At a recent Community Education Council town hall featuring Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, I heard parents raise concerns about overcrowding, budget cuts, and reduced test prep.
Walcott gave the same shopworn response to each concern, but it was his answer about test prep that drew my attention: He told the assembled parents that improving reading and critical thinking skills is more important than more test prep.
He’s absolutely right — but how are we to gain that ground?
After a decade of Bloomberg-Klein-Walcott reforms, Johnny’s in the eighth grade and he still can’t read well. And he won’t be college-ready when and if he graduates from high school.
At least, he can’t read well if he’s on the wrong side of the achievement gap — a chasm in reading and critical thinking skills between children from low-income and higher-income families.
In 2007, 59 percent of 8th-grade students scored at or above basic in reading. But that broke down to only 50 percent of black and Hispanic students, versus nearly 80 percent of whites.
In tests four years earlier, when this same cohort was in 4th grade, their black-white achievement gap was “just” 20 points.
The reason why the gap grew and remains is simple.
Last May, the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that children who read at grade level by the end of the third grade are more successful in school, work and in life.
Reading specialists say that if a student hasn’t learned to read proficiently by the third grade, that deficit grows because the student’s rising frustration turns him off to reading.
And reading is fundamental to learning to process the complex ideas in other classes, from history to biology to math. So the achievement gap spreads into these subject areas.
For all the depressingly little progress we’ve made on this front in the Bloomberg era, it’s not clear the 2013 mayoral candidates offer much hope of better. They talk about hiring teachers, reducing standardized testing and ending the Bloomberg fight for meaningful teacher evaluations.
Not a one has a clue about resolving the persistent achievement gap and increasing high school completion.
At best, you might hear about the woes of city middle schools, where math and reading deficits become magnified and are most glaring. But while the next mayor must redesign our middle schools, no turnaround strategy for them can overcome the deep deficits that have accumulated over the previous four or five grades.
Teaching a kid to read well improves later learning and reduces dropout rates. It does more to reduce teen pregnancy than comprehensive sex education; more to improve health than soda bans.
Any candidate who’s serious about our children’s future must commit to making a fundamental priority of teaching reading in the early years. (And, yes, he or she also needs to promise a full-spectrum push to raise standards, fix our middle schools and provide year-round enrichment opportunities.)
Basic literacy is insufficient for functioning well in the 21st-century digital world. The city’s leaders and would-be leaders have got to start focusing on the front end of public education, or New York’s children will face ever-longer odds against success in life.