Today’s Literacy Headlines

Homework is a hot-button issue for both parents and teachers. When we asked the MindShift audience about it, we got a wide range of thoughtful answers. And the results of our poll were pretty evenly split, although the “No’s” have it by a small margin. There was a pretty clear consensus among educators and parents that homework is not appropriate in elementary school. And research supports this perspective – homework in the early years doesn’t do a lot to improve achievement. However, some argue that the goal of giving students some light assignments is to start building a habit around responsibly doing work at home. Many elementary teachers responded that reading at home should be the only homework. And research on reading supports this approach. When reading becomes a habit, kids are more likely to enjoy reading and that has all kinds of positive benefits.

The Every Student Succeeds Act aims to close opportunity gaps for English-language learners—but reaching that goal will require more collaboration between educators, scholars, and policymakers, a leading English-language-learner researcher argues. The groups must work together to ensure that English-proficiency standards are used in classrooms in a “conceptually sound and practically feasible manner,” argues Okhee Lee, an education professor at New York University and a well-known expert on English-learners and science, in a new policy paper published in Educational Researcher. Lee writes that aligning English-proficiency standards with content standards, in English, mathematics, and science, has proved difficult because of a “lack of communication and collaboration” between researchers who focus on English-learners and those who specialize in those content areas. ESSA content standards call for all students, including English-learners, to engage in academically rigorous and language-intensive learning, such as arguing from evidence and constructing explanations.

Texts have tremendous power in our lives; they open realms, spark and extend interests, and add to our understanding of the world we live in. In order to tap into all of that information, get lost in those stories, explore the ideas of poets and dig deep into their curiosities, our kids must see themselves as readers. Very young children don’t pick up a book and think, “Oh, I should learn to read.” On the other hand, I don’t think they pick up a book and think, “Reading is hard/stupid/a waste of time.” As pre-readers, they grab a book because they have an interest in it—the cover, the memory of it being read to them, the pictures. In the case of some of the latest board books, children may simply be drawn to the textures added on each page. At that point, children are intrigued, curious, and wanting to explore. What happens, then, as the years go by and they come to believe that reading is a skill beyond their grasp or a challenge they may never conquer? With some kids, once their confidence gets rocked, it can be difficult to recover.

Kindergarten should not merely establish a springboard for success in upper grades. It is also the developmental foundation for mastery of content that is the focus of elementary, middle and high school. More K-12 schools are emphasizing the noncognitive skills that students can access throughout their schooling and careers. There is good reason to make this investment. But just as recognition is growing that these skills matter, our youngest students are losing out on opportunities to practice and hone such skills. As the white paper “Taking Back Kindergarten: Rethinking Rigor for Young Learners” discusses, a rigorous approach to kindergarten does not have to be at odds with developmentally appropriate education. Fusing academic and social development can create a remarkably rich kindergarten classroom. Rather than rows of students working quietly on practice worksheets or listening to the teacher speak, developmentally appropriate kindergarten classrooms are filled with children engaged in activities that match with their learning content.

Finalists in five categories for the 2019 National Book Awards were announced today by the National Book Foundation. Find out the finalists in the Young People’s Literature category. The winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 20, at the 70th National Book Awards ceremony in New York City, hosted by LeVar Burton.

Research has shown that reading is not a natural process, and it’s not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code—teaching systematic phonics—is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words. Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has just issued a report on what pediatricians can — and should — do to help “school-aged children who are not progressing academically.” Dr. Arthur Lavin, one of the lead authors of the report and the chairman of the A.A.P. committee on the psychosocial aspects of child and family health, said that pediatricians can play an important role in working with children who are struggling in school. He does so in his own practice in the Cleveland area and said it has emerged as a high priority among his patients because it is so common. What the report means, he said, is that the A.A.P. is setting a standard for the care of the child not doing well in school, and that the issue deserves the same attention as any other complex problem getting in a child’s way. The pediatrician should make sure the problem is properly investigated and the cause is found, though much of the specific testing and treatment will be done by others.

Georgia will have an additional $179.2 million to spend on improving reading in public schools over the next half decade after winning another literacy grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The federal Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant builds on prior awards to Georgia. In 2016, the state won $61.5 million. In 2011, Georgia won $25.7 million in what was then called the Striving Readers program. Some local educators have seen gains in literacy scores after using the money to buy reading-focused tests and curriculum for younger students. Early literacy has become a focus of the state’s top leaders. During the last legislation session, lawmakers mandated screening for dyslexia and pushed for changes in teacher literacy training.

In many preschool classrooms in the U.S., children are asked to do little more than identify shapes and letters and sit quietly on rugs during story time. But a growing body of research is overturning assumptions about what early education can look like. When children learn certain skills, such as the ability to focus attention—skills that emerge when teachers employ games and conversations that prompt kids to think about what they are doing—the children do better socially and academically for years afterward. A study published last year, which tracked kids for a decade starting in preschool, found some evidence that children with teachers trained to foster such abilities may get better grades compared with children who did not get this type of education.

