Timothy Shanahan: Reading, to me, involves some kind of an interpretation of written symbols. Being able to grasp linguistic information that somebody else has put out there in written form, that you can actually make sense of that.
More than that, that you can actually think and act with it. I think that for me kind of captures it. David Boulton: So, you just made a distinction that underlies the distinction between basic and proficient in a way. It is both of those things. Again, this is one of those places where people get in fights over which is it. Why would we put much social money behind making this happen? Tell me about the state of reading in America as you assess it from your position with the National Reading Panel and as a member of the International Reading Association — share with us your national perspective of this.
David Boulton: So, you could make one comparison and say the people coming into the country that do not have English as a primary language is a greater number percentage than there has been historically. And this is a nation that prides itself on being a nation of immigrants. You go back thirty years ago and that door had just been kicked open again. Schools in had very small numbers of second language kids relative to what they have now. These are wonderful kids. The point is trying to teach them to read in the same amount of time that your teaching them to read and learn English simultaneously.
The second task is tougher. The schools have managed to do it. Our schools are terrific. Timothy Shanahan: Look at it this way. No one stole it and now you take out that thousand dollars and you want to spend it. It buys a whole lot less than it would have in That thousand dollars has lost value because currency has inflated over the last thirty years. Sort of the same thing has happened with literacy. And the reason for that is because of two things: 1 the incredible growth of technology and 2 the internationalization of our markets and our world.
You can go into a sewing mill. You can show up on time, you can work, you can do manual labor. You want to build a car — no problem. Can you handle the computer codes that drive our robotics? The answer to that in far too many cases is no. Where did you get your Bachelor of Science degree? Those days are gone.
You want to be a truck driver — there will be a computer in your terminal, in the cab of your truck that will essentially allow you to do things like track inventories and book trips. Medicine, insurance, banking, education and law and so on — those were always high education jobs. David Boulton: Especially when you consider the dilution of the increased percentage of children that need extra literacy support given their lack of English native language.
People are getting angry at each other. People have always argued something between one percent and about twenty percent. They need special teaching and even with that they will probably learn more slowly or have more difficulty than other kids.
But of course the numbers of reading problems that we have go far beyond that. There are so many children, certainly more than three-to-five percent, who struggle to learn to read. David Boulton: We said earlier that the process of how well children learn to read is all but fating their development in life.
About three-to-five percent of children have some neurological disadvantage taking off in the process. Not letting kids slip through the cracks. Not failing to notice when Johnny is falling behind. David Boulton: Right, just drowning — not being met in this confusion. The trajectory continues, eighty-four percent of African-American children leaving the twelfth grade are still below proficiency.
Timothy Shanahan: One estimate of it from those figures is the typical African-American high school graduate is leaving school with a reading level that is comparable to the reading level that an eighth grade white student has. Now, of course, averages are just that.
You have African-Americans that perform not only high above the African-American average, but who perform above the white average. But when you look at the two groups the differences are huge and those differences are certainly connected to family income and financial resources.
If you happen to live in a poor neighborhood even though your mom now has a job what that might mean is you go to school where the teachers are less likely to be certified, you go to school where the amount of instruction in a given day is probably less than other schools, and so on and so forth. The big differences in terms of what we provide to our children really do make a big difference in terms of achievement.
If we look at some of the international reports that compare our kids with kids in other countries, we obviously have big economic inequities in our society and those are mirrored in the big differences we see in reading attainment.
If we look at other countries that have less economic diversity, they have less diversity of literacy attainment. The variation is less. The two things are connected. Not all low literacy people commit crime, but it does appear that the largest percentage of people who commit crime are of low literacy.
Every social pathology appears to be related to literacy attainment. Every good that we distribute in our society seems to be related to it. Literacy is a great enabler. But the deck is stacked against that kind of a child, and the statistics suggest that he or she will probably end up more like their parents in literacy attainment and the outcomes that can buy.
Timothy Shanahan: One aspect of this that I had personal experience with was one of the newspapers asked me to analyze the votes in the Florida election. The thing that is interesting is that in Florida there are probably more counties that are using paper ballots than machine ballots. They would spoil their vote by voting multiple times for different candidates. Even this basic franchise of whether you get to cast a vote is connected to literacy.
