Reading By Grade Three

Demos

Reading

by Grade three A National Goal To Help Every Child Succeed

Reading for Life Learning to read by third grade is a goal that can organize everything we do for kids.

By Sara Mead

contents A2 Reading for Life

by Sara Mead

A5 Literacy Begins at Birth

by Cornelia Grumman

A9 A Place for Play

by Lisa Guernsey

A13 There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test

by E.D. Hirsch jr. and Robert Pondiscio

A16 Lessons From New Jersey

by Gordon MacInnes

A19 Missing Out

on Reading

by Hedy N. Chang and Phyllis W. Jordan

A21 Health Education

by Monica Potts

Illustrations by Peter & Maria Hoey

this special report appears in the July/August 2010 issue of The American Prospect magazine and was made possible through the generous support of The Annie E. Casey Foundation.

For bulk reprints, please contact Ross Rapoport at rrapoport@prospect.org. special reports director Rebecca Ruiz

special report editors Mark Schmitt, Sara Mead

subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732)

subscription rate $24.95 copyright © 2010 by the american prospect, inc.

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f you’re reading this, that probably means that someone, once upon a time, taught you to read. Most likely, this happened sometime in your first few years of elementary school—­kindergarten or first, second, or third grade—building the vocabulary and language skills you began developing earlier in your life, starting in infancy and even before you were born. Not surprisingly, then, you probably remember little about your laborious progress acquiring the skills that form the building blocks of reading—recognizing the connection between print and meaning, learning to associate printed letters with sounds, putting those sounds together to form words, and developing the vocabulary and background knowledge to derive meaning from words on the page. By now, those skills have become internalized, old hat to you—so much that now, as you read this, you’re hardly cognizant of the mechanics of what you’re doing.

Unfortunately, for too many children in the United States today, this story does not have a similarly happy ending.

A shocking number of our nation’s children are not learning to read anywhere near as well as they need to in order to succeed in school and negotiate the realities of our increasingly informationbased and verbal world.

Consider these sobering findings from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading—a federally administered annual assessment that monitors national educational achievement and trends and serves as “the nation’s report card.” On the 2009 Reading NAEP, only one in three fourthgraders read at grade level. Fully onethird of fourth-graders tested lacked even the most basic literacy skills. And as these

children progress through their schooling, they fall even further behind their peers.

Even more striking are the large disparities in the reading skills of students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white fourth-graders read on grade level, only 16 percent of black youngsters do. And only 17 percent of fourth-graders who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches (an indicator of poverty) read at grade level, compared to 45 percent of non-low-income students.

Most sobering of all, American fourthgraders performed no better in reading in 2009 than they did two years previously. That’s a troubling departure from most of the past decade, during which fourth-grade literacy improved slowly but steadily—particularly for low-income and minority students. From 2000 to 2007, the percentage of low-income students at the lowest level of reading achievement fell from 62 percent to 50 percent. While no one knows exactly what accounted for this progress, experts credit expansion in access to quality pre-K programs, standards-based education reforms targeted to the elementary years, and early-literacy initiatives as potential causes. But that progress seems to have come to a halt since 2007, even as reading results for eighth-graders, which were stagnant throughout much of the past decade, improved.

These numbers—which illustrate sharp educational disparities by race and income w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y and the closing of the doors of educational opportunity for millions of youngsters— should be cause for alarm. But because the focus of education reform has shifted away from the elementary grades toward older students, few Americans know about this crisis in early literacy.

In recent years, policy-makers and major education foundations and advocacy groups have focused attention on the nation’s high school dropouts—with good reason. Roughly one in four youth who enter our nation’s high schools as freshmen­—and as many as half of black and Latino youth—fails to graduate within four years. In a world where jobs that can support a family require not just a high school diploma but also some type of postsecondary education and training, these young people are largely shut out of shared economic and civic life. But the focus on dropout prevention and “college and career readiness”—the Obama administration’s watchword when it comes to education— while laudable, sends a message that the most serious problems in education are clustered in the high school years.

In fact, the attention to older students has sometimes come at the expense of younger ones: Since 2007, federal funding for early literacy has declined from more than $1 billion to $250 million, even as the overall federal education budget has grown. And earlier this year, the Obama administration abandoned a provision in its landmark student-loan reform legislation that would have created comprehensive state systems to improve the quality of child care and early education for children from birth through age 5.

The road to college and career readiness­ —or dropping out of high school—begins long before students enter high school. In fact, the roots of the dropout crisis can be traced back to those fourth-grade NAEP scores—and the high number of youngsters who are not learning to read well by the end of third grade.

Why focus on early literacy? Because whether children can read well by the end of third grade is a strong predictor of how they are likely to do in the future— in school, at work, and as parents and citizens. The facts are sobering. Children who do not learn to read proficiently by

the end of third grade are unlikely ever to read at grade level. These youngsters are at high risk for later school failure and behavioral problems, for dropping out of high school, and for a host of negative life outcomes once they reach adulthood.

For example, poor reading skills in the early elementary grades are highly correlated with later delinquency. According to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 38 percent of all youth in juvenile detention read below the fourth-grade level.

That’s because the end of third grade marks a critical transition point in children’s learning: It is the time when children shift from learning how to read—the key focus, along with social development, of the early elementary years—to reading to learn. Once children reach fourth grade, the curriculum becomes more demanding, and children who lack foundational literacy skills find

and most cost-effective bet is to invest early in supporting their sound development in early childhood and acquisition of reading skills in elementary school.

But early literacy is not just a predictor of children’s future success. It’s also a reflection of how well—or, considering the evidence, how poorly—we as a society have cared for and kept up our responsibilities to our children to that point. Unlike any other single measure of children’s well-being, fourth-grade literacy rates reflect the cumulative effect of children’s experiences in the first eight years of their lives—not just in school but from birth (even prenatally) on.

The path to literacy doesn’t begin when children enter the schoolhouse door. It starts with high-quality prenatal care and maternal nutrition, to support healthy prenatal development, continuing with regular preventive health care, adequate nutrition, and developmen-

Children who do not learn to read proficiently by the end of third grade are unlikely ever to read at grade level. themselves struggling—unable to access the curriculum and keep up with their classmates. Faced with persistent failure as a result of their poor literacy skills, these students frequently become frustrated, disengage from school, “act out” behaviorally, and without significant interventions and supports to address their literacy deficits, may drop out of school and face a lifetime of severely diminished economic prospects.

That’s not to say we should give up on these youngsters. With determination and the right supports, older youth, and even adults, can become proficient readers at any age. But it is much more difficult to learn to read once the cycle of educational failure has already taken hold. And interventions that are successful in turning around the educational trajectories of older youth have lower success rates and are much more costly than getting it right in the early grades. In other words, if we want children to succeed in high school, college, and careers, our best

tal screenings in the infant and toddler years. It requires strong, stable, relationships with caregivers—whether parents or other caregivers—who stimulate infants’ and toddlers’ early language development by talking and reading to them, and, as children’s language skills develop, engaging them in rich conversations that encourage them to express themselves. High-quality pre-K programs, taught by qualified teachers who understand how young children learn, and specifically designed to prepare children for school, can also help make sure children start school ready to learn to read. Effective elementary schools continue this process by providing highquality instruction, delivered by skilled teachers and grounded in research about how young children learn to read.

Getting to literacy is like climbing a ladder. If any plank in the ladder is weak or missing, a child will be at risk for continued school failure. But if other rungs are strong, they can compensate for those the american prospect

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that prepares them to live productive lives and fulfill their responsibilities as adults, parents, and citizens. And ensuring this requires us to measure learning outcomes—­ particularly those that are predictive of children’s later life success. Fourthgrade literacy rates are such an outcome.

But because this outcome reflects the cumulative effects of children’s experiences throughout the first eight years of life, it is not just a high-stakes snapshot of performance at one moment in time.

By comparing fourthgrade literacy outcomes against the experiences and inputs that produced these results—including indicators of health-care and preschool access, family economic well-being, mental-health and child-welfare services, nutrition, and comprehensive school quality—we can identify gaps in how we are serving children and target investments and

High-quality pre-kindergarten programs can compensate for disparities in children’s home language environments. such a crippling effect on young children’s development that dramatic educational improvement is impossible without much broader policies to alleviate poverty.

Whole-child reformers tend to focus on services and inputs: Do children have access to health care? Are childcare classrooms safe and inviting? Is spending equitable between high- and low-poverty school districts? All of these things are important—even critical. But, as school reformers note, they are not ends in themselves. Ultimately, what we want for children is not only a safe, healthy, and pleasant childhood— although to be sure, we should want this for all children—but a childhood a 4 j u ly / au g u st 2 0 i 0

reforms to those areas with the greatest potential to improve children’s longterm life outcomes.

As the statistics demonstrate, our public policies fall far short of ensuring all children get what they need to read well by fourth grade.

The good news is that, at each critical juncture in young children’s development, smart policies and well-designed interventions can transform the trajectory of failure and put children on the path to reading success. Nurse home-visiting programs can ensure that low-income mothers get prenatal care, so their babies come into the world healthy, and help mothers support their children’s develop-

ment after they are born. Better access to quality health care can identify and arrest health problems—or prevent them altogether—before they become a threat to children’s development. High-quality pre-kindergarten can compensate for disparities in children’s home language environments. Effective elementary teachers can build children’s literacy skills while also infusing them with a love of reading and learning. And effective early-literacy interventions constantly monitor children’s progress and quickly intervene to support struggling students—ensuring no one falls behind.

The bad news is that too many children who need these supports do not get them.

For example, fewer than two-thirds of the poorest 4-year-olds—those most likely to enter school far behind—are enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs. Children from “near poor” families, those whose families have low to moderate incomes but are not poor enough to qualify for subsidized pre-K, are even less likely to attend—even though NAEP data show many of these youngsters also struggle to learn to read. Research shows that lowincome children in our nation’s schools have only a 10 percent chance of experiencing high-quality instruction throughw w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

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shortcomings, enabling children to keep moving toward educational success. For example, research shows that disadvantaged children who grow up in homes with little verbal stimulation can succeed if they attend high-quality pre-K programs followed by effective elementary schools. But if every rung—or too many of them—is weak or missing, then the probability that children will read successfully by third grade is much lower. In other words, the fact that two-thirds of fourth-graders cannot read at grade level means our current policies and systems are failing them in multiple ways.

