Federal

Southern States Urged to Tackle Adolescent Literacy

By Mary Ann Zehr — May 01, 2009 4 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The Southern Regional Education Board is advising its 16 member states to devise a comprehensive set of policies to improve reading for middle and high school students.

Calling adolescent reading “the most critical priority for public middle grades and high schools,” a report released today at the annual meeting of the Education Writers Association in Washington advises states to identify reading skills that apply to different subject areas, craft curricula, establish reading-intervention programs, and prepare teachers of adolescents to teach reading along with academic content.

It also calls on states to prepare a detailed plan to work with school districts to implement the policies.

“We’re saying this needs to be the top priority, even if something else has to give,” David S. Spence, the president of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board, said in an interview. “It’s obvious that we get kids reading or decoding by grade 4 or 5, and we probably make good progress in that. But in terms of higher-level reading, reading comprehension, we just don’t do it.”

Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia chaired the committee of legislators, state education officials, and others who came up with the recommendations for adolescent reading. The panel recognized, he said, “the problem that we stop teaching reading too early.”

Not every teacher, he said, needs to be a reading specialist. But all teachers do need to be trained, he added, in how to recognize reading deficits, and schools need to have strategies to respond to them.

Virginia has a higher percentage of 8th graders scoring at or above proficiency in reading than any other SREB state, he said. At the same time, he said, that figure—34 percent—"is hardly anything to turn cartwheels about.”

“An unacceptably high percentage of our students who go on to community college or four-year universities require remedial work,” said Mr. Kaine, who is a Democrat.

Getting Beyond Stories

Several reading experts who were not involved with the publication of the report, “A Critical Mission: Making Adolescent Reading an Immediate Priority in SREB States,” said its recommendations are on target.

They’re consistent with recommendations on adolescent literacy that have been made recently by the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices, said Ilene Berman, a program director for that center. “We, too, recommend that states build support for a state focus on adolescent literacy,” she said. “We encourage states to write and implement literacy plans.”

“I am glad to see they are doing this, because there was a certain period in American education, not too long ago, that it was assumed if you were just worried about reading in the primary grades, you’d solve all your problems,” said Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But, she said, many students need instruction beyond the primary grades in how to read for different purposes.

Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University, echoed Ms. Snow’s views that many educators have erroneously believed that students only need to be taught to read in the primary grades. Reading instruction in those grades, he says, focuses mostly on stories. But in middle and high school, Mr. Kamil noted, students need reading skills for other kinds of text.

“We have the stories, but then we have an intermediate form of text that is relatively information. Newspapers are a good example. Then we have a formal text, like a biology textbook,” he said, contending that educators teach a lot about reading stories, a bit about reading informal texts, and very little about reading formal texts.

A big piece in the puzzle of improving adolescent literacy, Mr. Kamil said, is training all middle and high school teachers to teach reading. Regular classroom teachers can help struggling readers by explicitly teaching vocabulary, he said, or by teaching reading-comprehension strategies. He added, however, that some students may have to be removed from the classroom for additional reading instruction as well.

The report says none of the 16 SREB states has a comprehensive plan to address adolescent literacy, but Alabama and Florida are ahead of other Southern states in implementing reading initiatives for middle or high school students.

Alabama, for instance, has been expanding a reading initiative that started in the early primary grades to grades 4 to 8.

Joe Morton, the superintendent of education for Alabama, said his state plans to use economic-stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, such as extra funds for school improvement, to carry out some recommendations in the SREB report.

One of the next steps in Alabama will be to include some high schools in the statewide reading initiative, which supports reading coaches in schools. Mr. Morton said data from the 29 schools with students in grades 4-8 who have participated in the reading initiative show that it is working.

He agrees with the SREB report that adolescent reading should be his state’s number one education priority.

“If you can’t read, there is no other thing to do in school with students for six and a half hours except discipline them and take them to lunch,” he said.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the May 13, 2009 edition of Education Week

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal What Would Happen to K-12 in a 2nd Trump Term? A Detailed Policy Agenda Offers Clues
A conservative policy agenda could offer the clearest view yet of K-12 education in a second Trump term.
8 min read
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, March 9, 2024, in Rome Ga.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, March 9, 2024, in Rome, Ga. Allies of the former president have assembled a detailed policy agenda for every corner of the federal government with the idea that it would be ready for a conservative president to use at the start of a new term next year.
Mike Stewart/AP
Federal Opinion Student Literacy Rates Are Concerning. How Can We Turn This Around?
The ranking Republican senator on the education committee wants to hear from educators and families about making improvements.
6 min read
Image shows a multi-tailed arrow hitting the bullseye of a target.
DigitalVision Vectors/Getty
Federal Biden Calls for Teacher Pay Raises, Expanded Pre-K in State of the Union
President Joe Biden highlighted a number of his education priorities in a high-stakes speech as he seeks a second term.
5 min read
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
Shawn Thew/Pool via AP
Federal Low-Performing Schools Are Left to Languish by Districts and States, Watchdog Finds
Fewer than half of district plans for improving struggling schools meet bare minimum requirements.
11 min read
A group of silhouettes looks across a grid with a public school on the other side.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva