Posts Tagged ‘Literacy’

Wanna’ be a cop? You need some college. But that doesn’t always work out…

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

NYTimes columnist David Brooks just rattled off his favorite articles of the year, including this piece in the Atlantic which I had missed. Professor X, an adjunct professor teaching writing skills to students who sorely need some college credentials to further their careers — but sorely lack the skills that should have been taught in high school needed to succeed in college — tells us of his travails. Does he flunk students who merit flunking, or let them get along with their lives.

Great piece, and it illustrates the dilemma men face in college. Literacy skills are the currency of any college work, regardless of what you choose to study. Those who can’t pass English 101 won’t get decent jobs. A sample:

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college-but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it-try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

 

 

Keep an eye in this site: Authors offering advice on getting boys to read

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Publisher Lee & Low Books solicits thoughts from its authors about boys and literacy. Postings will pick up in January, so watch everything unfold here. A sampling:

You’re a guy and you like to read. What made reading an important part of your life? What keeps it an important part of your life?

Tony Medina: When I was growing up, I wasn’t surrounded by books. I didn’t have children’s books, nor did I see many adults or my cousins reading. My attention span was basically shaped by television and a desire to go outside and play. It wasn’t until the ninth grade, when I had to complete a book report assignment or risk receiving an F, that I really forced myself to read an entire novel. I felt I had truly accomplished something that I didn’t think was possible. The story was so engaging. It truly allowed me to utilize my imagination, transporting me from my little blue room in Co-Op City in the Bronx to another world and someone else’s life and problems. That was when I literally got hooked on wanting to read more and more.

G. Neri: One of the reasons I write for boys is because there are so few men writing from the male teenage perspective. So when I write, I’m thinking about the boy I was, the one who didn’t like reading. My breakthrough as a reader came when I found a book that changed the notion in my head of what a book could be. It took me by surprise and I probably thought, I didn’t know you could do that in a book! As the writer, I try to surprise the new reader by constantly reinventing the notion of what a book can be or do. Voice is really important. I wrote Chess Rumble with a distinctly urban male voice, something you rarely see in books. The number one thing I hear from readers is that they are shocked to read a voice like that in a book. Inner city, street-call it what you will; it’s a voice they know and can relate to but have never seen in print before.

W. Nikola-Lisa: I grew up in South Texas, where reading was most definitely not a part of my life. I didn’t find the library until I got to high school. I attended an elite private high school in Florida. We had a beautiful library with vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling book stacks. The only reason I visited it, however, was because that was where you served your detentions-in the library after school. And I usually had a few to serve every month. As I sat there looking around, I’ll never forget how that room impressed me; and I began thinking: If people build an entire room just to house books, then books must be very important. That was when I really started looking at books in a more serious manner.

 

The truth about boys…and how to turn things around

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

This release from the International Reading Association nicely lays out the problem and the solution:

–By fourth grade, the average boy is two years behind the average girl in reading and writing.
– Boys score significantly lower than girls on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and writing assessments.
– Boys make up 70% of special education classes and are four times more likely to have ADHD than girls.
– Boys are 50% more likely to be retained a grade than girls and are three times more likely to be placed in reading/learning disabilities settings.
– Boys around the world score less well than girls in reading and writing and have lower motivation to read and write than their female counterparts.

And now the solutions, as laid out in the new book I’ve promoted here before, Bright Beginnings for Boys, by William Brozo and Debby Zambo:

What can be done? In Bright Beginnings for Boys, Zambo and Brozo say that boys will have great potential as active readers when they

– Are viewed as a resource with unique imaginations, abundant curiosity, and the capacity for self-regulation and sustained attention.
– Become engaged readers because of responsive instruction that is sensitive to the achievement and motivational challenges they face.
– Have print encounters upon entering school that capture their unique and burgeoning male imaginations and build strong literate identities.
– Are exposed to books with positive male characters that serve as both entry points to reading and templates of honorable masculinity.

“As we learn more about gender differences,” Zambo said in a recent interview, “we see that the way many boys are taught to read goes against the way they love to be, which is playful and active.” Repetitive drilling on basic skills can lead to boredom, inattention, and behavior problems. The question teachers ask is, “How can we help boys learn basic skills in a way that is active and motivating for them?”

In their new book, Zambo and Brozo assert that by harnessing young boys’ unique abilities and interests, preschool and elementary-grade teachers can get boys excited about reading and put them on the road to school success. Drawing from extensive research and 30 years of combined experience in classroom, the authors provide perspective on what makes boys tick, how to get boys interested in literacy and learning, and how to get parents and community members involved in boys’ literacy learning.

 

The real cause of the gender gaps…

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

…involve widening gaps in literacy — reading, comprehension and writing. The world has become more verbal; boys haven’t. That’s the starting point. But why have schools been more successful with girls than boys in boosting literacy skills? Here’s a great analysis published in Britain’s Reading Reform Foundation publication suggesting that teaching methods are the culprit:

Illiterate boys: The new international phenomenon
Dr Bonnie Macmillan
Boys are in trouble. Increasingly, it is coming to the attention of anyone who listens to the news or reads a newspaper that boys are struggling to read.