Focusing on literacy by the beginning of fourth grade as a critical national indicator of how we, as a nation, are fulfilling our responsibilities to our children offers a promising alternative to the current battles over education reform.

Currently, education-policy debates in the United States are divided between two warring camps: On one side are “school reformers,” who argue that efforts to improve equity for low-income youngsters must focus on fixing failing schools.

On the other are “whole child” reformers, who argue that focusing on schools is both too narrow and unfair to educators, because the stresses of poverty have

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y out the critical early elementary years.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Across the country, state policy-makers, school districts, major foundations, community­based organizations, and social entrepreneurs are implementing promising initiatives designed to arrest the cycle of school failure before it starts and ensure children read well by third grade. Now it’s time to expand those initiatives and take them national. These reforms and interventions should be judged not just on their immediate impacts but also by their effect on fourth-grade reading achievement. Just as important, policy-makers should be held accountable for how the policies they support affect fourth-grade literacy outcomes.

The articles in this special report cast a spotlight on the early-literacy challenge, explaining why early literacy is so critical, exploring the reasons that too many of our youngest children are not learning to read, and offering provocative prescriptions for how policy-makers can change this: Cornelia Grumman details the comprehensive supports that children need to get off to a good start in the first five years of life, how our public policies fall short in providing those supports, and some potential policy opportunities to better care for our youngest children.

Lisa Guernsey explains why efforts to improve early-literacy outcomes must not focus narrowly on teaching reading but must also leave room for play that develops children’s critical social­emotional and self-regulatory skills.

E.D. Hirsh and Robert Pondiscio explain how efforts to improve children’s literacy skills must go beyond skill-based drill and kill and also ensure children acquire the rich content knowledge necessary to really understand what they read.

Gordon MacInnes shows that it’s possible for high-poverty schools to do a much better job of teaching low-income youngsters to read, through the tale of how a package of reforms, including high-quality pre-K and intensive, data-driven literacy instruction in the early grades, dramatically improved reading performance for children in some of New Jersey’s highestpoverty, most troubled districts.

Hedy Chang and Phyllis Jordan describe how the crisis of chronic absenteeism in the early grades is undermining children’s learning—and what can be done about it.

And Monica Potts describes the potential of recently passed health-reform legislation to improve early-literacy outcomes, by improving children’s access to healthcare services that support their development and enable them to learn to read.

Together, these articles map out a pathway for policy-makers to dramatically improve early literacy—and our children’s futures. tap Sara Mead is the consulting editor of this special report and a senior associate with Bellwether Education, a nonprofit that works to build the field of organizations accelerating achievement for low-income students.

Literacy Begins at Birth An agenda for early education can’t wait for kindergarten—the first five years matter, too.

By Cornelia grumman

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arly childhood education has become the public-policy bobblehead of our time. An expanding raft of scientific and economic research underscores the need to significantly expand quality early learning in the first five years of life, particularly for at-risk children. Many key policy-makers know this. They nod. And nod.

That’s often all they do.

They acknowledge quality early learning can be the most cost-effective public investment available to curb later extensive interventions for special education, teen pregnancies, juvenile crime, and high school dropouts.

But all this goodwill still lacks a way.

After a decade on a federal starvation diet, early education seemed to be delivered a feast by President Barack Obama’s election. Finally, here was a policy-maker who would give more than a nod in support of early childhood education. Candidate Obama had pledged a “comprehensive platform” for early childhood and whipped up hopes and dreams for a new day, and, presumably, new investment. Early policy victories were also promising—a nearly $4.1 billion infusion of funding for Head Start, Early Head Start, and child care as part of the economic-recovery package. The

administration also proposed a major new investment of $8 billion to create an Early Learning Challenge Fund, a new competitive grant program designed to help states build stronger early-learning systems. But, as every politician turned policy-maker learns, having good ideas and implementing them are two wildly different matters. At the last minute, the Early Learning Challenge Fund was jettisoned from the budget-resolution package that carried health-care and student-loan reform—a devastating defeat for the early-­childhood community. Even the $1.5 billion investment in home visiting included in the healthcare bill couldn’t compensate for that disappointment.

Despite recent progress, the earlychildhood policy to-do list is very long.

The $4.1 billion infusion of Head Start and other child-care funding in the 2009 economic stimulus package, significant as it was, merely returned programs to the purchasing power they had at the end of the Clinton administration, before nearly a decade of flat funding (plus the forces of inflation) slowly but surely chipped away at their ability to serve children.

Rhetorically, this administration has reframed how the nation must regard the american prospect

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early education: Early childhood education can no longer be seen as just an entitlement or work support for parents in need but as a critical component of education reform, a necessary longterm investment in the nation’s future economic success. “Education and, in many ways, success in life begins with high-quality early-learning experiences,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan after the House passed the Early Learning Challenge Fund.

“We know that increasing the number of high-­quality early-learning opportunities, especially for low-income families, improves child outcomes. Research shows children who receive such services are less likely to be referred to special education and more likely to graduate and be successful adults.”

The insidious achievement gap becomes evident far earlier than most realize. Language development among children of professional parents begins to take off as early as 18 months, and at the same time begins to flatline among children of low-income parents. By the time an average child whose parents are on welfare reaches age 4, she has heard 32 million fewer words than a child of professional parents, according

early years, delivered by well-trained professionals who understand how to help develop a child’s sense of curiosity, motivation, impulse control, and group participation. And they need these supports from birth, ranging from home visits for pregnant and new moms to health screenings, quality child care, and preschool and Head Start services.

Young children don’t need kill-anddrill sergeants on letters, numbers, and colors to prepare for kindergarten.

Appropriate academic learning should occur alongside social-emotional learning, according to research. Nobel laureate in economics James Heckman found that “non-cognitive skills”—self­regulation skills such as the ability to focus and sustain attention, persevere through frustration, and organize—play a far more important role than once believed in long-term educational outcomes, ranging from high school graduation to adult employment rates.

Take it from another class of experts: Kindergarten teachers. When surveyed about which skills are most important for entering kindergartners to experience success, teachers gave as their top answers abilities like self-care and motor skills, followed closely by self-regulation.

An average child whose parents are on welfare has heard 32 million fewer words by age 4 than a child of professional parents. to a seminal study published in 1995 by University of Kansas researchers. Without intervention, that language gulf only expands over time. Few children who enter kindergarten far behind more advantaged peers are able to catch up.

The administration’s emphasis on early childhood education as a component in a larger education-reform strategy was, and remains, the right agenda, accompanied by pitch-perfect talking points. But making that rhetoric a reality will require much greater investment in smart policy at the federal level.

Smart policy acknowledges that atrisk infants, toddlers, and preschoolers need comprehensive services in the a 6 j u ly / au g u st 2 0 i 0

Academics, though not unimportant, show up much further down the list.

This isn’t just self-interested hope for a class full of well-behaved students who march in two perfect Madeline-esque lines. Skills like attentive listening, following directions, and exhibiting selfcontrol really do translate to success in school and in life. Research confirms this: In a measure of self-regulation called the Head-to-Toes Task, preschool- and kindergarten-age children are instructed to touch their toes when asked to touch their head, and to touch their head when asked to touch their toes. This simple task combines three core elements of selfregulation: attention, working memory,

and impulse control. A study at Oregon State University found that young children who performed well on this task in the fall had markedly higher test scores in math and reading the next spring. The effect was particularly strong in math, where they performed 3.4 months ahead of their peers.

If we accept that “soft skills” are in fact

important, what role can public policy possibly play in helping a child refrain from hitting the classmate who yanks away a favorite toy or avoid a temper tantrum when it’s time to transition from blocks to circle time? The answer is in policies that support high-quality relationships—be they through parenting, caregiving, or preschool. Skills like self-regulation and positive peer interactions emerge only when very young children have a stable base of relationships on which to build confidence to handle new situations and an understanding of their surrounding world. If you want a class of kindergartners with calm, consistent behavior, give them calm, consistent caregivers for the five years before they show up at school. That requires special skills and training and a level of professionalism that today isn’t adequately supported by public resources.

Quality caregiving is particularly critical for children who grow up amid chaotic family lives, depressed parents, frequent disruption, or extreme stress.

We know these same children from stressed households often end up in child care that is equally stressful or chaotic.

And that, scientific research tells us, carries physiological consequences on how neural connections in the brain develop in those early years, which in turn affects a child’s ability to learn and succeed long-term.

The most important relationship is between the child and his parents. The Obama administration and Congress’ recent investment in home visiting acknowledges this reality. Parenting a newborn can be profoundly difficult.

Many new parents need help in order to get off to the right start. Home-visiting programs, where a nurse, doula, or other trained professional provides informaw w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

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tion, resources, and support starting in pregnancy and extending into the baby’s first year, are one way to provide the kind of support that new parents used to get from their own parents but that can be hard to come by in today’s complicated, fragile, absent, or just geographically dispersed families.

Unfortunately, a whole host of policies get in the way of building the consistent relationships that lead to socio-emotional health and school success. Without any national system for paid parental leave—a sad distinction the U.S. shares with Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea—new mothers are left to cobble together whatever little time off they can afford. Most return to work within a few weeks, disrupting the mother-child relationship far sooner than is ideal. While American moms won’t soon enjoy the year of paid leave that a number of other wealthy nations offer, President Obama’s budget proposal did include a $50 million State Paid Leave Fund, which would provide competitive planning grants to states to design and implement new paid familyleave insurance programs. These would operate like unemployment insurance programs and allow parents to receive a percentage of their wages while taking maternity or paternity leave to care for their young children.

nearly two-thirds of children under 6 receive care from someone other than their parents, relationships with caregivers also play a vital role in shaping children’s development. We hope children are left in some sort of Mary Poppins ideal, with educated, engaged, attentive professionals.

