining you the doctor said, “Well, the problem seems to be that you have a cough.” It’s likely that you would be unsatisfied with her diagnosis. After all, you knew as much when you were at home in bed.

Unfortunately, this example of bad doctoring is exactly what happens every day in discussions about our country’s struggling schools. Journalists, commentators, parents, and even educators mistake symptoms for causes, as exemplified by these common refrains: “Well, of course the kids won’t learn if they don’t come to school.” And “If students didn’t act up so much in class and paid attention more maybe they’d have better grades.” And “Can you believe how many kids drop out every year in [insert school or district]?”

Attendance, behavior, and dropout rate seem to be three of the main culprits when people talk about schools or school districts where many students are not doing well on annual state tests. But these are in fact symptoms. In order to prevent students from skipping school, misbehaving, or leaving school altogether, we need to know why these problems are happening in the first place. I submit that the root cause of all three of these problems, and many others, is weak literacy. Therefore, when Arne Duncan talks about “turnaround schools,” what I hear is “schools that are populated by students who struggle when it comes to reading.” 

As I noted in my recent article on school turnaround in the Phi Delta Kappan, our research team at the University of Virginia learned that of the problematic conditions present in 19 struggling Virginia elementary and middle schools, low reading achievement was the only one found in every school. While serving as director of the reading development team at a turnaround high school in Chicago last year, I found that 60% of students were reading on or below a sixth-grade level. Just over 20% of our students were reading on or below a fourth-grade level, and half of them were freshmen—presumably because most struggling readers in the upper grades had dropped out of school already.

When Arne Duncan talks about “turnaround schools,” what I hear is “schools that are populated by students who struggle when it comes to reading.”

It makes sense. If you struggled to read the books and handouts in your classes, or couldn’t make heads or tails of what your teachers were talking about, why would you come to school every day and endure hours of frustration and failure? And if you were worried that your teachers or classmates might find out you struggled with reading, wouldn’t acting out in class be a good way to ensure their focus was on something other than your academic skills? It is in this way that weak literacy skills are at the root of the problems that end up being so visible in our public schools.

So why isn’t literacy a focal point in conversations about underperforming schools? One reason is that the effects of the problem do not reveal themselves until long after they begin. Just as it may take years of unhealthy eating and smoking before a heart attack occurs, a student who begins struggling with reading as a fourth grader may be able to get by for a few years before any serious problems emerge. (I use the example of a fourth-grade student because that is when students move from learning to read to reading to learn.) If a student sees a decline in report card grades from all Bs in grades 1-3, to Bs and Cs in grade 4, to mostly Cs in grades 5 and 6, and to all Cs and a few Ds in grades 7 and 8, it may be too gradual for anyone to become alarmed or even take notice. By the time red flags go up in November of his freshman year—when his first quarter report card comes back with Ds and Fs, accompanied by reports of his skipping school, talking back to his teachers, and getting in fights—it’s too late for prevention. The heart attack has struck.

One factor that contributes to literacy problems flying under the radar is that oral language does not necessarily reflect how well one reads. Jacques Demers, a well-known coach and general manager in the National Hockey League for over 20 years, did not reveal he was illiterate until he was 60 years old. In an interview he gave after going public with the news, Demers explained, “I took to protecting myself. You put a wall around yourself. And when I was given the possibility of talking, I could speak well and I think that really saved me.” Similarly, students can acquire and use the language needed to survive in school without being able to read that language in a textbook. An adult may have an interaction with a nearly illiterate child and not even know it.

Another reason literacy is not a focal point is that issues like attendance, behavior, and dropout rate fit into the average person’s mental model of how the world works. Everyone understands what it means to not show up when you’re supposed to, to misbehave, or to quit. Struggling with literacy, on the other hand, is much harder to understand and does not lend itself to simple explanations.

In order to talk about the problems stemming from weak literacy skills, what the general public would need to consider is what goes on in that hypothetical student’s head during fourth grade, when he can’t quite keep up with classmates when reading and comprehending a passage from the textbook. Does he want to ask for help? Is he embarrassed? Does he realize that he is falling behind? With what aspects of literacy is he struggling? And in sixth grade, as the problem compounds, does he not enjoy school as much? Can he comprehend the work he is expected to do in class? Does he know what kind of support it would take to get him back on track? As high school begins, does David act out in order to take attention away from academic deficits? Does he feel so far behind that he stops coming every day, biding his time until age 16 when he can drop out? Although parents, teachers, and the public may attribute his failing high school grades to poor attendance and bad behavior, in actuality his weak literacy skills were exposed. He was able to pull decent grades in elementary and middle school, but the work became progressively harder and by high school he could not keep up.

Even if dropout rates and school fights are visible and show up in the local paper or on the evening news, it is important for all of us to understand the vast difference between causes and symptoms of low-performing schools. Acknowledging, educating ourselves about, and addressing the primary cause of these problems—weak literacy skills—is essential if we hope to see our students and schools improve.