What's an "achievement gap"? Well, it's nothing good. Like an ill wind it blows good to nobody, nowhere, never. If you know where or in what school A Gap lives, don't go there. Ever. It impacts education for every child. It impacts property values, limits business investment, seriously reduces employability of young people, drives newcomers and new, young families (often referred to as new customers) and the brightest and best educated youths away to places where they can have better lives. It ain't good for anybody.
Well, OK. So what is it?
It's something that's created by the community, lives in the public schools where it steals literacy from school children. It's carried into the school system by five year olds and once there it cannot be eradicated. It's been written about in several places, among them the Kennewick, Washington literature about their own school district and how they learned a simple way to prevent it. The book titles of interest here are THE 90% READING GOAL and DELIVERING ON THE PROMISE both by Fielding, Kerr & Rosier. These works are available from the LAMPLIGHTERS shelf in the Lewiston, Michigan library or contact LAMPLIGHTERS. They are not about instruction in schools; they are explicitly about school governance in all of its simple but hard-edged details. No compromises, no excuses; just facts about a poor school system with the courage to become a good one over the protests of its staff, its executives and even the public. Yeah. Them too. Even parents were aghast.
OK. Now for the whole story of The Gap as told in the two volumes cited above. The first describes the problem, the second the solution and its stunning education outcomes and how anybody can achieve them.
In the mid-nineties Kennewick knew only 55% of their third grade read at grade level. That was not and is not an unusual statistic for grade level reading in any grade. Some schools blame it on ". . . the quality of the pupils we get here." But the first three grades are devoted to learning to read, reading being the single skill needed to absorb the education delivered in grades 4-12. Slow readers -semi-literates-and non-readers, a.k.a. illiterates "are disabled by the malfunctioning of our first three grades of school . . . When we fail the child fails . . . The most complicated burden we place on our education system grows out of our failure to teach students by third grade to read well and at grade level. We create:
- An immense and nearly unmanageable learning span within each K-12 classroom. . .
- A core of . . . increasingly unmotivated, inattentive and unruly students. . .
- The pool from which most of our drop-outs emerge.
- The most expensive burden we can place on our society is those students we have failed to teach to read well . . . they emerge into society as adults [without] the single prerequisite for managing their lives and acquiring additional training . . . are chronically unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable . . . They perpetuate and enlarge the problem by creating another generation of poor readers." (pp 5-7; THE 90% READING GOAL).
Five-year old pupils in the upper 60% of the entering class are as much as 4-5 years ahead of the curve and the low 40% group is 1-3 years behind, making a best-to-worst classroom span of as much as eight years. "An immense and nearly unmanageable learning span", says it all. That's The Gap. It can be prevented.
A sidebar here. Until WWII and sputnik, non-readers could find manual work, work which paid enough to have a life, even raise a family. No more. If you can't read an operating manual, you can't work at anything except hamburger work for hamburger pay which will not pay for a normal life with a family. That of course means poverty which means public assistance which means the working public pays for the lives of the unemployable. That has gotten terribly expensive and illiteracy has become the root cause of a problem -poverty-- peculiar to the information age. If you can't routinely get information from a printed page you're not likely to get employment except in the streets.
Part 4:
What It Is, What It Does, How It Hurts Your Child's Life
