I recently read the Reading Next report about adolescent literacy by the Alliance for Excellence in Education to the Carnegie Foundation. I think the lack of student engagement that is leading to unbelievable drop-out rates is a national calamity. I am astonished that there hasn’t been more of a national outcry. How can we spend so much on education and get such abysmal results? How is it that neither of the major presidential candidates have a substantive educational platform? How will our nation thrive (survive?) if the majority of our students are not literate, let alone versed in 21st century skills? (OK, I’ll stop now.)
In this report, the authors outline 15 major elements that are viewed as being critical for a program seeking to build adolescent literacy skills. These 15 elements are broken into instructional issues and infrastructural ones. The instructional components are things like direct, explicit comprehension instruction; content-embedded reading and writing; strategic tutoring; and differentiation. These are all research-based and also intuitively obvious.
The infrastructure issues outlined in the report include:
· Extended time for literacy (2-4 hours per day)
· Meaningful professional development
· Cross-curricular team teaching
· Strong instructional leadership
· A comprehensive coordinated literacy program
· Summative assessment
OK, these are all optimal, but with the exception of the last item, these conditions do not exist (or could not easily be made to exist) in most middle or high schools. The culture of secondary education in our country today is just not geared this way.
I think these issues – most importantly, the lack of strong instructional leadership at the building or district level – are at the crux of a lot of problems in secondary education.
Having said that though, I do not believe that we can tie our children’s education (or our nation’s future) on the infrastructure failings of the educational establishment.
What is the solution? Perhaps, it is empowering students to drive their own learning through open resources and web-enabled tools. With the right tools and strong motivation, adolescents may be able to do a better job at this than we as “educators” can.
What are your thoughts on this?