Timothy Shanahan: Yes. In fact, one interesting analysis done with adults who are low in literacy is that low literacy individuals are less likely to read a newspaper than a high literate person.
But, of course, these folks could still participate by getting information from television and have radio. Except it turns out that lack of literacy has an isolating effect. Timothy Shanahan: Exactly. And so their kids are at greater risk in all kinds of ways and they themselves are at greater risk. The underlying connection here is both a lack of the instrumental ability which would allow them to navigate a field of options, and also an aversion to being intellectual that comes as a consequence of this shame.
We learn very young to become escape artists. And these kids are developing a shame aversion to the feel of their own learning. And when they become adults it ends up becoming a part of the social reality of their lives. What that does is it builds a dependency.
How much does that threaten the partner who has come to depend on my dependence? Quite often when an adult who is really low on literacy goes off and becomes literate it leads to divorce.
That is essential. David Boulton: That brings us back to the core purpose of all of this. We can come at this from all these different dimensions and it comes back to we need to build an effective stairway for these children to get into reading. David Boulton: Let me set up this one question for you if I could. One of the major things that seems to be at the base of the polarities or the dichotomies is that, on the one hand, without the experience being consciously meaningful there is insufficient interest to power the engagement process.
Without comparatively meaningless, unconscious assembly construction, decoding, disambiguation and projection from this lower level up into consciousness — there is no meaning. We actually start there. I guess for most kids the beginning would be kindergarten or first grade, in terms of formal teaching being introduced into their lives.
Some kids, of course, get that at home, some kids get it in pre-school. Timothy Shanahan: From the very beginning we have to teach a whole variety of things to kids. In fact, in terms of what I tell teachers or how I organize things in schools that I work in, is that there really are four big things that have to be addressed with literacy instruction.
One of them has to do with words. The words would be grouped properly. You would have the emphasis on the right ones. David Boulton: And it would be flowing at a pace that is consistent with our attention, our natural flow of listening. The third piece is really working on comprehension and thinking about text.
And so, getting them engaged in that grand conversation early on and all the way through is pretty important. And of course, that means learning different discourses, that means getting exposed to different kinds of text, and really different kinds of worlds.
And then finally, knowing how to compose your own text. I think all four of those things have to be taught all the time. If you go into a first grade classroom you should see all four of those things getting a fairly substantial amount of time, each one. If you go into a twelfth grade classroom you should be able to see all four of those things happening. David Boulton: Excellent. David Boulton: Yes. It degenerated through ignorance and neglect during the collision between the Latin and the English to develop these letter-sound confusions.
In its original incarnation, see a letter, say its sound, blend it together fast and its code-cued speech — no problem. David Boulton: Which is an entirely different challenge than the human brain evolved to deal with. Certainly, you can abstract these, we can talk about them separately, you can teach them separately, but ultimately they have to come together. For example, say a high school teacher brings in a scientific text for the students to read and does some work on the word meanings so that youngsters can interpret those words and understand the meaningful parts of those words because our language is morphemic, that is that words are made up of meaningful parts.
Combining meaningful parts becomes pretty important in vocabulary learning, and so the teacher teaches that but then also makes sure that the kids actually can read this kind of language. The students still might not understand what that discourse should sound like.
The teacher might read some of it aloud to the kids so they can hear what it should sound like. Different groups of people read in different ways and scientists are going to look for certain kinds of information. He was inducted to the Reading Hall of Fame in , and is a former first-grade teacher.
Download cv Contact. Provided expert testimony in legal case, Governor Bobby Jindal v. Department of Education.
Common Core State Standards are issued and are eventually adopted as the basis of K education in more than 40 states. Shanahan chaired the panel. People who ask a question just so they can answer it.
Though I h Tim works with various agencies and publishers on a myriad of projects aimed at improving literacy. Here are links to his partners' sites. National and international charities that support literacy that receive high Charity Navigator ratings. Put your money where your love is. All rights reserved. Web Development by Dog and Rooster , Inc.
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