Ridge Smith hunches over a newspaper article, harnesses his concentration and focuses on the words.
He wants to prove how well he can read.
His wide, luminous smile disappears. His mouth slowly forms the words he knows. He stops again and again, tripped up on words such as “awkward,” “August” and “local.”
Seconds stretch into minutes.
Ridge is 16. He spent more than 10 years in some of Charleston County’s inner-city, low-performing schools. His teachers and principals learned early on that he had an average IQ and could learn to read. Many of them latched on to the quiet, well-behaved and kind child, but no one taught him to read well.
Ridge reads at a third-grade level.
Would that this were an isolated case! Someone should ask Ridge why he did not learn to read…he knows, and , if he trusts the person asking enough, he will explain in detail. There are so many factors involved, most of them unknown to anyone but Ridge. I have worked with many non-readers in the South, I have heard their stories, I have assigned Laubach Literacy tutors to them, I have tutored them myself, and I have seen them make incredible progress. The hardest part is always that so many times there is no way to connect the non-reader with the person who has the skills to help. My prayer is that someday, somehow, God will bring the right person into Ridge’s life. Frances scott
For more on this, I recommend “We’ve Had A Solution For The Black-White Reading Gap For Four Decades” from the January 14, 2009 issue of The New Republic. This essay is by John H. McWhorter, UC Berkeley Linguist, and may be found on-line here:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=3665
Of course, our public schools can – and do – teach children to read. The vast majority of kids in school learn just fine.
To focus on a single case, particularly a young man from a tragic family situation, who probably suffers from an organic learning disorder, is not at all helpful. To claim that this extreme case says something about schools in general is profoundly dishonest. Yet this is the technique social reformers have used forever. What’s the phrase? “The perfect has become the enemy of the good”? Is that it? Because that’s what’s happening. Bonheoffer’s maxim about the destructive power of idealism applies.
The family remains the real determinant in a child’s life. Schools, no matter how well funded (and doesn’t it always end with an appeal for more money?) cannot undo what a broken family should be doing. Schools can help, but to burden them with an ideal of perfection is, finally, destructive.
This story is disappointingly sad. I pray for the likes of Ridge Smith and his contemporaries who are “administratively promoted.” That is a process that should be banned.
But even sadder, children of ALL socio-economic levels demonstrate the same disabilities. Like #4 I taught a in a professional program (nursing) where students had been admitted to the college, given remedial courses (writing, math, reading) and had to have passed some pre-professional courses (anatomy and physiology, chemistry). I STILL had to teach students in the first terms of our program that a sentence started with a capital letter and ended with a punctuation mark!
These days I am teaching an adult teacher-training course with a diverse group of students–some young, some old, some college grads, some even with graduate degrees. I was startled last week when one (with a college degree!) complained that the vocabulary in the printed material was not understandable, not contemporary or meaningful. The word being referred to was “pathos.” Fully half of the class did NOT understand the meaning of the word!
I say this to point out that it is not just the under served or the economically or socially deprived.
On the other hand, there is an article in our local paper this morning about a set of twins–Korean–who are going to Harvard. Their SATs were 2400 and 2380 respectively. And they are good kids who received an award from the President for their volunteer work with the Red Cross. So there is some hope!
If you want to see a robust study of how your reading scores compare then look at this:
http://www.edweek.org/media/2007/11/20/1120sow-c1.jpg
For the money the USA spends on its children the results are underwhelming to say the least — just one point above the OECD – and beaten by Canada by a country mile.
I am in New Zealand — we spend a triffling amount on our schooling in comparison — and angst over our fifth place.
The major component of success seems to be the quality of the teaching profession in each country — and quality seems to unrelated to qualifications or pay. It does appear to relate to the esteem with which teachers are held by society, and the extent to which good teaching is recognised by the system. With good teachers even children from lower socio-economic backgrounds can read at an age appropriate level.
My son had Major speech, and then, of course, MAJOR reading problems out of K/1st grade. Tested him, got him into special ed, he got “graduated” out of special ed in 3rd grade, and then aced the 4th grade state wide testing (as in did the best in the state). Lessons learned: special ed can work. we were fortunate and smart enough to have him tested. me showing up Every day at school impacted him and his teachers. every kid can do better. God Bless his teachers.
Although it does not say in this article, I would be willing to bet that every attempt to teach Ridge to read has been based on the “whole word” method of teaching reading. I know a number of college graduates who were taught this way, and none of them can read new material. The problem is, the method approaches English as if it were Chinese, trying to teach the child to recognize the “shape” of the word, rather than the letters making it up.
This method of teaching reading has been shown to be unsuccessful for over 50 years, but the schools still insist on it. The correct method of teaching someone to read English is to teach them the sounds of the consonants, the vowels, and how they combine. I taught all three of my children to read this way (one at 6, one at 5, and one a 4 years of age), and they all were able to read adult books (Dr. Doolittle, Three Musketeers, etc.) by third grade.
A friend of mine was tutoring an adult who could not read. I persuaded her to teach him phonics, rather than the recommended “whole word” method, which had failed him repeatedly in the past. In a few weeks he was actually starting to read, but then his wife made him stop the lessons, since she could read and did not want him to gain that degree of independence.
So, the real question is: Why do so many schools insist on using a method of teaching reading which has consistently failed, rather than using one which nearly always works? Either it is incompetence or, even worse, a desire to keep children from learning to read so that they are dependent on others to provide them with information about the world and what is going on in it. Ridge is a tragic story, and, I suspect, a completely unnecessary tragedy. But the schools will not recognize that their methods don’t work.