Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates

It’s a fact: The ability to read, and hit key proficiency benchmarks in elementary school, is the foundation of a quality education. But statistics indicate students in poor communities, and particularly African American and Latino boys, are struggling to build a knowledge base on sand. 

That’s why on National Read Across America Day, the annual celebration of the birthday of author Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—experts from education policy think tanks to the White House are focusing on literacy as a way to stem the stubborn “graduation gap." Reading is being promoted as a way to end the above-average dropout rate of minority kids compared with whites—and plug the school-to-prisons pipeline. 

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“It’s one of the early warning indicators,” said Gary Chapman, executive vice president for impact and operations for Communities in Schools, a national network of organizations committed to ending the dropout crisis. By the time they get to high school, “if kids are offtrack in any of those areas, they’re much less likely to graduate.”  

“We find in so many ways it’s their lack of on-level reading abilities that’s driving their lack of interest in school,” he said. Now that the U.S. public school system is majority-minority and low-income, breaking the link between dropout rates and literacy is crucial, experts say.

Education policy analysts agree that mastering reading by the end of third grade is a critical touchstone for young learners. That grade is the turning point between learning to read and reading to learn. Students who miss that benchmark are up to four times more likely to drop out of high school. Among struggling readers, the dropout rates are twice as high for African American and Latino students as they are for white students.

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While parents and other caregivers are usually a child’s earliest reading teachers—something taken for granted in affluent white communities—the problem of struggling readers is “more an indication of the poverty level that’s happening in those communities,” Chapman said. 

There’s ample data backing him up. An analysis by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count Data Center found that the problem of subpar literacy is particularly acute among black and Latino boys.

White male students are three times more likely than their African American peers to be reading proficiently by fourth grade—and more than twice as likely as Latino boys to hit that benchmark, according to the Kids Count Data Center data.

Things are even worse in households that barely make ends meet. Among impoverished families just 10 percent of the African American boys and 14 percent of Latino boys from families at or below the poverty line are reading proficiently, compared with 25 percent of their white peers.

While middle- and upper-class families typically have the means to engage their kids by reading to them, taking them to the library, or buying books, in unstable homes a parent’s chief concern is survival, and putting food on the table usually trumps a bedtime story, Chapman said. 

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“[A mom or dad] may not be available to read to their kids every day or help them with their homework,” said Chapman. “When you have a parent who’s in crisis or just trying to meet the basic needs of their families, this may not be high on their priority list.”

An inability to read proficiently, coupled with a broken school system that may be more interested in pushing students to the next grade level than in ensuring learning, tends to trigger a chain reaction, experts say. Frustration in the classroom leads to truancy or disruptive behavior and ultimately quitting school altogether, one of the conduits in the schools-to-prison pipeline. 

“If kids in poverty are getting offtrack early, that’s just this domino effect that has them not being interested in school,” said Chapman, who noted that he’s seen high school students reading at a third-grade level. Studying algebra, learning to code a computer, or even passing a standardized achievement test, he said, “is really difficult when they can’t read the basics.”

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There’s good news, however: A growing number of federal and local education policy officials, along with ed-reform advocates and community activists, have recognized that making sure every child can read proficiently ahead of high school is the ounce of prevention that can eliminate the need for more costly solutions for students later.

Under the new Every Student Succeeds Act, states have access to federal money that can help them create comprehensive literacy programs from preschool to high school. My Brother’s Keeper, President Barack Obama’s signature initiative aimed at boys and young men of color, also includes components to improve literacy among African American and Latino boys and teenagers.

At the same time, Communities in Schools pairs teenagers working to read at grade level with younger kids who are honing their literacy skills, as well as with retired teachers, Chapman said. 

“We have high school students paired with elementary and middle school students to work together and read a book together,” helping one another work through the material, he said. Communities in Schools also provides after-school and summer programs to help students retain what they’ve learned.

Getting students to read, and to stay in school, goes beyond what happens in the classroom, Chapman said.

“It’s about great teaching in classroom. It’s about leadership” from teachers and school administrators, he said. “But it’s also about how you address those nonacademic pieces in a student’s life that keep them from being successful too.”

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Original article from TakePart