The Literacy/Achievement Gap.

It's said all the time that the achievement gap between the students we serve and more affluent schools and students is in reality a literacy gap. One of our instructors, a literacy specialist, put up a pretty shocking chart to illustrate this point:

Most of our students just aren't getting enough time reading, and when that happens they lose out on all sorts of language, vocabulary, and writing skills as well. Of course, this doesn't just have to do with the resource differences between urban and suburban schools. Plenty of reading time takes place at home. However, the sheer size of the difference in word exposure between percentiles is shocking.

Anyway, I got the perfect in-person illustration of this the other day when I got one of my struggling readers' math midterm back. It was obvious he hadn't tried, since he had just circled "A" four times and then flipped the paper over. I knew that he has trouble reading word problems, and this particular test only had word problems and directions on it. I called him over after class and told him that I knew he didn't try at all. I asked him why, and he just shrugged. So, I said:

"I'm going to ask you something, and if it's not true, please don't be mad, because I just need to make sure. If it's true, though, you need to let me know so we can figure something out. There's no shame if it is... Did you give up on this because you couldn't read the words?"

He was silent for a couple of seconds, then muttered, "There were too many words. I didn't want to do it." I told him that I understood, and that he needed to ask for help since he couldn't let his reading take away from him demonstrating how much he knew about math. We agreed to meet after school to take the test again. This time, I would read the questions and he would do the math.

After school, we sat down and I read the questions to him (this is allowed even during a test since we're supposedly only testing their math skills). He quickly answered the first two questions correctly without any hesitation, but got the other two wrong. The two he got wrong tested concepts he didn't know since he had been absent that day. I graded the test and quickly taught him the other concepts. He immediately understood and started applying the most difficult objectives (distribution of factors, doubling and halving to find products) to solve the problems immediately without any help or guidance from me.

I asked him if he understood what had just happened. By not asking for help, and not trying, he had failed a test and given people the message that he was stupid or lazy, even though he was neither of those things. He was just ashamed and afraid to ask someone for help.

The student I'm talking about is 12 years old and was just held back in 4th grade again. It's not hard to imagine him going through year after year understanding what is going on in math class, but unable to demonstrate it because of a huge literacy gap that prevents him from reading the questions on a test. It's so easy to see him get frustrated, stop paying attention, and then get labeled the lazy student who just doesn't apply himself in class.

If there's one thing I promise I won't do, it's label a student and give up on him or her. Sure, it's a lot of work, but something tells me that there's more little geniuses out there who are just about to give up because no one ever took the time to ask what was wrong, and then actually teach them something. I just think there's absolutely no reason why that should ever happen to a child.