Instead, many child-care arrangements are staffed by overwhelmed, untrained, and poorly compensated caregivers. It is a stressful job that is both emotionally and physically demanding. The hours are long and the pay is terrible, with many child-care providers earning about $10 an hour. Turnover is high. Neither a frazzled caregiver left in charge of too many children nor one who leaves after a few months for a better-paying job will succeed in building stable, enduring relationships with the children in her care.

These scenarios can exist in any setting: For-profit centers, church­basement day cares, and the kindly neighbor down the street can all be hit or miss when it comes to the quality of the care they provide. Child-care quality too often ranges from so-so to lousy, particularly for infants and toddlers. Children who need the most help are often in the lowest-quality settings. A child whose parents coo and cuddle him, who read to him at night, and who use expressive language and varied vocabularies will In a country where

probably be just fine with “just fine” care.

Children whose parents are in poverty, who have mental-health or substanceabuse issues, or who are facing other risk factors need more than “just fine”— they need a high-quality, comprehensive intervention.

After years of neglect of child-care at the federal level, Congress and the administration now have an opportunity to improve the quality of child care.

The president’s budget proposed a $600 million increase (on top of maintaining a $1 billion-a-year bump the program received as part of the economic-stimulus package) for the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for low-income working parents.

The early-­childhood community dreams about having that investment available for meaningful quality improvements.

We know the minimum ingredients necessary to ensure quality early education.

Among them: high teacher standards, small group sizes and low teacher-tochild ratios. Any proposals to increase child-care money must include more meaningful incentives and accountability to assure quality, and better compensation has to be offered to teachers to reach those higher standards and, once there, to stay in the profession.

Separate from the child-care subsidy system is the grandmamma of earlythe american prospect

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learning programs, Head Start. Head Start is the cornerstone program for early learning in poor communities across the country. It began in 1965 amid the Great Society zeal, and today Head Start attempts to provide comprehensive developmental support to children and their families in half- and full-day programs across the country. In the 1990s, Early Head Start was added to serve lowincome pregnant women and infants and toddlers. Head Start reaches 900,000 poor preschoolers, a fraction of the more than 6 million children under the age of 6 who live in poverty in America. Early Head Start reaches a mere 3 percent of eligible infants and toddlers (a figure that may or may not creep up after new programs begin thanks to economicstimulus dollars, given that, unfortunately, the number of poor children is growing at the same time).

If we truly intend to give every child a

significant learning begins at birth, not at kindergarten; our federal, state, and local education policies must ref lect that reality. To improve K-12, we must create a seamless system that supplies elementary schools with children ready to learn, and that means early childhood education—not baby-sitting.

Early childhood education, we now know, is the first step toward college readiness. It is the very first and most cost-efficient investment we should make in human capital if we are to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

But to get there, early childhood needs a more coherent system upon which to build and offer a wider array of effective programs. Early learning has been characterized as “1,000 random acts of good intentions,” a “tossed salad” of a system and a patchwork quilt. There’s home visiting. Center-based child care. Pre-K. Family day-care homes. Unlicensed care.

To improve K-12, we must supply schools with children ready to learn, and that means early childhood education—not baby-sitting. shot at the American dream, if we really want to close the achievement gap, we must improve and fortify Head Start.

Head Start itself must use research to set ever higher standards and better define programming.

Head Start also must embrace open competition among programs, letting the very best programs succeed and grow.

Let the others—those that are not achieving results or those in areas with low demand—die. Programs that can’t do the job should be shuttered, allowing the resources to go toward those that can.

Even if it takes an aggressive stance toward program improvement, it’s unlikely that Head Start could close the achievement gap all on its own. Smart early-education policy also means more meaningful integration with the K-12 system. No magical learning switch turns on the moment a child enters her kindergarten classroom for the first time. Brain science tells us the most

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Most policy-makers—and, for that matter, members of the public—haven’t a clue about how one differs from the other.

In order to give more disadvantaged children some semblance of the comprehensive experience they need, savvy early-learning programs serving lowincome families are forced to do a kind of juggling act: to patch together different funding streams like Head Start, child care, and state preschool funds.

But each of those programs “lives” in a different bureaucracy, with wholly different sets of eligibility rules and procedures and paperwork and reporting and audits and hoops to jump through. We could give a lot more children a much more meaningful, comprehensive, and effective experience if we didn’t make it so hard to let them stay in one program with one set of teachers who know and care about them.

Building links between those disparate systems is one of the goals of the Early Learning Challenge Fund. Faced

with a budget reality in which any new funding for Head Start, Early Head Start, and child care is going to be a tough slog, the idea is to invest in “glue” that could help all of these programs be more coordinated and of higher quality. It must get easier for states to articulate meaningful quality rating systems for programs, build professional-­development career ladders for providers, and create coherent data systems to begin to understand where and how children are receiving care and to start to conceptualize what kind of standards and assessments make sense for tracking the development of the youngest learners. The idea is to be a “Race to the Top” for early education, encouraging states to coordinate their programs, innovate policies, measure effectiveness, and focus on improving outcomes.

How can early childhood evolve from something everyone thinks is a swell thing to do but then dismisses as less than vital? For starters, the field must simplify its arguments. We need to be clear that early-childhood investments are not just about meeting children’s and families’ immediate needs but making a long-term, positive impact on children’s educational and life outcomes. These investments are in everyone’s economic self-interest. We can invest a little now or pay a lot more later playing catch-up.

And, in exchange for increased public funding, the early-childhood community must be willing to accept increased accountability for results—including developmentally appropriate measures of the impacts programs are having on children’s learning and lives. The potential for public policy to accomplish a world of good for vulnerable young children is enormous. Children need policy-makers to be much more than bobblehead dolls—they need them to be vocal champions and, ultimately, prolific check-writers. tap Cornelia Grumman is executive director of the First Five Years Fund.

She was previously a reporter and editorial board member for the Chicago Tribune, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her editorials in 2003. w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

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A Place for Play Why reading programs must combine playful learning with direct instruction

By Lisa Guernsey

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hen the latest scores of our country’s national reading test arrived this spring, they were as depressing as usual: Two-thirds of American fourth-graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, cannot read at grade level.

Among Hispanic and African American children, it’s even higher.

Considering the consequences of growing up as a struggling reader, you might assume that the solution is to help children build better reading skills as soon as possible. Research shows that the earlier specialists intervene, the more likely children will surmount reading difficulties. Surely, early-­l iteracy instruction is a good solution. What could be controversial about that?

Plenty. Debates over when to teach children to read—and how to do it—are now afire around the country. As reading skills are taught at younger ages, child-development experts increasingly worry about the new look and feel of classrooms for 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. They see children memorizing flashcards and coloring in worksheets.

They watch with trepidation as school districts around the country adapt curricula to introduce letters and their sounds to children as early as possible.

The parenting blogosphere is filled with mothers who worry over whether to enroll their children in schools that are replacing playtime with lessons on basic literacy skills. Parents of young 5-year-olds—particularly those with boys—agonize over whether to wait an extra year before sending their children to kindergarten classrooms that seem too academic for their boisterous kids.

In a piece for The New York Times Magazine last year, cultural critic and mother Peggy Orenstein captured the angst as

been told that helping such students requires direct and explicit teaching of literacy skills. And so a new class-based divide is emerging over how children are taught to read. At one extreme are children in high-poverty schools with teachers who have been asked to drill them on letters, words, and sounds that they were never really exposed to before arriving at school. On the other end are middle-class children whose teachers read them elaborate stories and encourage playful re-­ enactments and whose parents have been pointing out letters and reading them books since the year they were born. It’s a chasm that shows no sign of narrowing.

How do we get out of it? middle of winter when Ed Miller first got a look at an early draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative—a 180-page document outlining what students across the nation would be expected to know, year by year, in language arts and mathematics from kindergarten to 12th grade.

What he saw deeply worried him. Among the standards for kindergartners: “read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.”

Read fluently? In kindergarten?

Miller is a senior researcher and consultant for the Alliance for Childhood, an advocacy group based in College Park, Maryland, that has already become known for pushing back against what it sees as the over-commercialization of childhood, unfair standardized testing, and unnecessary technology in schools.

Last year, the alliance published Crisis in the Kindergarten, a report bemoaning the academic nature of today’s classrooms for 5-year-olds. The alliance had been waiting anxiously to see whether these standards would lead to even more academic work at the expense of recess, art, music, and make-believe play.

The document Miller reviewed was an early draft, leaked to Ed Week, of what experts were creating for the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The two organizations decided last summer to develop a set of national standards to replace today’s uneven system of every It was a day in the

she wrote about her struggle to find a kindergarten for her daughter that didn’t assign homework. As she put it, “How did 5 become the new 7, anyway?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Timothy Shanahan, a literacy researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has co-authored reports on the need for explicit instruction on basic skills, recently argued on his blog that “good teaching includes both didactic lessons and opportunities to practice and play.”

Child-development experts who plead for more child-centered classrooms are not at all averse to putting early-literacy skills front and center within the games and playtime that are essential to early childhood. Educators shouldn’t have to choose between teaching literacy or encouraging play, says Patricia Cooper, an assistant professor of education at New York University. To her mind, it’s a “false dichotomy.”

But outside of academe—on playgrounds and listservs, in superintendents’ offices and teacher lounges­—the dichotomy feels all too real. Well-­intentioned school leaders want to ensure that poor, minority children get what they need to improve their reading scores and have

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finished a 10-hour workday this spring.

She sounded weary. Her workplace, the Mann School in west Philadelphia, had been labeled “chronically low-performing” under NCLB and will close this summer, reopening as a charter school in the fall. Katz, who has been teaching in the elementary grades for 17 years, will be looking for another job.

At the Mann School each morning, Katz asks her students to listen, watch the letters to which she points, and repeat after her: “C, U, P. Cuh-uh-puh. C-cuh.

U-uh. P-puh. Now faster: c-uh-puh.

Cup!” She has a script. Another sample lesson goes like this: “I’m going to say a word slowly. M-a-n. Now it’s your turn.

