Today’s Literacy Headlines

Fourth-grader Lainey Rogers put in her coin and pushed the letters and numbers on the dial pad. What Lainey did get was a surprise – a book she had never read before, and one she could call her own. The machine, called Inchy, the Bookworm Vending Machine, is the only one of its kind in the Sioux Falls School District. The vending machine doesn’t cost money, but it does take gold coins given to students for being “Hurricane Heroes,” for exhibiting kindness and good behavior. “It’s an amazing engagement tool we can use for kids. What’s been really fun to watch unfold is the investment our kids have in not only wanting to meet those Hurricane behavior expectations, but also the way they’re having conversations around books and authors.”

Glynnis Fawkes’s graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë opens with the 20-year-old aspiring writer receiving a letter from the poet Robert Southey. He warns her, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Find yourself a husband, he says; write poems on the side if you must. But creative aspirations? Forget about it. Thankfully, today’s shelves are filled with stories about and by women who wouldn’t oblige. And, as everyone knows, extraordinary women start as girls — smart, determined and chafing against society’s notions of what they should be. So it seems fitting that two new graphic novels examine what happens just before the blockbuster moment where childhood makes way for nothing less than iconhood in the making.

On the heels of a troubling “report card” on reading and math skills among American students, a global test of adult skills suggests older generations may echo those problems. The 2017 results of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies finds that America’s adult workforce is no more skillful in reading, math, or digital problem-solving than it was five years ago, even though more students are graduating from high school. Every three years, the PIAAC measures the literacy, numeracy, and digital problem-solving skills of “working age” adults, 16 to 65, in 38 countries, including 23 in 2011-12, and another nine in 2014-15. In both math and digital problem-solving skills, U.S. adults scored significantly below the international average:

It’s official—the book world can’t get enough of audiobooks. Like everyone else, I love listening to a good story while finishing household chores. But one time, I ticked off my to-do list too fast. So, I decided to fire up my Kindle Paperwhite to read along with the narrator. Guess what, it was a eureka moment for me. After weeks of doing this, I think it facilitated my reading comprehension and made me understand the story better.

We are enjoying the early stages of a surprising and encouraging curriculum moment in education marked by robust attention and interest in scientifically-sound reading instruction. Among veteran advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum, it feels like a long overdue and welcome change in the weather. If I may offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow disciples in the cause of research-based teaching and knowledge-rich curricula: widen your lens, embrace complexity, forget top-down initiatives, counsel patience, brace yourself for years of struggle, identify your allies doing the actual work, and prepare to protect their flank. In sum, abandon single-issue curriculum advocacy, which is naïve, unrealistic, and self-defeating. It paves the way for more of the wild, fad-prone gyrations that we see over and over in this field.

Any way you say it, the latest scores from the Nation’s Report Card were bad, with trends getting worse over time. In particular, America’s lowest-performing students, who also tend to be our lowest-income children, are faring particularly poorly, especially in eighth grade, and especially in reading, but pretty much all across the board. Meanwhile, our higher-achieving students are mostly holding steady or even making gains — cause for celebration, to be sure, but also a clue as to what might be happening in schools and beyond. What might explain all this? Let me dig into three hypotheses: It’s the economy, it’s the pixels, or it’s our shift in attention away from basic skills.