In the fall of 1995 Kennewick School District in SE Washington State found by testing (by contractors):
- 43% of 3rd graders read below grade level,
- 35% of third graders read above grade level,
- 22% of third graders read at grade level.
Kennewick assumed the large gap in achievement was the fault of the education process, was not the fault of parents or pupils and began remediation efforts to assure pupils did not fall behind in reading. Nothing they did was effective.
In 1999 Kennewick began testing incoming five-year olds for letter recognition by sight and sound, phonemic awareness and ability to print their names. Their data strongly suggested 40% of five-year olds enter kindergarten with language and math deficits of one to three years. At the other end of the scoring spectrum --the 60% group with higher-than-average scoring-- pupils were found to be as much as four years ahead of expectations. The total achievement gap for a typical class of five-year olds can be as much as seven, even eight years.(DELIVERING ON THE PROMISE, PARTS 2,3).
Kennewick also found that in-school remediation per child is very expensive -about equal to the regular per pupil budget-- and carries very low success rates and that all children deficient in pre-literary skills will stay at the end of the line throughout their education careers.
Reading is not a content area like most of the curriculum beyond third grade; reading is a skill. Without the reading skill, no one can master the education material in grades four to twelve. Without that skill at the end of third grade the doors to education and almost everything else in life are closed. Experience has shown hardly any child with impaired reading skills will catch up after 3rd grade. If the child is not prepared for fourth grade there is very little hope for other than hamburger work for hamburger pay and that hope dwindles every year. Kennewick and others who have tried have learned in-school remediation is NOT the answer to illiteracy.
Schools do an excellent job with the 60% of clients who own pre-literacy skills. Why is it not possible to bring the 40% of students in deficit up to literacy speed? Briefly put, a baby's brain at birth is very busy making fifteen million brain cells per hour, most of them dedicated to specialized purposes, like language skills for example. By the age of five or six there are trillions of brain cell connections. If these are not stimulated in the years immediately following birth, they are "pruned" during ages 9-10 years approximately. Not used for their intended purpose in the very early (birth-3) years, they are not available for structured learning in the later years. Use it early or lose it later seems to be the iron rule for learning to read.
LAMPLIGHTERS keystone program is to teach parents to read to babies from birth through six to seven years of age for 20 minutes every day. If this 20 minutes a day reading is done for the first five years of life this presents the child entering kindergarten with 600 hours of exposure to words, numbers, sentences which then empower the child to learn the skill of reading by the third grade. That single skill is the only key to all the rest of education.
When Kennewick discovered that pupils who learned to read on schedule had been read to long before they entered school, they scrapped efforts to bring slow readers up to speed after age five. Instead, they began to teach the community how central those years of pre-school literary exposure were to the rest of education.
LAMPLIGHTERS C2K program (and the Kennewick READY! program) can eliminate illiteracy in a very few years everyplace it is used! We can do it! The Introduction to THE 90% READING GOAL asserts illiteracy will disappear if 90% of third graders read at or above grade level. The solution is to prevent illiteracy beginning at birth and not in remediation of illiteracy five or more years after birth.
We're the literacy people. We can help. Contact us. lamplightersnet@msn.com
From page 6 of THE 90% READING GOAL
"The harshest handicap we can impose on children in our public schools is to
fail to teach them by third grade to read well. When we fail, the child fails.
We create for him or her a cycle of continued failure, diminished self-esteem,
lowered self-expectations, and decreased effort. It does not matter what book
we hand to a child who does not read. The door is shut. . .The most comp-
licated burden we place on our education system grows out of our failure to
teach students to read well and at grade level."
Read Part 3:
Achievement Gaps Stifle Learning, Create Illiteracy