Say the word slowly. M-a-n. Man.” The routine is part of 45 minutes devoted to Reading Mastery, a set of teaching instructions designed by Scientific Research Associates, a McGraw-Hill company. Based on myriad studies about effective reading instruction, the program uses “direct instruction” to provide a systematic way of introducing children to words and their sounds. The Philadelphia School District has directed all teachers in “empowerment schools”—the schools with poor test scores—to use

Reading Mastery for 45 minutes before starting on another literacy block, 75 minutes of students reading together, independently, or under the guidance of a teacher.

Earlier this year, just before the annual standardized tests, Katz says, all teachers were asked to double the time they spent on Reading Mastery, with one 45-minute chunk in the morning and another in the afternoon. Recess was minimized, and the kids got more and more restless.

“It’s torture,” she says. also a first-grade teacher. Like Katz’s, his school, KIPP DREAM Prep, a charter elementary school in Houston, Texas, enrolls mostly minority children, 96 percent of whom qualify for subsidized lunch.

But if you had walked by his classroom on April 23, you would have seen something entirely different from Katz’s lesson. First-graders were lying under tables with their heads up as they sketched and wrote on white paper taped to the tables’ undersides. A few minutes before, they had picked up pretend shovels and air-shoveled a tunnel to enter Marcus Ceniceros is

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state for itself. (Much of the criticism of No Child Lef t Behind stems from states keeping their standards low to fulfill the law’s requirement of showing that children meet the state standards.)

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have signed on to support the commonstandards initiative.

P r e s ident B a r a c k Obama applauds it.

In March, as soon as the official draft was published for comment, the alliance distributed a letter calling for suspension of further work on the K-3 standards. Nearly 500 people signed it, including David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child, and Vivian Gussin Paley, author and renowned kindergarten teacher at the Lab School at the University of Chicago. The letter argued that the standards would lead to “long hours of instruction” in literacy and math, inappropriate testing, and didactic instruction that would “[cut] off children’s initiative, curiosity, and imagination, limiting their later engagement in school and the workplace, not to mention responsible citizenship.”

The specter of inappropriate testing and drill-based instruction has hovered over early education for decades, but it gained new haunting ground in the mid- to late 2000s as school districts attempted to fulfill or dodge NCLB requirements. To make “adequate yearly progress” under the law, schools must show that increasing numbers of students can meet state standards, no matter what their race or poverty level. In many high-­poverty school districts, that means zooming in on basic skills and getting children to practice, practice, practice.

Amy Katz, a first-grade teacher, knows the drill well. I called Katz after she had

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y their habitat. Their task was to draw or write what they saw, imagining themselves as “undergrounders” looking up at the world.

“It was fun, but it wasn’t just an activity,” Ceniceros says. “It was very structured and had objectives.”

At KIPP DREAM , getting children reading­— and starting instruction early—is a top priority. Children enroll in pre-kindergarten at age 4, and this fall enrollment will be available for 3-yearolds. Every teacher strives to raise their students’ reading level a full year and a half above where the students started at the beginning of the school year. First­graders have a 90-minute “literacy block” in the morning and looser reading time throughout the day. Earlier that morning, for example, Ceniceros had taken on a more conventional teacher role, telling his students about compound words and how they work. He also typically dedicates at least an hour to reading and listening to books related to whatever the first grade happens to be studying that week. In this case, it was a science lesson on underground animal habitats.

Children could choose from a basket of books on spiders, moles, snakes, and other tunnel-dwellers.

That integration between subjectmatter content and reading lessons, many literacy experts say, is one of the pieces that gets left out when schools focus on basic skills. In his book, Reading Instruction: The Two Keys, reading expert Matthew Davis, a project director at the Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, emphasizes the need for both basic skills and content knowledge. He writes: “Schools that ignore history, science and the arts are, in fact, increasing the likelihood that students will encounter problems in later grades.”

But that April morning Ceniceros had another goal in mind, too. He wanted his students to demonstrate that they recognized how those readings changed their perspective on the world. According to midyear tests, nearly three-quarters of his students are reading at grade level, he says, but he wants to take them further.

As debate continues over the Common

Core State Standards Initiative, many educators, even those in early childhood, stress that setting expectations for children and encouraging playful classrooms are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, two large organizations with child-development specialists as members—the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association of Child Development Specialists in State Departments of Education—released statements generally in favor of the draft that has caused such a stir.

But does this mean that concerns over standardized expectations for all kindergartners are unfounded? Not necessarily. Rambunctious and contrary, brilliant and befuddling, children at ages 4, 5, and 6 are a squirrelly bunch. One day they don’t even seem to notice the words around them. The next, they’re recognizing—and calling out—every stop sign in the neighborhood. Aware that major leaps in cognitive development characterize these ages, earlychildhood experts don’t want to label a not-yet-reading 5-year-old as failing to measure up. They also fear misinterpretation of words such as “fluency,” as used in the proposal for reading abil-

not the rule. Eva Phillips, early childhood consultant for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, has been studying how kindergarten teachers use class time. She points to data from a program called FirstSchool that shows a wide gap between preschool and kindergarten, with kindergarteners getting much more teacher-led instruction than preschoolers, and the time during which children choose their activities shrinking from 136 minutes to 16. Fitting in moments of child-led activity is a struggle, Phillips says. “Teachers ask, ‘How do we balance this with accountability and standards?’” today consists of at least two basic approaches.

There is decoding—the skill of being able to see a squiggly line, immediately identify it as the letter S, hear its sound in your head (“sss”), and blend or attach it to the sound made by the next squiggly line. There is also comprehension, often understood as using the words and pictures in a text to help you grasp what a sentence, chapter, or book is trying to tell you. If you can decode and comprehend, the wisdom goes, you’re on your way.

The tricky balancing act between Early-literacy instruction

Many educators stress that setting expectations for children and encouraging playful classrooms are not mutually exclusive. ity by kindergarten. The appendix to the March draft provided examples of the books that kindergarteners should be reading—wordless books that children might “read” by describing what the pictures tell them. But as principals are faced with policies pegged to the standards, they might miss that nuance, interpreting “fluency” in the sense it is used in later grades, and ask teachers to do even more drill and practice.

National data does not exist on exactly what is happening in classrooms around the country, but anecdotal evidence and a few time-diary studies of kindergarten classrooms indicate that the KIPP DREAM classroom may be the exception,

teaching these skills and giving children play-based learning is better understood today than it was when the movement toward standards began in the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, the focus—then as now—was simply on figuring out how to help poor and minority children learn to read. In 1997, Congress called for a group of experts to analyze the scientific studies about how to get the job done. The National Reading Panel’s 2000 report concluded that systematic teaching of letters and sounds was highly effective.

A 2009 report from the National Early Literacy Panel took a similar emphasis. After reviewing approximately 500 studies on the literacy skills that correthe american prospect

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late with later achievement, it pointed to the importance of six abilities: knowing letters; being aware of the sounds within words; being able to rapidly name letters, digits, objects, and colors when they are presented; writing one’s name; and remembering what sounds go with what patterns of letters.

Both panels confirmed the need for what was once thought optional: decoding instruction in the early years. Their reports have been influential. No longer are most educators relying solely on “whole language” methods as many did in the 1970s. Instead schools of all types—from the Mann School to KIPP DREAM—ensure that letters and phonemic awareness are systematically taught.

There’s some evidence that the shift is working. As low as today’s national reading scores are, they were even worse in the early 1990s, before the recent trend toward directly teaching these basic skills. In 1992, nine out of 10 black students were not reading at grade level, compared to four out of five today.

But as the authors of both reports acknowledge, they reviewed only a small fraction of all studies on reading instruction. Many studies of teaching methods or other indicators of strong

we’re going to the store,” is stretching herself cognitively more than we might think. She has to stay in character, construct dialogue, and imagine a sequence of events. She would grow even further if a teacher or adult snuck in some reading or writing practice: “Do you want to make a shopping list? Here, use this notepad.”

A 2007 study in Science explored the impact of this kind of play by collecting data on children who were taught using Tools of the Mind, a Vygotskian method.

The study, which followed 147 preschoolers in 21 settings, showed that children taught using the Tools method scored significantly higher than did their counterparts on tests of “executive function skills,” such as the ability to keep their behavior in check, control their impulses, and focus—skills that certainly don’t hurt when it comes to learning to read.

Make-believe play may foster other foundational skills, too, like symbolic understanding. By pretending to punch numbers on a cash register, for example, a child is symbolizing what a cashier does. This ability to comprehend and manipulate symbols is a skill that should serve her well, since letters symbolize sounds, and words symbolize objects or

Early-literacy instruction that focuses on basic reading skills can miss the playful, content­rich language experiences kids need. reading skills were not deemed rigorous enough to assure that results were not due to outside variables. Some literacy researchers felt the omissions were a shame. “Code is what has been studied,” wrote Susan Neuman, education professor at the University of Michigan, in a review of the 2009 report, “but what we know is that code alone is not going to solve our educational problems.”

What else do we need? The ideas of Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are starting to percolate among educators. Many of his theories center on make-believe play. A child who says to a peer, “OK, I’ll be the mom. Let’s pretend a 12 j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 i 0

actions or ideas. Several recent books— Children’s Play: The Roots of Reading; Play=Learning; and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool—make that case.

Patricia Cooper of New York University has added another title to the genre with her 2009 book, The Classrooms All Young Children Need. She says she knew people wouldn’t take the idea of play-based learning seriously until she had some pre- and post-test data on how well children performed in such a setting. So in the mid-2000s, she helped design a study comparing two groups of young children—those encouraged to act out stories they invented and to dictate

them to a teacher and those who only followed the conventional curriculum. The results, published in 2007 in the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, showed that the storytelling students scored significantly better on vocabulary and reading “readiness” tests than the control group. ingredients for truly integrating playful learning and early-literacy instruction? Surely they will evolve, but the experiences of Amy Katz and Marcus Ceniceros are instructive: The amount of time spent on decoding skills and “repeat after me” lessons should be calibrated to avoid overkill and yet still provide the explicit teaching of letters and their sounds that children need. Teachers should be given the time and flexibility to plan and carry out creative projects as well as continuous training on methods that recognize the curious, developing minds of young kids. The school day should be long enough to allow for intensive literacy blocks that don’t feel intensive. Educators need to have high expectations for what their students can achieve, while still recognizing that children’s cognitive skills develop at different rates. And high-quality pre-kindergarten should be the norm.

