reading ups test scores....duh!

Did anyone see this article in the Times?

From The New York Times
November 19, 2007
Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading

By MOTOKO RICH
Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside,
Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less
for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining.
At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math
and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited,
and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

That is the message of a new report being released today by the
National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from
about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor
Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic,
foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at
Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read
novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to
collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all
reading, including nonfiction.

In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the
endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary
school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle
school students and slightly declining among high school seniors.
These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading
among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a
drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also
showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed
better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or
hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to
adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are
proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the
proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.

Three years ago “Reading at Risk,” which was based on a study by the
Census Bureau in 2002, provoked a debate among academics, publishers
and others, some of whom argued that the report defined reading too
narrowly by focusing on fiction, poetry and drama. Others argued that
there had not been as much of a decline in reading as the report
suggested.

This time the endowment did not limit its analysis to so-called
literary reading. It selected studies that asked questions about
“reading for fun” or “time spent reading for pleasure,” saying that
this could refer to a range of reading materials.

“It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists,” said
Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment.
“Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in
decline.”

In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain
why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted
culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the
Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to
develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia
said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize,
celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.”

In seeking to detail the consequences of a decline in reading, the
study showed that reading appeared to correlate with other academic
achievement. In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders
who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal
Education Department statistics found that those students scored much
lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although
some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar
noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but
whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests
than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were
therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with
fewer than 10 books.

The new report also looked at data from the workplace, including a
survey that showed nearly three-quarters of employers who were polled
rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with two-
year college degrees, and nearly 90 percent of employers said so for
graduates of four-year colleges. Better reading skills were also
correlated with higher income.

In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight
weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time
workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests
earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while
20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed
“proficient” earned such wages.

The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous
one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the
University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of
other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the
endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores
and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of
decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early
1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were
only one point lower.

Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading
Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s
report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s
notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the
reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said,
referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the
solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging
folks to think they might be.”

urban poverty and education enlightened by HBO's the Wire

Can 'The Wire' Tell Us How to Reach the Unreachable?

A former inner city teacher reflects on a devil's
bargain.
by Lisa Morehouse

11/12/2007
Watching fourth-season episodes of the acclaimed HBO
television series
The Wire, I immediately recognized the students who
were the show's
focus -- the personality- filled teenagers who can
derail a class with
one outburst, who can make great strides for weeks,
then backtrack in
an instant, whose chaotic lives (the little we know
about them) can
make academic problems seem minuscule.

The Wire centers on West Baltimore's "corner kids."
Defined by the
show in contrast with "stoop kids," who grow up in the
ghetto but are
still under their families' watch, corner kids make up
a small
minority of young people, those abandoned by their
families and
committed to and wrecked by the laws of the street.
They're either
unable to function in schools as they exist in much of
inner city
America, or they're savvy enough to know that the
system doesn't serve
them. The Wireasks, "What do we do with these kids?"

And it answers that question with an experiment: In
the show, the most
disruptive corner kids are separated from the rest of
the student body
into their own classroom.

It's not as if this division is a stretch. The most
troubled kids in
schools are often isolated from others, by official
mandate or not.
Research documents the disturbing number of African
American boys
nationwide who are shuffled into special education
classes despite the
lack of evidence that they have learning disabilities.
And many times,
the most defiant students just get kicked out of class
and school.

Even educators committed to the achievement of
students living in
poverty see the pull of a formal separation between
students. Jeffrey
Robinson, principal of Baltimore Talent Development
High School, says,
"I think most principals and most teachers would agree
that if they
could get rid of one to two kids in every class, they
could increase
achievement by a whole lot."

When Carla Finkelstein taught high school in West
Baltimore, her
teaching team had some scheduling autonomy. Each year,
the team
debated creating what they called a "knucklehead
class" but couldn't
philosophically agree on the purpose. Would it be, she
asks, "to get
at the root of what's really going on with those kids,
or to ditto
them to death," keeping them busy with worksheets
while creating calm
learning environments for their other students?

The Wire experiments with what Finklestein calls a
public health
response to corner kids. In the show, a small number
of students are
pulled from general classes and put together with
multiple adults,
including mental health professionals, who work at the
causes of these
students' disruptive behavior and their disengagement
from school.

Finklestein, who now helps run a public charter school
in Baltimore,
says that by playing out this classroom experiment
over a whole
season, the show asks the questions "What would it
look like if it
were done well? and "What social consequences would it
have?" without
providing pat answers. "I think that was a smart piece
for them to put
in the show, because that's a tremendous tension,"
Finklestein says. A
minority of kids come to school with such intractable
issues, she
adds, that "you can't solve the problem just by giving
the kid a tutor
or giving them access to a computer."

Whether teachers agree with The Wire's experiment or
not, the story
line is crushingly on point: After the adults reach
some level of
understanding of the corner kids' real values and
fears, the program
is terminated because of the pressures of standardized
testing.

Lisa Morehouse taught secondary English for twelve
years in San
Francisco and rural Georgia. She is now a public-radio
journalist and
an education consultant.