From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith
2007
AMONG
THE many myths of No Child Left Behind is that schools are in charge of
literacy. I got an early inkling of the fallacy of this as I listened
to black teenagers conversing in our DC neighborhood in the 1960s. As a
writer, I was struck by their use of metaphor - trading insults while
"doin' the dozens" - and by their clear acceptance of language as a
weapon of survival in life. Yet these were the same kids who had already
been largely assigned to failure by the schools and others.
Why
the disconnect? I mentioned this the other day to an educator friend,
David Craig, who soon returned with two academic articles that shed
fascinating light on the topic.
The first, from the American
Psychologist in 1989 by Shirley Brice Heath, dealt with shifts in the
oral and literate traditions among black Americans living in poverty.
Heath
pointed out that both cold stats and warm culture had changed
dramatically among the black poor since the 1960s. This was a period of
migration from the rural south to the urban north. Even the ghettos in
the north changed. Instead of primarily two family dwellings or small
apartment houses "with the 1960s came high rise, high-density projects,
where people took residence not through individual and free choice of
neighbor and community, but through bureaucratic placement." By the
1980s, not only did nearly half of all black children live in poverty,
but "the proportion of young black families with fathers fell
drastically."
Among the impacts: a loss of adult contact.
Describing the earlier culture, Heath wrote, "Male and female adults of
several ages are often available in the neighborhood to watch over
children who play outside and to supplement the parenting role of young
mothers." In the later urban inner city this was no longer the case.
And, of course, the more adults that are around, the more language is used in both quantity and variety:
"Children
take adults' roles, issue commands and counter-statements, and win
arguments by negotiating nuances of meaning verbally and nonverbally.
Adults goad children into taking several roles and learning to respond
quickly to shifts in mood, expectations and degrees of jest."
Further,
in these earlier communities families were far more likely to be
involved in other organizations, not the least of which was the church:
"For
those who participate in the many organizations surrounding the church
there are many occasions for both writing long texts (such as public
prayers) and reading Biblical and Sunday School materials, as well as
legal records of property and church management matters. Through all of
these activities based on written materials, oral negotiations in groups
makes the writing matter. . . The community values access to written
sources and acknowledges the need to produce written materials of a
variety of types for their own purposes, as well as for successful
interaction with mainstream institutions."
Now jump to the 1980s:
"Young
mothers, isolated in small apartments with their children, and often
separated by the expense and trouble of cross-town transportation from
family members, watch television, talk on the phone, or carry out
household and caregiving chores with few opportunities to tease or
challenge their youngsters verbally. No caring, familiar, and ready
audience of young and old is there to appreciate the negotiated
performances."
Heath got one mother to agree "to tape record her
interactions with her children over a two-year period and to write
notes about her activities with them." During "500 hours of tape and
over 1,000 lines of notes, she initiated talk to one of the three
preschool children (other than to give them a brief directive or query
their actions or intentions) in only 18 instances. . . In the 14
exchanges that contained more than four turns between mother and child,
12 took place when someone else was in the room."
I have just
been pouring over this years' dismal NCLB results for DC public and
charter schools. As I did so, I wondered whether the experts with whom
we have entrusted America's children's literacy are aware the sort of
factors that Heath noted:
"In a comparative study of black
dropouts and high school graduates in Chicago, those who graduated had
found support in school and community associations, as well as church
attendance; 72% of the graduates reported regular church attendance
whereas only 14% of the dropouts did. Alienation from family and
community, and subsequently school, seems to play a more critical role
in determining whether a student finishes high school than the
socioeconomic markers of family income or education level."
Heath
wasn't too optimistic: "For the majority of students that score poorly
on standardized tests, the school offers little practice and reward in
open-ended, wide-ranging uses of oral and written language. . . Yet such
occasions lie at the very heart of being literate: sharing knowledge
and skills from multiple sources, building collaborative activities from
and with written materials, and switching roles and trading expertise
and skill in reading, writing and speaking."
Of course, the
danger in all of this is that such occasions also encourage critical
thinking, little valued by NCLB or by the establishment that created it,
an establishment far more interested in compliant drones than in
independent minds.