Catherine Drennan describes herself as insatiably curious, a trait she credits to her parents. Drennan was excited when it came time to start school. But when she got to first grade, she hit a major stumbling block. Drennan couldn’t make sense of the reading exercises the class was doing. She compares those pages full of words to a code that she couldn’t figure out how to crack. Drennan was eventually placed in the lowest reading level in her grade, a designation that felt extremely embarrassing. “I was someone who was so in love with learning but learning was not in love with me,” she says. Eventually, Drennan was diagnosed with dyslexia. At the time, in the 1970s, scientists and educators didn’t know a lot about the diagnosis and there was little in the way of advice for kids like her on how to find other ways to decode the written word.

There have already been some fantastic new book titles for grade-school children in 2019—and we have several months to go. From adventures to family dramas, from silly tales to scary stories, here’s a selection of some of the best literary releases for children of the year so far—some of which may well become treasures and classics of the future.

Neuroscience has evolved tremendously in recent decades. What was once based on inference can now be scientifically investigated using brain imaging and the power of computational science. As a result of these advancements, pioneering scientists have filled the gap in understanding how parent or caregiver input impacts the brain, and ultimately a child’s skill formation. They have generated a wealth of evidence that suggests the single most important component to brain development is the relationship between a baby and her caretaker, with parent language at the heart of that relationship. Parent language, it is important to note, refers not just to the words a parent speaks to a child, but also the quality of the parent-child interaction.

A new study shows early reading in any language helps children learn to read English. The study, titled English Reading Growth in Spanish-Speaking Bilingual Students: Moderating Effect of English Proficiency on Cross-Linguistic Influence found that children whose native language is Spanish and had early reading skills in Spanish had greater growth in their ability to read English. The study also found that children who spoke Spanish and had stronger Spanish reading skills in kindergarten performed better across time, and performed stronger than their Spanish-speaking peers who had higher levels of fluency in English but less proficient in reading Spanish. For parents and caretakers, this means that reading to children in any language will impact their future in learning new languages in the future.

The Pew Research Center released its book reading survey results and while reading of print books remains the same among adults, audiobooks are rising in popularity. And those who say that listening to audiobooks is just as good as reading print copies now have some science on their side. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, measured the brain response of nine people while they listened to stories on “The Moth Radio Hour” and as they read the same stories in print. Analyzing the brain scans and data, researchers found “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical.” The same cognitive and emotional areas of the brain were stimulated, offering further insight into comprehension and a starting point for future studies to better understand the complex process of “word meaning representation.” It shows a larger network of ­regions in the brain with like response to reading and listening than past research.

A recent study concludes that gaps in student test scores are driven by poverty, not race—but then says the solution must nevertheless be racial integration. More fundamentally, it overlooks current classroom practices that perpetuate income-based gaps even when schools are integrated. Earlier this week, Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon and some colleagues released a report using massive amounts of test-score data to investigate the effects of modern-day racial segregation. After Southern schools were desegregated in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, test-score gaps between black and white students decreased. But with the decline of court-ordered integration, racial segregation in schools returned and has remained at high levels since the 1980s. The question the study set out to investigate is: does racial segregation still matter? The answer, Reardon and his colleagues say, is yes. School systems that are more segregated have larger achievement gaps, and “their gaps grow faster during elementary and middle schools than in less segregated ones.” But it’s not because of race per se. The real problem, the researchers conclude, is poverty.

Assistive technology teachers working at schools in the Fairfax County, VA school district–the 10th largest school district in the U.S.–are finding that the use of audiobooks is improving access to grade-level content while also developing the love of reading that motivates many students to continue improving. Two assistive technology teachers shared their experiences and recommendations during a recent edWebinar. The teachers explained how Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) provides assistive technology support to struggling readers and their teachers, and how the audiobooks in particular are having a very positive impact. As of one of the edWebinar participants recommended, “Don’t wait—accommodate.” FCPS has 30 assistive technology resource teachers, each of whom works with 7 to 10 schools. While at the schools, they coordinate with the special education teachers, speech/language pathologists, and other members of their teams there, and also spend time with individual students and student groups.

There are “no measurable differences” between the performance of charter schools and traditional public schools on national reading and math assessments from 2017, a finding that persists when parents’ educational attainment were factored into the results. That’s one key takeaway from a report released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics about charters, private schools, and home schooling. “School Choice in the United States: 2019 ” also found that Hispanic students constituted a plurality—33 percent—of charter school enrollment in 2016-17, followed by white students at 32 percent and black students at 26 percent. Meanwhile, nearly half of students enrolled at traditional public schools, 49 percent, were white. And a higher share of charter school students were enrolled in “high poverty” schools compared to their traditional public school counterparts, as defined by eligibility for free or reduced-price meals, by a count of 34 to 24 percent. Enrollment in charter schools grew by more than five times between 2000 and 2016.

Caldecott winner Mordicai Gerstein died Tuesday, his publisher, Holiday House, confirmed. “Mordicai Gerstein was a genius, a master of both art and text,” said Grace Maccarone, executive editor at Holiday House. “Mordicai wrote with humor and insight, and he painted with skill and with all his heart. “What was it like to work with him? Thrilling. Especially when he delivered art for I Am Hermes! Mordicai was full of energy, enthusiasm, and goodwill. Gerstein wrote and illustrated many children’s books, including The Boy and the Whale, The Night World, Sleeping Gypsy, and I Am Pan! He won the Caldecott Medal in 2004 for The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, a picture book he wrote and illustrated.