Together two recent international surveys of reading achievement have measured reading ability in more than 50 countries (OECD/Unesco, 2003; Mullis et al., 2003). The results show that at both the age of 9 and 15, boys’ reading skills are substantially worse than girls’. For the first time in the history of such surveys, the gender gaps in performance are significantly large in virtually every country.

Of the countries surveyed recently in 2001, 37 were also surveyed in 1991. In 13 of these, where sex differences did not exist ten years ago, they are now in evidence. In addition, the gap between boys’ and girls’ scores has widened over the last ten years in every country but one. Sex differences in reading are not only showing up in more and more countries, they are also growing larger.

What is happening? Why are boys having such trouble keeping up with girls in their ability to read? And why are more and more boys falling further and further behind?

(more…)

Waking up to literacy problems…

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Here’s a good story from the Detroit Free Press about teachers in the upper grades realizing that literacy skills that are supposed to be taught in the lower grades weren’t — or at least they didn’t stick. One nitpick: I think reporters often fall short in failing to point out how much of this literacy problems involves only boys:

Nearly 40% of the high school juniors who took the Michigan Merit Exam this year failed the reading portion of it; about the same percentage failed it the year before. Far more — about 60% both years — failed the writing portion. Nationwide, just 35% of the high school students who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam were considered proficient in 2005.

Experts say those children are reading — they’re just not understanding what they read well enough. And those poor literacy skills may shed light on why teens also tend to struggle with other subjects.

 

Nation! (think Colbert here….)

Friday, June 27th, 2008

 We has a literacy problem! So says a new report on adult literacy released Thursday:

America is losing its place as a world leader in education, and in fact is becoming less educated. Among the 30 OECD
free-market countries, the U.S. is the only nation where young adults are less educated than the previous generation.
And we are losing ground to other countries in educational attainment.
More and more, the American economy requires that most workers have at least some postsecondary education or
occupational training to be ready for current and future jobs in the global marketplace, yet we are moving further
from that goal. By one set of measures, more than 88 million adults have at least one major educational barrier-
no high school diploma, no college, or ESL language needs.With a current U.S. labor force of about 150 million
(16 and older), a troubling number of prime working age adults likely will fall behind in their struggle to get higher
wage jobs, or to qualify for the college courses or job training that will help them join or advance in jobs that pay a
family-sustaining wage.

Here’s the cool graphic that goes with that: 

If that’s true, and I think it is, then surely Congress is moving with dispatch to ensure school districts use reading programs based on actual research, as opposed to programs teachers like because, well, they’ve been comfortable with them for years. Not so. Instead, Congress is poised to wipe out the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program, not because it was ineffective but because it was run by sometimes-bullying true believers.

Well, I never much cared for Larry, my neighborhood bully, either, but is it really right to respond by pulling the reading rug out from under thousands of poor children who appear to need the kind of highly structured reading programs the bullies were pushing? Oh wait, the House and Senate have reasons for their actions; they have research showing the program was not effective.

Remember former WPostie Karin Chenoweth, whose book about schools serving poor and minority children that are succeeding I recommended a couple of days ago? Well, my timing is great … she just did an analysis of that research. Chenoweth is a shoe-leather reporter; she both gets out of the office and crunches numbers. I trust her assessment of the research:

 If this were a medical trial, this would be like comparing two groups of people, both of which had asked for a particular treatment. One group gets the treatment and results are compared to the second, control, group, and the treatment is declared to have no effect. But - and this is the important part - members of the second group are never asked whether they went to the drug store and bought the generic version of the treatment. They could all have been using substantially the same medicine.

Translation: The comparison group used to conclude Reading First was ineffective was, well, ineffective. I vote for Karin and against both chambers of Congress. 

I know what you’re wondering: What the hell has this got to do with boys?

Ok, I hear you. First, check the graphic atop my blog. Then read About the Blog. Literacy issues, I believe, are at the root of what’s limiting those higher education ambitions we’re seeing among boys. We don’t know how to teach reading, and its affecting boys more than girls. They can’t compete, so they withdraw into video games and other distractions.

If Reading First is truly ineffective, and I don’t believe that’s the case, then let’s re-do the National Reading Panel that settled on the phonics-heavy Reading First strategies while keeping current reading programs at full strength. If the review calls for changes, then make them. But don’t kill the program based on this research. This is too important an issue to get wrong.

Why does this man look so frazzled?

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

That’s celebrated children’s author Jon Scieszka, recently appointed national reading ambassador. Scieszka, who’s deliberately looking goofy here for a book promotion, created Guys Read. But he would have a good reason to look frazzled, because the problem is guys don’t … read, that is. Here’s my take on Jon’s quest.

Looking at NAEP it’s easy to see that girls’ advantages in literacy are large, compared to the tiny boys’ advantages in math. Since I started following this issue a couple of years ago I”ve seen nothing to shake my early conclusion: the world is getting more verbal, and boys aren’t. They’re falling behind because they can’t compete in the new college readiness academic tracks designed by well intentioned school reformers. Here’s the first time I wrote that, in a New Republic piece. Also below is the NAEP data. Given that literacy skills are the currency of any post-high school study, it seems clear where this is headed. Included below are links the NAEP data, my New Republic piece on the literacy issue and a Chronicle article on future college enrollment trends.

naep-data-on-gender-gaps1

newrepublicboyspiece4

chroniclepredictions