Once, talking to a large group of DC public
high school students, I was struck by the fact that, concerned as they
were about drugs and violence, they were unable even to phrase the
questions they wanted to ask. I mentioned this to a friend with long
experience in the DC public schools and she replied with sadness, "But
they are not meant to ask questions; they are only meant to answer them"
- perhaps the best summation of NCLB I've heard.
The second
article came from a 2001 edition of Reading Research Quarterly, written
by Susan B Neuman and Donna Celano, who had gone out and examined four
Philadelphia neighborhoods of different ethnicities and economics to
discover how much written material was easily available. The poverty
rates ran from 0% to 85% and the percent of black residents ranged from
5% 82%.
It was a highly detailed and academic study but over and
over again - examining different factors - the mere access to words
seemed to play an important role. They considered signage, public spaces
for reading and books in child care centers, libraries and drug stores.
The poorest neighborhoods, for example, had 4 stores selling
children's reading material while the better off neighborhoods had 11
and 12. More dramatic was the number of titles visible in these stores:
55 in the poorest neighborhood (most in pharmacy and Dollar Store) vs.
16,000 in the wealthiest [including Borders) and 1597 in the second
wealthiest. Signage was far more equal: 76 business signs in the poor
neighborhood vs. 77 in the richest. But the content was different. In
the better off neighborhoods "children could conceivably read their
environment though these signs, with pictures, shapes, and colors
denoting the library, the bank, and the public telephone." In the poor
neighborhoods, signs "were often graffiti covered and difficult to
decipher."
None of this really surprises me. After all, I
learned to read and write - despite my parents' prohibitions - with no
small help from a massive number of comic books. It seems perfectly
obvious to me that the easiest way to learn the word "deviation" is to
read it in a balloon above the head of a mean looking Nazi officer
shouting to his frightened mignons, "I will stand no DEVIATION from my
orders!!!" The story-telling and the silent translation of the art
combine to make one of the best reading aids of all times.
And at least one academic study found that:
"There
was no difference in frequency of comic book reading between a middle
class and a less affluent sample of seventh grade boys. For both groups,
those who read more comic books did more pleasure reading, liked to
read more, and tended to read more books. These results show that comic
book reading certainly does not inhibit other kinds of reading, and is
consistent with the hypothesis that comic book reading facilitates
heavier reading."
But comic book sales have diminished and with
them another door to literacy is harder to open. Now instead of Captain
Marvel, we have No Child Left Behind, a program that gets reading off to
a bad start by even lying in its title.
Among my other untested contact with matters of literacy:
-
I was blessed to have been a parents' association president of an
elementary school that understood the importance of quantity in teaching
words. The school realized that the shortest route to good writing was
to do it. The kids were always writing something: diaries, plays,
stories, speeches, advertisements. There was also an emphasis was the
arts, particularly drama and music, which among their other virtues
offer the opportunity to sing or say words over and over until they
become a part of your soul.
- Starting out in journalism, I had
to write nine radio newscasts a day for a while. You won't find that
suggested in any writing manual or school curriculum but I still recall
trying to come up with new ways of saying the same thing just to keep
from being bored.
- As an editor, I have often offered a
standard cure for writers' block: just write crap and don't worry about
it. Then go to bed and retrieve the good parts the next day.
-
My own list of unauthorized literary aids would include memorizing Burma
Shave signs, devouring Ogden Nash poems, reading under duress from the
Book of Common Prayer at Holy Communion, learning jokes, listening to
Edward R. Murrow, following instructions on how to build an HO gauge
model freight car and absorbing the lyrics to endless popular songs.
Make
a list from your own life and the virtues of constant exposure to words
in sound and print without regardless of their purported quality will
become clear.
Above all is the need to enjoy what you're reading
or writing. The greatest sin of NCLB is to make what should be a
lifelong joy into a tedious, bureaucratic exercise - making words far
harder to learn and infinitely harder to love.
Kids need more words in their lives - and fewer tests.