In short, all children—but especially the poor who grow up without the language and book exposure to help them succeed—should be getting early-literacy instruction that balances basic skills with playful, content-rich language experiences. We cannot let the latest literacy debates lead to another case of the haves and have-nots. We cannot afford a battle that pits play against literacy. But we need to go further than simply adding playtime to the day. We have to recognize that play and literacy learning can be one and the same. It does an injustice to children in poor and struggling schools if they never get the chance to experience that connection. tap What are the essential

Lisa Guernsey is the director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation and editor of EarlyEdWatch.org. w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

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There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test Real literacy involves learning about the world, not just letters and sounds.

By E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Robert Pondiscio

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t is among the most common of nightmares. You dream of taking a test for which you are completely unprepared—you’ve never studied the material or even attended the course.

For millions of American schoolchildren, it is a nightmare from which they cannot wake, a trial visited upon them each year when the law requires them to take reading tests with little preparation. Sure, formally preparing for reading tests has become more than just a ritual for schools. It is practically their raison d’être! Yet students are not prepared in the way they need to be.

Schools and teachers may indeed be making a Herculean effort to raise reading scores, but these efforts do little to improve reading achievement and to prepare children for college, a career, and a lifetime of productive, engaged citizenship. This wasted effort is not because our teachers are lazy or of low quality. Rather, too many of our schools labor under fundamental misconceptions about reading comprehension—how it works, how to improve it, and how to test it.

Reading, like riding a bike, is an ability we acquire as children and generally never lose. Some of us are more confident on two wheels than others, and some of us, we are told, are better readers than others. The culture of testing treats reading ability as a broad, generalized skill that is easily measured and assessed. We judge our schools and increasingly individual teachers based on their ability to improve the reading skills of our children. When you think about your ability to read—if you think about it at all—the chances are good that you perceive it as not just a skill but a readily transferable skill. Once you learn how to read you can

competently read a novel, a newspaper article, or the latest memo from corporate headquarters. Reading is reading is reading. Either you can do it, or you cannot.

This view of reading is only partially correct. The ability to translate written symbols into sounds, commonly called “decoding,” is indeed a skill that can be taught and mastered. This explains why you are able to “read” nonsense words such as “rigfap” or “churbit.” Once a child masters letter-sound correspondence, or phonics, we might say she can read because she can reproduce the sounds represented by written language. But clearly there’s more to reading than making sounds. To be fully literate is to have the communicative power of language at your command—to read, write, listen, and speak with understanding. As nearly any elementary schoolteacher can attest, it is possible to decode skillfully yet struggle with comprehension. And reading comprehension, the ability to extract meaning from text, is not transferable.

Cognitive scientists describe comprehension as domain specific. If a baseball fan reads “A-Rod hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game,” he needs

not another word to understand that the New York Yankees lost when Alex Rodriguez came up to bat with a man on first base and one out and then hit a groundball to the shortstop, who threw to the second baseman, who relayed to first in time to catch Rodriguez for the final out. If you’ve never heard of A-Rod or a 6-4-3 double play and cannot reconstruct the game situation, you are not a poor reader. You merely lack the domain-specific knowledge of baseball to fill in the gaps.

Even simple texts, like those on reading tests, are filled with gaps—presumed domain knowledge—that the writer assumes the reader knows. Research also tells us that familiarity with domain knowledge increases fluency, broadens vocabulary (you can pick up words in context), and enables deeper reading and listening comprehension.

Think of reading as a two-lock box, requiring two keys to open. The first key is decoding skills. The second key is oral language, vocabulary, and domain-­specific or background knowledge sufficient to understand what is being decoded. Even this simple understanding of reading enables us to see that the very idea of an abstract skill called “reading comprehension” is ill-informed. Yet most U.S. schools teach reading as if both decoding and comprehension are transferable skills. Worse, we test our children’s reading ability without regard to whether we have given them the requisite background knowledge they need to be successful.

Researchers have consistently demonstrated that in order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. Students who are identified as “poor readers” comprehend with relative ease when asked to read passages on familiar subjects, outperforming even “good readers” who lack relevant background knowledge. One well-known study looked at junior high school students judged to be either good or poor readers in terms of their ability to decode or read aloud fluently. Some knew a lot about baseball, while others knew little. The children read a passage written at an early fifth-grade reading level, describing the action in a game. the american prospect

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dren receive, the more capable they will become as readers.

The message has not yet reached Amer-

ican classrooms. A stubborn belief in reading comprehension as a transferable skill combined with the immense pressures of testing and accountability results in ever more time being wasted on scattered, trivial, and incoherent reading. A study sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that only 4 percent of first-grade class time in American elementary schools is spent on science and only 2 percent, on social studies. In third grade, about 5 percent of class time goes to each of these subjects. Meanwhile a whopping 62 percent in first grade and 47 percent in third grade is spent on language arts.

Most young American children spend anywhere from 90 minutes to two and a half hours a day in something educators call “the literacy block,” an extended period that might include reading aloud, small-group “guided reading,” independent writing, and other activities aimed at increasing children’s verbal skills. Reading instruction largely focuses on teaching and practicing reading­c omprehension strategies—helping students to find the main idea of a passage and make inferences or identify the author’s purpose. The general idea is to arm young readers with a suite of

all-purpose tricks and tips for thinking about reading that can be applied to any text the child encounters. Careful readers may be thinking, “If the ability to understand what you read is a function of your domain-specific background knowledge, then how is it possible to teach all-purpose reading strategies?”

Reading strategies figured prominently in the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel, based on evidence that reading strategies work—which they do, to a point. Reading-comprehension scores tend to go up after instruction in strategies, but it’s a onetime boost. The major contribution of such instruction is to help beginning readers know that text, like speech, is supposed to make sense. If someone says something you don’t understand, you can always ask that person to repeat, explain, or give an example. Reading strategies offer similar workarounds for print. They’re not useless, but repeated practice seems to have little or no effect on scores.

“The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies, and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country,” Daniel T. Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, recently wrote in The Washington Post. “Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.” w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

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As they read, they were asked to move models of ballplayers around a replica baseball diamond to illustrate the action in the passage. If reading comprehension were a transferable skill that could be taught, practiced, and mastered, then the students who were “good” readers should have had no trouble outperforming the “poor” readers. Just the opposite happened. Poor readers with high content knowledge outperformed good readers with low content knowledge.

Such findings should challenge our very idea of who is or is not good reader: If reading is the means by which we receive ideas and information, then the good reader is the one who best understands the author’s words.

You have probably experienced the uncomfortable sensation of feeling like a poor reader when struggling to understand a new product warranty, directions for installing a computer operating system, or some other piece of writing where your lack of background knowledge left you feeling out of your depth.

Your rate of reading slows. You find yourself repeating sentences to make sure you understand. If this happens only rarely to you, it is because you possess a broad range of background knowledge— the more you know, the more you are able to communicate and comprehend. The implications of this insight for teaching children to read should be obvious: The more domain knowledge our chil-

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y and acted upon the clear evidence that domainspecific content knowledge is foundational to literacy, reading instruction might look very different in our children’s classrooms. Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. Recently, the Core Knowledge Foundation has been piloting precisely such a language-arts program in a small number of schools in New York City and elsewhere. Initial results are promising; however, building domain knowledge is a long-term proposition. All reading tests are cumulative. The measurable benefit of broad background knowledge can take years to reveal itself.

At present, teachers are tacitly discouraged from taking the long view.

Indeed, what incentive would secondgrade teachers have to emphasize content that might not show up on a test until sixth grade, if even then? There is more upside for teachers in doing exactly what they chiefly do now—test prep, skills, and strategies—unless we actively promote a domain-specific approach to language arts.

Consider a reasonable, simple, even elegant alternative to replace the vicious circle of narrowed curriculum and comprehension skills of limited efficacy, which over time depress reading achievement. By tying the content of reading tests to specific curricular content, the circle becomes virtuous. Here’s how it would work: Let’s say a state’s fourthgrade science standards include the circulatory system, atoms and molecules, electricity, and Earth’s geologic layers and weather; and social-studies standards include world geography, Europe in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other domains. The state’s reading tests should include not just fiction and poetry but nonfiction readings on those topics and others culled from those specific curriculum standards. Teachers would still teach to the test, emphasizing If our schools understood

domain-specific knowledge (because it might be on the test), but no one would object, because it would help students not only pass the current year’s test but build the broad background knowledge that enables them to become stronger readers in general.

The benefits of such “curriculumbased reading tests” would be many: Tests would be fairer and offer a better reflection of how well a student had learned the particular year’s curriculum.

The tests would also exhibit “consequential validity,” meaning they would actually improve education. Instead of wasted hours of mind-numbing test prep and reading-strategy lessons of limited value, the best test-taking strategy would be learning the material in the curriculum standards—a true virtuous circle.

By contrast, let’s imagine what it is like to be a fourth-grade boy in a struggling South Bronx elementary school, sitting

no brighter or more capable than you are, but because they have wider general knowledge—as students who come from advantaged backgrounds so often do— the test is not much of a challenge. Those who think reading is a transferable skill and take background knowledge for granted may well wonder what all the fuss is about. Those kids and teachers in the Bronx struggle all year and fail to get ready for this? Why, all the answers are right there on the page!

It ends, as it inevitably must, in the finger-pointing that plagues American education. But do not blame the tests.

Taxpayers are entitled to know if the schools they support are any good, and reading tests, all things considered, are quite reliable. Do not blame the test writers. They have no idea what topics are being taught in school and their job is done when tests show certain technical characteristics. It is unfair to blame

Without the benefit of broad background knowledge, less advantaged students don’t have a chance at reading comprehension. for a high-stakes reading test. If you do not pass, you face summer school or repeating the grade. Because the school has large numbers of students below grade level, it has drastically cut back on science, social studies, art, music—even gym and recess—to focus on reading and math. You have spent the year learning and practicing reading strategies. Your teacher, worried about her performance, has relentlessly hammered test-taking strategies for months.

