Building a Cliff or building a Bridge?

As students move from grade to grade, literacy tasks are inversely correlated with supports. That is, as literacy tasks become more complex, supports generally become less explicit and less available to students. It’s an imbalance in schools and must be corrected to avert a crisis.

This inverse correlation of skill to need results in what I call the Literacy Cliff.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress  (known as NAEP or “the Nation’s Report Card”), only 34% of 8th graders read and write at a proficient level (that is, at a level deemed to be appropriate for their year in school). And for low-income students and students of color, the statistics are even more alarming: just 14% of Black, 26% of Hispanic, and 15% of low-income 8th graders were found to be proficient in reading.

Unironically, these stats are practically the same in 4th grade. And 11th. This means that the reading instruction students encounter before 4th grade results in ~30% of students being able to read on grade level, and there aren't more students added to this number after 4th grade. ~70% of students are headed the edge of the cliff. Unsurprisingly, an inordinate number of the 70% who don't reach proficiency in the early grades are poor and/or non-white students.

Having worked with hundreds of schools, I see the dearth of reading instruction after 3rd grade. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Students are expected to move linearly from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn

• Secondary teachers and admin are less experienced with explicit reading instruction (not emphasized in prep programs)

• Middle and High schools generally lack structure/expectation for explicit, schoolwide literacy approach

• Adlit research and funding (since 2010) have evaporated

The resulting Cliff and its jagged rock bed below awaits thousands of students a year. For some, this leads to disengagement, chronic absenteeism. The resulting illiteracy leads to poverty and, sometimes jail or death. We can debate the correlation, but if we're honest with ourselves, we know how that story ends.