That's All in the Past

Had a workshop today on a new national library initiative called Every Child Ready to Read @ Your Library. It's based on research about early literacy, brain development, and how kids learn to read. The experts found that traditional library storytimes are not having a significant impact on literacy. The most important thing storytimes can do, however, is teach parents and caregivers to spend time reading to their children. And teach them how to optimize that reading to develop phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and four other skills necessary to learn to read. Whether those skills are present upon entry to school or not is one of the strongest indicators of life-long academic success: knowledge of alphabet letters at entry into kindergarten is a strong predictor of reading ability in 10th grade and there is nearly a 90% probability that a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if the child is a poor reader at the end of the first grade. If kids start school lacking these pre-literacy skills, they are going to have a hard time learning to read at the pace of their peers. Once they fall behind, they have a hard time catching up. So one of the strongest factors in determining a child's success or failure is if he or she gets regular reading practice before school ever starts. Thus the program's emphasis on teaching parents to imitate on a daily basis what they see at weekly storytimes at the library.

One of the other things they tried to determine through the research is who is most in need of the extra help. They found a strong connection between the education and income levels of the parents and the amount of early literacy exposure of the children. In general, the less educated the parents, the less reading going on in the household and the less likely the kids are to learn to read well. The worse their reading, the less likely they are to get a good education and less likely they are to have a good income as an adult. Then they have children and the cycle continues. Hearing this made me think of another article I read recently about different studies. This one looks at African Americans and the ongoing impact of slavery. One of the ways owners controlled their slaves was through illiteracy; they were often punished for trying to learn to read and were deliberatley kept illiterate. If you trace bloodlines back from today's educated, middle and upper class African Americans, you'll find that the majority are descendents of Blacks who were free or who secretly learned to read as slaves. As with the findings of the library study, the cycle of illiteracy that began with slavery continues to effect the reading levels and socioeconomic success of African Americans today.