Why reading is the greatest civil rights issue of our time: Opinion

According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.

Here in Jefferson County

• According to the most recent edition of the official state reading test, 64% of all JCPS students cannot read at the “Proficient” level, and that number jumps to 79% for our Black children, and 74% for our children in poverty.

• And according to the MAP test—which scores kids more so on grade-level—last year showed that 55% of all JCPS students, 71% of Black students, and 65% of students in poverty are below grade-level in reading.

With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that some, including Levar Burton, producer of the new documentary film, “The Right to Read,” have begun to refer to reading as “the greatest civil rights issue of our time.”

Teachers are just as much the victims as our children

There can be a lot of debate about why we are in this situation, and who is to blame. We want to make it very clear that our research, and all of the best research out there, does not put the responsibility for this at the feet of our teachers. In many ways, our teachers are just as much the victims as our children are. We have great teachers, who are doing heroic work.

Rather, one of the things that has become very clear to us in our research is that our colleges of education, and our publishers of reading curriculum, are simply not following the latest in the “Science of Reading.” There has been a lot of brain research and other science done over the past couple of decades. It shows that a large percentage of children will not learn to read well— especially those coming to school without background in being read to, having books in the home, and so forth—without being taught using a direct, systematic, explicit and sequential phonics approach (that is, teaching them how to “decode” the written word, by sounding out letters, and letter combinations, etc.). In other words, probably like most of us reading this were taught to read!

More:Between the Lines: An investigation into why Kentucky's kids can't read

So, what are we to do about this?

Well, the good news is, there are approaches to reading instruction that JCPS could be using that would go a long way to getting all kids up to grade level.

Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together has some experience with this issue. Our organization fought a seven-year battle in the late-90s and early-2000s to get a program using direct, explicit and sequential instruction in phonics into JCPS schools. And the impact on some of our lowest-performing schools was nothing short of amazing. Over the same period (1999-2001) that 44% of JCPS elementary schools went down in their reading scores:

• Lincoln Elementary School (a school with 89% low-income students) increased 19.5 points in reading and 46.5 points in writing (which contradicts the argument that this kind of instruction does not help higher-order thinking, comprehension skills). Lincoln also closed its achievement gap between Black & white students, with 50% of their Black students and 50% of their white students scoring at the proficient/distinguished level.

• Shelby Elementary School (a school with 88% low-income students, and the lowest scoring school in reading in the whole state of Kentucky at the time) increased 15.1 points in reading and 21.9 points in writing.

More:After Courier Journal investigation, lawmakers vote to ax contract with literacy center

JCPS stopped using what was working

With those kinds of results, surely the leadership of JCPS at that time wanted to continue and to expand this approach to many other struggling schools, right? Wrong. Instead, the school district ended up designing their own reading program, and removing the successful program from the schools that were using it. And the tragic result was that the reading scores in those lowest-performing schools went right back to where they were. And overall, JCPS reading scores haven’t budged one bit since then—that is, there are still less than half of our kids reading at grade-level, and it’s much worse for our kids of color and those in poverty, just like 20 years ago. So that’s almost a whole generation of kids who could have been reading, and succeeding, if only the JCPS administration at the time had stayed the course.

There is now some momentum in our state and in our city to address the problem. This is due partly to The Courier Journal’s Between the Lines investigative report on the state of reading performance in Kentucky, published last November, as well as the Read to Succeed Act passed by the Kentucky legislature last year, which requires districts to incorporate the Science of Reading as they make decisions about reading instruction.

CLOUT leaders have met with Dr. Marty Pollio, JCPS Superintendent and Brent McKim, President of the Jefferson County Teachers Association . Both of them have stated their support for providing additional tools to our teachers that are more consistent with the Science of Reading, and we commend them for that. A committee of representatives of JCPS and JCTA has been working to select a new curriculum that will provide some of those tools.

More:Now is the time to address Kentucky's literacy problems. But will lawmakers act?

We have some concerns about the curriculum being considered

Our major concern is the lack of research that exists on the program’s effectiveness. While its design appears to be more in line with the Science of Reading than what the district has been using, we believe that any reading program that is going to be adopted by the district should have strong longitudinal evidence of its effectiveness. For example, the program that produced the results cited above, right here in JCPS 20 years ago, has decades of reports, peer-reviewed studies and meta-analysis proving that it works. Therefore, it is our position that, at a minimum, both programs should be tried and compared.

We are also concerned about what we have heard from teachers, both locally and across the country, who have used the program being considered by JCPS. They report how difficult it is to use, especially for newer teachers. In fact, in real-life experience of using the program, teachers report that it requires over twice as much planning time per day than is currently allowed in the JCTA contract. We don’t want our teachers to have another burden placed on them in these challenging times of new school start times, new student assignment plan, teacher shortage, student absenteeism, etc.

We have a long way to go, but we can get there together if the community consensus is to use what works. May we work together toward a new day, when 85% or 90%, or very close to 100% of our children are reading on grade level. Isn’t that what we all want? It can be done!

At CLOUT’s March 27 Assembly, we will be launching the “ALL Kids Reading!” campaign. Dr. Pollio and Brent McKim will be present to hear the community’s commitment to support deep and sustainable improvements in the district’s approach to literacy, and to make their own commitments. Mayor Greenberg, LMPD Chief Villaroel, and other top officials will also be present to address other critical community problems. The theme of the assembly will be “From Childhood Through Adulthood: Building a City of Justice.” For more information, CLOUT can be reached at (502) 583-1267 or office@cloutky.org.

Tom Gardner and Jonathan Berkley are Co-Presidents of CLOUT

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Why reading is the greatest civil rights issue of our time, Kentucky