The test begins, and the very first passage concerns the customs of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. You do not know what a custom is; neither do you know who the Dutch were, or even what a colony is. You have never heard of Amsterdam, old or new. Certainly it’s never come up in class. Without background knowledge, you struggle with most of the passages on the test.

You never had a chance. Meanwhile, across town, more affluent students take and pass the test with ease. They are

teachers, because they are mainly operating to the best of their ability using the methods in which they were trained. And let’s not blame the parents of our struggling young man in the South Bronx. Is it unreasonable to assume that a child who dutifully goes to school every day will gain access to the same rich, enabling domains of knowledge that more affluent children take for granted?

It’s not unreasonable at all. That’s what schools are supposed to be for. The only unreasonable thing is our refusal to see reading for what it really is and to teach and test accordingly. tap E.D. Hirsch Jr. is the founder and chair of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. Robert Pondiscio is a former fifth-grade teacher. He writes about education at the Core Knowledge blog. the american prospect

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Lessons From New Jersey Providing poor children with stable, high-quality preschool and kindergarten will make them higher performers.

By Gordon MacInnes

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ew Jersey is usually overlooked as a leader in anything except population density, corruption, and Superfund sites. It has also never been known as an education role model, either.

It spends more than any other state, but the gaps in student achievement are vast.

Some of its larger urban districts, such as Newark and Camden, have become nationally known for their poor student performance and official corruption. The state is also home to long-running and contentious lawsuits over inequities in education funding and disparities in student achievement. But in the last decade, New Jersey has discovered some answers to improving schools for its poorest children by focusing on achieving literacy in the early grades.

The 30-year legal battle over school funding, in the case Abbott v. Burke, has led to the nation’s highest-spending urban districts. In 2007–2008, for example, the 31 city districts covered by the state Supreme Court’s order to equalize funding enrolled 20 percent of New Jersey students, received 55 percent of all state aid, and outspent the wealthiest districts by about $3,000 per student.

Despite years of effort, and various faddish and simplistic solutions, student achievement only took off when the state set a tangible goal that unlocked everything else: Work with cooperating city districts to increase literacy among 9-year-olds. The effort was made possible by the example set by a poor urban district with a high concentration of immigrant and first-generation students who enter school with little English: Union City. The story centers on what works for teachers and students to improve early literacy. Its implications extend to any place with concentrations of children from poor families. a 16 j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 i 0

We know very well what the basic problem is: Poor children begin kindergarten with insufficient vocabulary and general knowledge and without a familiarity with print needed to make them strong readers by third grade. Weak readers at age 9 or 10 rarely attain the reading capacity to master the increasingly rigorous content expected of students beginning in fourth grade. Poor children fall further behind, drop out, or graduate from high school unequipped for college or the job market.

The solution is disarmingly simple to describe. First, give poor children at least one year of high-quality preschool. Second, closely connect their experience in preschool with intensive early literacy from kindergarten through third grade.

In brief, make them literate by age 10.

Finally, provide a rich and engaging curriculum of increasingly rigorous academic content in grades four through 12 to prepare them for a university education.

Walking through Union City, New Jersey, you will see no front lawns or hear much English. Union City is one of the nation’s most densely populated cities.

It is crammed with immigrants, and its students are among the poorest in the state (more than 90 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price meals) with 75 percent from families that speak Spanish at home. Concentrated poverty and no English at home are the strongest predictors of reading difficulty.

Union City is run by one of the nation’s most efficient political organizations; the mayor calls the shots. In 1989, the mayor­ —Bob Menendez, now a U.S. senator— watched as the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) seized control of neighboring Jersey City’s school system under the nation’s first “takeover” law.

Since Union City’s schools were also among the lowest-performing in the state, the mayor was nervous about losing control of his school district— the city’s largest employer. The Union City schools superintendent was given six months to get the district off the NJDOE’s “watch list.” He handed the job off to Fred Carrigg, then the supervisor for bilingual education.

Carrigg concluded that Union City fourth-graders did not read well enough to master what was expected of them in history, science, English, and math. He traced the problem back to kindergarten, where most students did not possess enough general knowledge, vocabulary, or sufficient mastery of books to get ready to read. Carrigg determined that the district should do everything possible to get to kids before kindergarten to increase their familiarity with words, stories, ideas, and general knowledge in either English or Spanish. For this he initiated a readaloud program with operators of local day-care centers, most of which employed caregivers fluent in Spanish.

Over time, working with teachers and literacy experts, Carrigg developed a set of practices and resources he called Intensive Early Literacy (IEL): Start early, connect preschool experiences to instruction from kindergarten through third grade, expand the time for literacy instruction, keep careful track of student progress, adjust instruction to reflect individual needs, surround students with books and words, focus on small groups for most instruction, spend extra time with struggling readers, and support teachers and engage them in making necessary changes.

IEL has worked pretty well. New Jersey first tested fourth-graders in literacy in 1999. Only one-third of Union City’s fourth-graders were proficient, a gap of 31 percentage points with students in the higher-performing districts not covered

by Abbott. Union City was 11th among the 31 Abbott districts, trailing even Jersey City. By 2008, 77.7 percent of Union City fourth-graders were proficient, the gap with non-Abbott districts closed to eight percentage points. Only two small, bluecollar Abbott districts did slightly better.

Nationally, improvements in reading w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y test scores for elementary school students haven’t always translated into improvements in later grades. Union City, with its emphasis on strong early literacy and an engaging curriculum in the middle grades, broke this pattern. One indicator: Only 42.3 percent of Union City’s eighth-graders were proficient on the state’s 1999 math assessment, 26 percentage points behind non-Abbott students but 12 percentage points ahead of other Abbott students. By 2008, Union City eighth-graders trailed non-Abbott students by a bare three percentage points (70.1 percent versus 73.6 percent) but were 31 percentage points ahead of other Abbott students. was elected governor in 2001, his education platform was to make every third-grader a strong reader. Abbott allowed, but did not guarantee, that pre-kindergarten through third grade could be the focus. He struck a truce with the Education Law Center (which was representing the children in poor districts in the long Abbott case) to end the animosity and incessant litigation that prevailed during Christine Todd Whitman’s administration. The ELC was invited to advise on reorganizing Abbott implementation within NJDOE and selecting its leadership. A “coordinating” council that included the ELC was established by executive order; the ELC supported the administration’s petition for a one-year “timeout” in implementing Abbott’s long list of programs and services (which was granted).

The new Abbott division focused on two related goals: increasing enrollments and improving the quality of preschool; and intensifying early-literacy instruction in kindergarten through third grade. The metric for evaluating Abbott districts shifted from their compliance with judicial mandates to whether their third-graders were strong readers and writers. The rationale was as simple as the goals: Weak readers cannot be well educated, and reading is a skill and practice learned early or not at all.

“K to three, learn to read; four through 12 read to learn,” is a common saw among educators. Trite as it is, the saying conveys When Jim McGreevey

succinctly the moral responsibility of elementary schools. No third-grade test was given until 2003, but the evidence from the 2001 fourth-grade test provided all the evidence the NJDOE needed to frame the problem: Barely half (55 percent) of Abbott students were “proficient” on the state language-arts test, 30 percentage points behind their non-Abbott peers.

The districts in New Jersey making these efforts offer a case study for what happens in trying to get the preschool through third-grade part right. No state funds preschool so generously. Abbott gave New Jersey the mandate and means to bring the Union City approach to its poorest districts. Specifically, the state Supreme Court ordered in 1998 that each Abbott district offer high-quality preschool beginning at age 3, followed by full-day kindergarten and four years of intensive literacy instruction in a class of no more than 21 students. The state

group instruction, clear and specific academic expectations, extensive sharing of the evidence from student work with teachers, and adjustment in instruction, Montgomery County and Union City have pursued remarkably similar paths without consultation. Their results in schools with concentrations of poor students are also similar, and beyond the usual fourth-grade plateau. the New Jersey experience is the importance of beginning with preschool. New Jersey has the advantage that districts were required to provide full-day preschool and did not have to pay for it. To accelerate enrollments, the state Supreme Court directed that any licensed day-care center could contract with its local district as long as it agreed to Abbott’s more demanding requirements: a college-educated, early-childhood-certified teacher and a Another lesson from

Between 1999 and 2007, the percentage of preschool teachers holding bachelor’s degrees increased from 38 to 97 percent. was directed to pay 100 percent of the preschool costs.

True, New Jersey’s implementation of preschool and intensive early literacy was made easier by the fact that it was mandated and funded. Fortunately, Montgomery County, Maryland, public schools (MCPS) are proof that generous state funding or judicial orders are not essential to the introduction of intensive early literacy. Jerry Weast, the MCPS superintendent since 1999, has demonstrated that at least one year of quality preschool can be provided by combining Head Start, Title I, and district funds.

Further, he increased spending for fullday kindergarten and small class sizes in elementary schools serving poor kids, all the while maintaining quality in Montgomery’s affluent neighborhoods. And when the Great Recession hit, Weast temporarily increased Title I funds to expand and strengthen preschool and class-size reductions in Title I schools.

In concentrating on preschool, small-

teacher’s assistant in classrooms with no more than 15 children.

Most Abbott superintendents saw preschool as just another mandate. They resented having to contract with outside day-care centers and did not accept that preschool paid off in improved literacy. In regular meetings to discuss early-literacy progress, most superintendents implied that “real” reading instruction started in first grade. While Carrigg emphasized strengthening instruction in kindergarten and first grade to start, they deployed their best primary teachers to drill thirdand fourth-graders for test-taking.

Many educators are skeptical about the fuss made over “high quality” preschool. What, they opine, can be so difficult about teaching a roomful of curious, playful, eager, nonthreatening 4-yearolds? The evidence is mounting that poor children exposed to creative uses of play to introduce new words, concepts, problem-­solving approaches, and stories are better prepared for kindergarten and, the american prospect

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later, reading and writing. Well-trained and fairly compensated teachers are essential. Between 1999 and 2007, the percentage of Abbott preschool teachers holding bachelor’s degrees increased from 38 percent to 97 percent. Moreover, the quality of teaching and learning in the affected districts has increased from a rating of barely “good” in 1999 to almost “excellent” in 2007 even as enrollment exploded from 19,000 to 43,000.

