Why has success in urban elementary schools not translated into success at the middle school level?  One theory is that urban schools are doing a relatively good job teaching kids how to read in the early grades--promoting, for example, intensive phonics instruction and basic reading strategies.  But once kids have the basics down, urban schools are not doing a very good job teaching students how to read "deeply."  Instead, urban schools tend to focus on reading strategies--explicitly teaching kids, for example, how to "look for the main idea," how to "ask questions while reading" and so forth.  

There are two potential problems with this strategy: first, if students are focused on reading strategies as opposed to the substance of the text, they may feel bored by what they're reading--and by reading generally.  Second, as a number of commentators over at the Core Knowledge blog have argued, real literacy requires more than just these basic "reading skills."  To make sense of a novel, a newspaper article, or any other complex text, the reader typically requires a modicum of background content knowledge.  (For example, imagine reading "Huck Finn" without knowing that African Americans were, at one point, enslaved in the American South).  But, as we've noted on this blog before, content simply isn't being sufficiently taught in American secondary schools.  

Completely eradicating the "content instruction gap" in American schools may require changes in the secondary school curriculum.  But there is an immediate impact you can make as an individual.  If you're on this site looking for ways in which you can make a real impact, consider donating sets of books that are both engaging and help teach kids about...you know...stuff.  Literacy teachers are always looking for engaging texts for their students, and there are a number of books geared towards young adults that touch on historical or scientific themes.  

And don't worry if you don't have specific titles in mind!  If you want to, say, fund a teacher's purchase of interesting historical fiction, you can just create a gift earmarked for "historical fiction."  The classroom teacher who claims your gift can select the specific titles.

ON DETROIT:
The NAEP results were particularly disheartening for Detroit, one of the four major cities The Generation Project currently serves.  Detroit students' reading scores--like the math scores released in December--were the worst in the 40-year history of the test.  Incredibly, not a single Detroit fourth-grader--in a city of nearly 1 million people--scored at an "advanced" reading level.

1) Reading Rainbow was still on?  (Yep--and had been running for twenty six years!) 
2) That sucks that they cancelled it.
3) What was that song again?  Butterfly in the sky...I can fly twice as high...take a look...it's in a book...a reading rainbow... 
4) Oh well, I guess it had to end sometime.  

But then I read why they cancelled it.  .  

According to this NPR report, the triumverate that funded Reading Rainbow--PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the US Department of Education--decided that spending money on a show that attempts to impart a love of reading was no longer a good investment.  Instead, these entities wanted to shift their entire focus to basic reading skills, like phonics and spelling instruction.   

Now, phonics and spelling are clearly necessary components in training literate kids.  But ultimately, we also need to teach kids to want to read. After all, if we only teach kids about the basic mechanics of reading, what on earth is going to make them want to pick up a book on their own?  Few people read just because they are technically able to recognize phonetical sounds.  They read because they want to know about interesting stuff.  Reading Rainbow was great because it consistently let children know that incredible adventures awaited them in books.

Maybe Reading Rainbow's time was up anyway--I'm not sure how well today's kids were responding to Geordi La Forge telling them about books.  But the wholesale rejection of the concept that we should teach kids to love reading is disturbing and, in my view, entirely wrong-headed.  

But you don't have to take my word for it....

A sense of inevitable doom hangs over the print journalism industry. Subscriptions and advertising revenue have plummeted, and nobody can figure out how to leverage newspaper websites into a viable revenue stream.  Unless some visionary gamechanger (Rupert Murdoch?) can figure out how to turn pageviews into cash, newspapers will continue to shrink until they fold altogether. And while there are some promising models of for-profit news-gathering websites (on Monday, the Times ran a feature on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's resurgence as a website) most industry analysts predict that news-gathering will be severely curtailed, with many stories simply going uncovered for lack of resources. 

The impending death of newspapers presents a grave challenge for the next generation of Americans.   Inherent in our democratic system is an assumption that citizens can make somewhat informed political and electoral decisions.  But without an apparatus for news-gathering and fact-checking, citizens will either be misinformed or left in the dark on a number of issues--especially issues like local corruption.  As Thomas Jefferson once said: "Were it left for me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not heistate a moment to prefer the latter."   Tomorrow's children--who are likely to be raised in a world without substantial news reporting--are likely to be a generation of stunningly ill-informed voters.  

But newspapers have tremendous value for kids well before they reach legal voting age, as they often provide young people with an initial window to the outside world.  Many newspapers are written at a 3rd-8th grade reading level, so newspapers are texts that even struggling readers can pick up and understand.  And the stories in local newspapers tend to pique kids' interests.  When I was teaching eighth grade in the Bronx, many kids would pick up the New York Post on the way to school and read it during their downtime, drawn in by the intensely local focus, the tabloid-esque headlines, and the sensationalistic stories.  Of course, the Post is not my newspaper of choice, nor would I consider it a paradigm of great journalism.  But the Post get my students reading, and it got them reading actual news, thus allowing them to become better acquainted with the world around them.  (Plus, their familiarity with the Post made my lessons on yellow journalism so much easier for them to understand).  

