Hello!
We will be presenting a series of essays about illiteracy; it's beginnings,
its costs, its burdens, and the simple, low cost way it is being prevented by
the schools in Kennewick, WA. These efforts, about a dozen, will be followed by
another series about successful school systems around the country and how they
also achieved stunning successes in increasing academic achievement. They will
be brought to you by LAMPLIGHTERS - The Literacy People, who invite you to
contact us at this website with questions, criticism, or (we fondly hope) a bit
of praise. We sincerely believe you will find these efforts informative and
pleasant to read. All the material will be documented in books found in the
Lewiston, MI library on the LAMPLIGHTERS bookshelves. They've been placed there
in the hope you will find answers to your education questions and much pleasant
reading about improving education in your district.
Best wishes to our friends and neighbors
LAMPLIGHTERS
The Literacy People
All available installments of this series are available in our archives,
which you can access by clicking here.
THE WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT DOES, HOW
IT HURTS YOUR CHILD'S LIFE
Illiteracy Series - Part 4
We don't hear much about it, but the
"achievement gap" really exists, it's at the heart of education's disarray and
its impact is felt across all segments of our culture which means if you have
children in school it seriously impacts their academic achievement no matter
what their intellectual capacities are. It also impacts property values, job
opportunities and limits business growth. Oh, and another thing, achievement gap
is NOT created by the schools and certainly not the parents. The essential fact
appears to be that many new kindergartners don't get to school on day one with
the pre-literacy training that the other more than half of five-year old
children possess and that is necessary for acquiring literacy in school --for
learning to read and write.
That's right! The achievement gap is NOT created by the schools but it's the
schools' biggest problem and shows every sign of getting worse as the years roll
over us. However, those schools at the top of the academic heap have solved the
problem of the gap at a cost of about $200 or less per entering skill-deficit
child per year. The LAMPLIGHTERS shelf in the Lewiston library has a number of
books that directly address the problem. Most of the information in this essay
comes from the 90& READING GOAL, a short book about the Kennewick School
district in Kennewick, Washington in the 1990's describing their experience with
this achievement gap, called in these essays, The Gap.
Ready? Good. Let's start with describing the problem and what it looks like.
The gap starts with kindergarten and involves entering five year olds. These are
the children who lack the skills, increasingly called "pre-literary skills",
like letter recognition, ability to print their own names, count to twenty plus
others. The number of children who lack these pre-literary skills is about 40%
of those entering our national education system every year.
OK. Now for the whole story...
Click here to read the
rest of this article...