Supporting and respecting teachers is also key to improving early literacy. Effective districts operate on the assumption that teachers need frequent support and information to do their difficult jobs well. They must not be left alone but made a part of a professional and collaborative culture. Union City and Montgomery County schedule more time for teachers to work with one another on shared problems. They provide intensive support for inexperienced teachers. Evidence from student work is evaluated not to play “gotcha” with teachers but to explore with them how to improve student achievement. Both districts use their own interim assessments that are shared quickly with teachers and principals to spot gaps in instruction; compare results across classrooms, schools, and

of the elements of Intensive Early Literacy in place: Classroom libraries were skimpy or little used, nationally normed reading assessments were not in place, small-group instruction was rare, and the scheduled uninterrupted time for literacy instruction was insufficient. A coherent reading program was adopted for all Orange schools, classroom libraries were expanded, and regular assessments were conducted with twice-weekly meetings among coaches and teachers to review the needs of individual students.

Helping teachers understand what was expected from students was also part of the story. The primary grades benefit from broad agreement on what children should be able do and when— for example, a first-grader should have a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500 words.

Nationally normed assessments can help teachers evaluate students against expectations and suggest what specific assistance they need. Carrigg introduced and helped train teachers in districts with little experience with either assessments or small-group instruction.

The results of all this and much more can be reduced to a crude generalization: Students in districts that concentrated on sustaining the implementation of Inten-

The Great Recession intervened to make the future of New Jersey’s generously funded early-literacy program uncertain. grades; and adjust the composition of small instructional groups.

The data provided useful information and helped different districts in New Jersey develop their own solutions. For example, in two small districts, Asbury Park and Pleasantville, the problem was that students had not been taught writing—about half the score on New Jersey’s language-arts test involved the composition of a paragraph. Fred Carrigg, who by this time had been elevated to the state Department of Education, organized in-school workshops for teachers in all the primary grades to intensify writing instruction. In Orange, a heavily black district, teachers did not have most a 18 j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 i 0

sive Early Literacy performed significantly better on New Jersey’s third- and fourthgrade literacy tests. Students in districts that ignored the opportunity offered by the funding boost performed no better or slightly worse than students in prior years.

The two districts with the largest gains— Elizabeth and Orange—were the districts most attentive to connecting preschools with primary grades. Orange’s fourthgraders in 1999 were 25th among the 31 Abbott districts on the literacy test; by 2007 they were fifth with 75.6 percent of them proficient (tying Union City). Elizabeth’s fourth-graders made similar progress (74.2 percent proficiency in 2008), despite their high poverty rates (80.5 per-

cent eligible for free or reduced meals).

Unfortunately, the intense investment forced by Abbott was unsustainable politically or morally. By 2007, one-half of poor children attended non-Abbott schools.

Districts with rapidly growing immigrant populations received no special state aid or advice to help with Spanishor Creole-speaking students. In 2007, Gov. Jon Corzine pushed through a new school-aid formula that ended Abbott’s two-tier funding. Instead, state aid would be determined by a district’s poverty level, the number of English learners and disabled students set against the district’s financial capacity to provide the extra funding required. Small, poor towns and blue-collar suburbs benefited; Abbott districts were protected against reductions, but most important, preschool was expanded from 31 to 78 districts.

The state Supreme Court blessed the new formula in 2008, with a plan to revisit the case yet again within three years to see if the approach is working. The Great Recession intervened to ensure that preschool expansion would not occur for at least three years. By 2010, just about every district in the state was looking at cuts in state aid.

Gov. Chris Christie took office in 2010 and signaled tough times for every category of public spending, including education. In his proposed 2011 budget, he protected preschool in the old Abbott districts while postponing its expansion.

But he also supported efforts to divert $360 million in scarce funds to initiate a voucher program to support low-income parents in transferring their children out of failing public schools. In short, the future of New Jersey’s generously funded early-literacy program is uncertain.

There are no surprises at the end of the New Jersey story. Focus, intensity of effort, expanded teaching time, attention to student work, and adjustments to instruction based on those results are at the heart of ending the state’s and our nation’s long failure to adequately educate poor children.

We have trifled with the lives of poor children—and lost tens of millions of them in the process—with rushed, simplistic solutions, always in the name of “reform.” w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y Those who urge “systemic” or “transformational” reform of public education deflect attention from improving what happens in classrooms. The lesson from New Jersey is that intensive investment, attention to what works, high-quality preschool, respect for teachers, and adjusting the approach based on data and results, over time, can get kids across the threshold that

matters most for their future as learners and citizens: third-grade literacy. tap Gordon MacInnes was the assistant commissioner in the New Jersey Department of Education responsible for Abbott implementation and also a state senator.

He is currently a fellow at The Century Foundation.

Missing Out on Reading Children can’t learn to read if they’re not in school— and chronic absenteeism is a problem we can fix.

By Hedy N. Chang and Phyllis W. Jordan

F

our years ago, the teachers at Robert Bailey IV Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island, set a goal that all their students would learn to read well by the end of third grade. They adjusted their curriculum, developed an individual learning plan for each struggling reader, and launched an engaging summer program.

But they quickly realized that whatever they did inside the classroom wasn’t going to matter much if the students weren’t showing up for school. An attendance analysis found that one in five of their young students was missing the equivalent of a month of school each year.

This wasn’t truancy in the traditional sense, because parents usually know when kindergartners and first-graders are staying home and call in to the school with an excuse. But “chronic absence”— defined as missing 10 percent of the school days—was affecting academic achievement nonetheless. As school officials looked over the data and as teachers talked to parents, patterns began to emerge. The parents of many chronically absent children, for instance, worked overnight shifts and were falling asleep before taking their children to school.

So Bailey opened an early-morning program, allowing parents to drop off children at 6:30 A.M.—after the night shift ended but before parents working the shift

went to bed. Local organizations used a federal grant to begin providing transportation to children who needed it and delivering other services to address the underlying social and economic problems keeping children from getting to school.

Since the program began four years ago, Bailey has seen its rate of chronically absent students drop from 21 percent to 10 percent. The elementary school’s reading scores, meanwhile, are up: 59 percent of third graders now read on grade level, compared to 28 percent in 2006, according to state test results.

Among the causes of problems in developing literacy, absenteeism in the early grades is often overlooked. We think of truancy as a problem among middle- and high-school students. Much less attention is paid to excused, but persistent, absences that keep children out of the classroom

and off track for learning, exacerbating the achievement gap and, ultimately, the high school dropout problem.

Research shows that nationwide, one in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students misses 10 percent of the school year, or about a month, meeting the definition of chronic absence. In some school districts, including Providence and New York City, the rate is much higher. The research also demonstrates that these absences—excused or unexcused—can have an early, often lasting, effect on academic performance.

Students who were chronically absent in kindergarten suffered academically in the first grade regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, we reported in Present, Engaged, and Accounted For, published in 2008 by the National Center for Children in Poverty.

The effects are particularly pronounced among Hispanic students in reading.

For low-income children, the poor performance continues through fifth grade.

In secondary school, chronic absence becomes a powerful predictor of dropping out of high school, other research shows.

Test scores are not the only numbers that matter in education reform. Chronic absence in the early grades is essentially an early-warning system alerting schools that a student, long before he or she fills in the first bubble on a standardized test, could be headed off track.

“If you want to close the achievement gap and keep kids from dropping out, you’ve got to build good attendance habits in the early grades,” said Maryclaire Knight, an education and community-services coordinator who works with the Bailey school as part of an Annie E. Casey Foundation initiative that targets schools and neighborhoods for a full range of approaches aimed at ensuring early school success.

At Bailey, almost all of the children are poor and two-thirds are Hispanic, many of them still learning English.

Chronic absenteeism in the early grades can disrupt education for entire classrooms—and schools. The constant churn of students can make classroom management difficult. And teachers may end up slowing down the pace of instruction to review lessons for children who the american prospect

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missed class. In school districts where funding is tied to attendance, chronic absence can cost money.

Even so, most school districts in America don’t track this data. Certainly teachers take roll every day and turn in the attendance sheets to the school office. Schools and district officials use those sheets to calculate average daily attendance, a number that is tied to various government funding streams. But schools typically don’t look at whether individual students are missing extended periods of classroom time. And they don’t look for the kinds of patterns that are key to understanding and ultimately reducing absences.

When districts do gather this data, principals have been able to recognize the not-so-mysterious causes of absences and fashion solutions. For example, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Principal Margarita Cotto-Hernandez found that many of the Hispanic students at Bur-

the children didn’t miss weeks of school.

In Baltimore, childhood illnesses often caused by unhealthy living conditions were keeping many children home from school. So school officials approached school nurses and asked them to reach out to the parents of children who were frequently sick.

The Baltimore effort is part of a broader initiative supported by the city, the school district, and the Open Society Institute, a local and national foundation, to reduce absences and cut the city’s high school dropout rate. An attendance analysis found that 14 percent of first-graders miss 20 or more days of school a year. By middle school, the rate reached one-third.

“Encouraging good attendance is basically growing a key skill. It’s teaching persistence and perseverance, which students need if they are to succeed during their school years and throughout their lives,” said Jane Sundius, director

Too often schools and parents fail to recognize the importance of good attendance in kindergarten and the primary grades. ton Elementary School were missing school when their parents took them for extended visits to their home country at Christmastime. She understood the cultural importance of the tradition. But she made sure that parents understood the academic importance of attendance.

“I run the workshops myself, and I always say that a good education is the key out of poverty,” Hernandez says. “I explain that we all know we will lose our jobs if we miss too many days of work or always arrive late. We need to teach our children this is a priority if we want them to succeed. We can start while they are here at school.”

In New York City, where 20 percent of elementary students are chronically absent, a principal at a Bronx school faced a different sort of cultural challenge. Many of his Muslim students were staying home through Ramadan, hoping to avoid the school cafeteria while fasting. The school hired a Muslim man to sit with the students in a separate area at lunchtime, so a 20 j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 i 0

of the Education and Youth Development Program for OSI in Baltimore. “Chronic absence is a serious problem—one that merits intensive school and community responses, beginning in kindergarten and continuing through high school.”