In addition to giving students easily palatable, interesting texts on subjects that actually matter, students can learn a tremendous amount by writing and publishing their own school newspaper.  When students emulate the ideal of journalistic objectivity that newspapers (theoretically) embody, they are learning to distinguish fact from opinion and news from propaganda.  This is a distinction that is blurred by the blogosphere and TV news channels, but one that old-fashioned newspapers--with their "news" and "opinion" sections--still technically make explicitly.  Of course, the demise of for-profit newspapers does not necessarily make school newspapers obsolete.  But it seems ludicrous to think that future students and schools will be particularly motivated to emulate an anachronistic form of communication.  Telegraph club, anybody?

On a personal level, the demise of print journalism is quite painful for me to watch, as so many parts of my own childhood were intricately shaped by newspapers.  In elementary school, I had my own paper route for the Ann Arbor News, and I would look forward to the end of my route each day when I could read the extra paper that the newspaper provided its carriers.  Perhaps because I was already so familiar with journalism, my favorite class in middle school was a journalism course in which seventh and eighth graders wrote, edited and published a deliciously irreverant publication known as the Tappan Tabloid.  Having been instilled at an early age with a love for newspapers, I stayed involved with journalism throughout my educational career, becoming an editor on both my high school and college papers.  When I taught in the Bronx, not only did I integrate newspapers into my curriculum, I also started a school newspaper club.  (Mimicking larger societal trends, perhaps, the publication started as a printed newspaper entitled "CIS 339 School Post," but has since become a web-only publication called The 339 Hardline).

Last month, the Ann Arbor News folded, leaving my hometown without a daily newspaper and dozens of little paperboys without an after-school job or an extra newspaper to read.  There's no easy way to fill the voids created by local papers. Some aspects of these publications were simply irreplacable, and our democracy is going to suffer until their news-gathering function, at least, can be rescued.  Insofar as newspaper affect eductation, it's ultimately up to the schools--and us as philanthropists--to ensure that at least some of the fundamental lessons that newspapers have provided do not fall by the wayside.

Are you inspired by Earth Day too?  You can 'give green' with a donation through The Generation Project.  You might:

• ●Purchase tickets for an elementary school class to see Disney's new movie, Earth (in theaters today)
• ●Sponsor the creation of a school garden a la Alice Waters
• ●Send an urban student to camp
• ●Purchase a set of books to inspire and empower students to become eco-conscious

Huge news out of the curling world! Canada has reached the 3-versus-4 Page playoff at world women's curling championship!  But it wasn't all easy:

If you're not a curling fan, you're probably a bit confused by all this.  What, after all, does it mean to have a  "6-1 lead through four ends?"  Or to run "one of her own rocks into the Swiss pair?" And who in the heck is "Ott?" But your failure to understand the preceding paragraph probably does not mean that you are illiterate, or  that your reading comprehension is subpar.   Instead, it simply betrays your lack of knowledge about the ostensible subject matter of this blog post: curling.  In fact, you probably know all the words that are used in the preceding paragraph ("rocks," "ends" "skip") you just don't know what they mean in this pariticular context.

This very simple point--that you need to know what you're reading about in order to really understand it--has been made again, and again, and again by the philosopher/educational theorist E.D. Hirsch.  And in light of President Obama's call for “assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test," Hirsch strikes a similar tone in his recent New York Times op-ed, Reading Test Dummies.

The crux of Hirsch's argument is that schools have responded to the incentives tied to standardized reading tests by teaching reading as a skill.  Because teachers never know what the subject matter of the actual passages on the reading tests are going to be--they could be on curling, baseball, the Constitution, or butterfies--teachers spend their time teaching students "skills" like "making inferences" or "finding the main idea."  But, Hirsch argues, reading is not "merely a 'skill' that can be transferred from one passage to another...[and] reading scores [cannot] be raised by having young students endlessly practice strategies on trivial stories."  To truly raise a generation of literate citizens, Hirsch argues, we need to reform standards and tests so that they reward the teaching of substantive knowledge: science, history, geography, and so forth.

Hirsch's point is an important and a good one.  Reading "skills" only go so far, and an overreliance on teaching literacy in a vacuum threatens to create a generation of students who aren't very literate in any meaningful sense.  A child might be able to "identify the main idea" and understand all the words in an article about the Supreme Court, but if they have no idea what the Supreme Court does or how it functions, they are not going to understand that article any more than those uninitated in curling can understand the passage above.  Just as bad, overemphasis on reading as a skill strips reading of some of its joy.  Think about it: are you reading this blog post right now because you think that "making inferences" is fun?  Because you like "finding the main idea?"  No, more likely, you're reading it because you are interested in the subject matter of this post, and you probably have some background knowledge in the topic.  But teaching a generation of kids that reading is simply about skills and not about content risks undermining the very fun of diving into a book, article or blog post about a topic that's interesting. 

If literacy is the ultimate end to be achieved, then we as educators, philanthropists and citizens would do well to focus our attention not just on reading qua reading, but also on things like the arts, social studies, science, and so forth.  Giving kids the background knowledge to understand a wide range of texts is critical, and teaching kids about stuff will give them the motivation to read about subjects they find interesting.  That's why recent cutbacks in history, geography, arts, and so forth are ultimately so counterproductive.  Indeed, as Hirsch points out, this de-emphasis on teaching content in favor of teaching skills may, ironically, explain why test scores have stayed flat despite tremendous investment of money and instructional time in reading qua reading.