The Racialized Reading Opportunity Gap
This will be only one small slice, of a VERY HUGE problem…
My experience with this problem is that people in educational leadership are just plain stupid when it comes to understanding the science of reading. They were largely NOT elementary level teachers. Look, this is yet another example of the intersection of systemic sexism and racism in education. It just is, so wake the F up here if you do not see this. Only a quarter of superintendents are female in the US. This gender equity problem persists, even given the fact that 70 percent of the teachers are FEMALE! What this means, is that the teachers we have who hold the sacred knowledge of how to teach reading, are largely NOT the people who get to make the really important decisions about reading instruction inside of the districts.
Teaching reading is HARD. But you’d be surprised how many folks pretend to understand it! It is not intuitive—ESPECIALLY ENGLISH. It takes years of on-the-job learning, and the expert level knowledge of this art and craft is really relegated only to our nation’s first and second grade teachers. By third grade, kids are “reading to learn” more than “learning to read” and teachers will tell you, that if a kid makes it to third grade, and is reading below grade level, chances are, they will never be fully literate. The cold hard truth here is that our black, brown, and low SES kids are getting way more than their fair share of BRAND new teachers, year after year. Just typing this out makes my blood boil, because it is EASILY FIXED!
The solution? Put the Goddesses of reading instruction—those highly effective, veteran first and second grade teachers who know their kids and the their reading instruction pedagogy, into highly paid coaching/reading instruction positions. THEY NEED TO BE TEACHING TIER ONE READING TO ALL STUDENTS IN FIRST AND SECOND GRADE CLASSROOMS WHICH LACK VETERAN TEACHERS, and also coach new teachers on their reading instruction game. Why the all caps? Because new, and/or not fully credentialed teachers are what our black, brown, and low SES kids get—year after year. Its more complicated than this, but this one fact is at the core of the issue. Will this be expensive? Yes. But it will pay dividends later. Lives will be saved. Talents will be shared with the world that would otherwise be lost. Life expectancy rates will soar. Infant mortality rates will drop. The percentage of incarcerated people will plummet. We can all look ourselves in the mirror, and respect the face that stares back at us. We can take our rightful place alongside the soaring quality of life ratings with the rest of FIRST WORLD, and stop hiding our actual nationwide literacy rates (yeah...the CIA world fact book publication has been hiding this data for years.) The US department of Education has what appears to be the most accurate data—54 percent of Americans are actually literate. Google the world’s literacy rates—go on. Do it. When you’re done, read on.
Okay, so you see now that this actually goes WAAAAY beyond just racial justice—Good God. We suck. But we could be awesome. But we need to get the women who hold this knowledge into leadership.
I have never taught elementary school, but I did take the RICA, and am in awe of this scared knowledge. I have also learned that addressing the reading opportunity gap at the secondary level is like trying to put the ills of the world back into Pandora’s box. You can sorta pull a few of them outta the sky, but really, the key is not opening the damn box in the first place. I learned this by becoming completely obsessed with this issue. I noticed that there were reliably a few black boys in my 6th grade classes each year who could not read, and when I tried to get ANYONE at my site to look at this issue and give a SH*T, I got dead panned faces. Ack. It drove me CRAZY! It should drive ALL of us crazy! I could not even get my leaders to agree that the problem existed, much less get them to find creative solutions. Back then, I did not know what I know now. I did not understand that it is pretty impossible to make big growth with kid’s reading levels if they read below the 3rd grade level, without getting them back into explicit instruction of reading (basically giving them what they did not get in first and second grade). And putting older kids in this kind of reading program carries a lot of shame—so much so that it has actually yielded negative learning outcomes.
But you can try to do something good, which is what I did. I took advantage of a fellowship program opportunity some years back, and was able to design a reading intervention pilot project at my last site (a middle school) which targeted this issue, and I researched all of this stuff ad nauseum for that effort. I talked to all of the reading gurus that I could find. The implicit bias that everyone in education has about black students runs deeeeep. There are folks out there that wanna cover up the fact that we are FAILING our black students (and to be clear, this is mostly black boys). They wanna dress up the problem, and would not name the injustice here—there are a lot of kids who are being moved along throughout the grades, getting all the way to highschool who CANNOT READ! This is INEXCUSABLE, and should be headline news. Ack. I am still so f’ing angry about this.
I got daring in my outreach. After hearing an amazing story on KQED, I spoke with Kareem Weaver, and the late Dirk Tillotson (RIP), of the NAACP reading project based out of Oakland to get their feedback on my ideas and work. These two dudes were the ONLY captive audience I have really ever encountered. Dirk was one of the most collaborative, kind, and eager people that I ever spoke with about this subject. And Kareem confirmed for me that my idea could work. Both of these men have given up far more lucrative careers to pursue this work. I will not rest until we see this injustice as a core, reparations—type issue at the very heart of what is wrong in education. Throughout my journey with this issue I learned much, and began to understand the giant behemoth thing that is systemic racism.
The costs associated with this type of shift in reading instruction WILL be expensive—especially for the first decade or so. But THIS is what reparations-style radical reforms in education look like. There are no short cuts, only fierce dedication to nuance, and absolutely, positively NO corners cut—ever.
If you don’t know how to teach reading—really, REALLY well, then you need to stop calling the shots for our kids! Shut up, and pass the mic to a woman who knows her sh*t.