The latest analysis shows significantly improved attendance in Baltimore’s middle schools with modest but consistent gains in elementary and high school attendance.

The progress in Providence and Baltimore belies a common misperception— that little can be done about chronic absence, given the intractable problems that often keep children from making it to school. Some absentee students are sick, but others miss school because of the problems associated with poverty: frequent moves, foster-care placements, unreliable transportation, neighborhood crime, and parental depression or substance abuse.

Often, high absentee rates are a sign that an entire neighborhood needs help.

Knight and her team of community­service providers in Providence used Bailey’s chronic-absence data to tip them off to children in need. With a federal grant, the team now has additional resources that pay for transportation to bring children to school, as well as family counseling and home visits, effectively creating a system of wraparound services for the most vulnerable children and families.

Chronic-absence data is also crucial to evaluating and reforming schools.

Educators can’t assess whether a new curriculum or teaching style is working unless they know whether the children are actually in the classroom to benefit from these reforms.

Ultimately, if we are to improve childhood literacy, we need to acknowledge the obvious: Children aren’t likely to learn if they’re not in school. Too often schools and parents fail to recognize the importance of good attendance in kindergarten and the primary grades. Our research demonstrated that missing too many days in these early years can set a child on the wrong course academically.

Often the children most likely to be chronically absent are also beset with a tangle of health, social, and cognitive problems that make learning difficult. By tracking absences, schools can spot these children early and start to intervene. Districts in turn can spot schools or entire communities that are in trouble.

While it may seem far removed from the challenge of early literacy, a vital innovation in helping kids prepare to read and succeed at reading would be the simple act of insisting that every school track and analyze chronic-absence data, even where it’s not an obvious problem. Social-service providers can use the data to determine where and when they should intervene in a community. Student longitudinal databases, required for every state, should include attendance data as well as test scores. And school improvement efforts need to be measured by attendance gains as well as test improvements. tap Hedy N. Chang is director of Attendance Counts. Phyllis W. Jordan is vice president at The Hatcher Group in Bethesda, Maryland. w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

c h i ld h o o d l i t e r ac y

Health Education Glasses and eye tests are just one of the ways in which the new health-reform law will help kids read.

By Monica Potts

a n i ta b a c k / l a i f / r e d u x

I

n addition to reforming the nation’s health-care system, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed in March, came close to being a major education bill. Funding for an early education program for children under 5, which would have made explicit the connection between education and health, hitched a ride with the healthcare reconciliation package until negotiators dropped it at the last minute.

Even without that provision, the health bill holds great promise as a means to dramatically improve early literacy and other educational outcomes, albeit indirectly. Educators and health providers agree that well-fed, healthy children learn better. While experts will continue to debate the exact ways adequate nutrition and health care can lead to better educational outcomes, widespread acceptance that health affects learning helped justify many early nutrition and insurance programs for poor children and pregnant women, from the Women, Infants and Children feeding program through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). In explicit recognition of this connection, the health-reform bill did include a $1.5 billion home-visitation program, funding nurses to visit homes to educate and provide support for expecting or new parents. This kind of initiative recognizes that the skills needed to create a nurturing environment—and a learning environment—aren’t natural and that the kind of educational enrichment middle-class families take for granted should be available to everyone.

But there are more basic ways that the health-care-reform effort is likely to lead to better education outcomes, especially in literacy. Put simply, it will bring every last child under the umbrella of health

insurance and get parents more involved in their children’s health care and overall well-being.

From promoting breast-feeding by requiring employers to provide safe spaces for pumping breast milk, to eliminating lifetime caps on benefits that prevent the sickest children from receiving adequate care, to reducing school absenteeism by ensuring children have better treatment and therefore fewer emergencies—the health-care reform bill has the potential to make children healthier and, as a result, better learners.

While the link between breast-feeding and better literacy outcomes is not a direct one, most doctors now agree that breast milk is a sort of elixir for babies. A 2008 study from McGill University found that

breast-feeding exclusively and for longer periods of time was associated with higher IQs and better educational outcomes.

A study published in Pediatrics this year found that breast-feeding also prevents nutritional diseases like diabetes and long-term problems like asthma. Those conditions aren’t only costly; they can keep children from learning because they require intense management. For example, as Hedy Chang and Phyllis Jordan write in this report, about one in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students miss 10 percent of the year’s classes.

And those first years of school provide the building blocks for learning later, especially in literacy. Late in elementary school, children shift from learning to read to reading to learn; nearly every aspect of their subsequent education will be influenced by their ability to read educational materials.

One disarmingly simple provision of a better health-care system that could dramatically improve childhood literacy is ensuring vision testing for all kids and providing glasses to those who need them.

This will come as no surprise to teachers, who know well that many of their students who have trouble reading or paying attention are having trouble seeing.

Many schools screen for vision problems, but in the Philadelphia area, for example, about 60 percent of the children who show problems in screening do not receive further eye care. Simply getting those children glasses can have a big effect on their learning ability.

Philadelphia offers a case study in the effort to close the glasses gap, and its effects on literacy. In 1995, the Philadelphia Eagles football team launched a program to provide free eye exams and eyeglasses. “We’ve noticed since we’ve had the Eagles Eye Mobile come to us, there’s been an increase in our reading skills and also in our math skills for our children,” said Kathleen Girbada, a school nurse from the Philadelphia the american prospect

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area interviewed in a video on the initiative’s website. The mobile clinic provided glasses for children who knew, and whose teachers knew, that they needed them but weren’t able to afford them.

Vision care, along with untreated hearing problems, is a bigger obstacle to children’s literacy than most Americans know, says Linda Katz, executive director of the Children’s Literacy Initiative, also located in Philadelphia. “These aren’t at the margins,” she says. The numbers of children with untreated vision and hearing problems, and the consequences of those problems, are “getting worse, primarily because of the money.”

While for many children, better vision and improved learning is just a matter of getting the right glasses, for others, improved screening and regular access to medical care is necessary to solve problems that often appear to be learning disabilities. Children who can’t read the

dren under age 18, only about 20 percent had visited an eye doctor in the previous year. A recent National Commission on Vision & Health report revealed that 23 percent of children without insurance had unmet vision needs, in part because more than half of children without health insurance do not have regular physicals. Five percent of children who had been insured for a year or more still had unmet vision needs.

For the poor and the uninsured, eye exams and glasses are an expense that cannot be squeezed into the budget. As a result, many children don’t resolve vision problems until their adolescence.

By the time they first see an eye doctor, they’ve already been expected to know how to read. Every piece of knowledge in every class will be augmented by or first encountered in a textbook. Untreated vision problems that prevented literacy training, then, can lead to learn-

Untreated vision problems can hinder earlyliteracy training and lead to learning problems for the rest of a child’s life. board or their books may have visualprocessing disorders like dyslexia that worsen because they go undiagnosed.

Children with uncorrected vision problems can overcompensate, making their eyesight worse and causing other health problems like headaches. That can lead to learning blocks that are falsely attributed to behavioral or learning problems.

“It’s not identified early because kids don’t seem to be having trouble: They’re not walking into walls a lot, and they seem to be able to watch television,” says Shelly Yanoff, executive director of the Public Citizens for Children and Youth. “So the fact that they’re not able to identify letters appears to be a learning disability.”

There is still a gap in vision care for children in the benefits that are covered under insurance and public health programs. A 2002 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that only a little more than a third of children under 6-years-old had ever had their vision tested. Of all chila 22 j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 i 0

ing problems for the rest of their lives.

Vision care for children is uneven now.

Medicaid has very comprehensive vision coverage, but the S-CHIP programs vary from state to state because states can decide on their own S-CHIP regulations, within certain guidelines. And when the benefits aren’t mandatory, they’re vulnerable. “When … states are under budget pressures, the very last thing they want to do is cut eligibility,” says Julia Paradise, of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “One of the very first options they have is to cut benefits.”

Researchers at the Public Citizens for Children and Youth found in a 2008 report that in addition to not being able to afford glasses, many parents are not aware of the severity of their child’s vision problems. They either do not understand the diagnosis from school screening programs, or they don’t understand the damage a delay in getting glasses can do to their child’s ability to learn. Additionally, the report said, parents can misun-

derstand their benefits and not realize, for example, that their child’s glasses can be repaired if they break.

Private plans also vary a great deal.

The health-care reform bill does define vision and dental care as an essential ingredient of pediatric care for insurance plans within the private healthinsurance exchanges, which will result, eventually, in a standardized minimum package of benefits. What that package will include is not yet clear and will vary from state to state. At the very minimum, though, the law requires that plans cover vision screening as preventive care, with no out-of-pocket costs, for children under 5. “It’s a very important gain,” Paradise says. “It’s an idea that an essential benefits package for children includes vision care, whatever the limitations are.”

That basic level of care can also catch other problems. The bill provides for children to have regular doctor visits, and preventative screenings are covered with no cost-sharing. That can catch learning disorders earlier and help children receive continual, adequate treatment.

The goal is to bring the last children without access to health insurance into a seamless system of care. It could also close a loophole that allowed family-plan providers to consider many benefits, like vision care for children, as separate from a basic plan. “There will be some sort of a blanket,” Yanoff says. “It will give more impetus for all practitioners to do these screenings and follow up.”

Moreover, it will make a difference for parents to simply be part of an overarching health-insurance system. If all works as hoped, children will be under the continuous care of a doctor, who will see problems as they develop and know that the family will be able to afford the prescribed remedy. And by bringing the whole family into the same web of care, parents may become more engaged with their children’s needs and better able to support them in school or demand that the school provide necessary services— as middle-class parents have done for years. Vision is just one example of the ways in which a giant step forward for health care might also be a big step for education and literacy. tap w w w. p ro s p ect. o rg

To save a child, there’s no such thing as too far away.

In every corner of the world, local health workers like Salif Diarra bring lifesaving care to the children who need it most.

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The independent magazine with the best political coverage of the Obama era.

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Was it The Nation? Mother Jones? The New Republic?

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