Improving Literacy by Not Focusing on Literacy

In the 1960s researchers seeking to understand the vocabulary deficit that persistently plague students of lower income families began observing 42 families in their homes for several hours each month for 2 1/2 years. The data showed that the amount of experience with language and interaction families provide their children and are strongly linked to children’s language accomplishments. They learned that children from poorer families are subject to fewer words and more admonishments than higher income families and that these two factors contributed to a 30 million-word gap by age three, making it more difficult for these students to keep up with their higher income peers all through their school years. This study is frequently used in attempts at improving literacy by focusing on literacy. This sounds logical, but it is focusing on the effect rather than the cause, much like treating the symptoms of an illness and ignoring the causes and implications of the illness as a whole. In addition to the sheer number of words they are missing and the encouragement they lack, they also have to contend with issues of nutrition, movement, play, and unhelpful community/family dynamics that negatively impact their ability to learn.

Poorer families typically do not have the resources to buy high quality, nourishing, whole foods, and they have less time to prepare them. Families with less education and that struggle financially are more able and more likely to buy nutritionally vapid foods that contain harmful ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. With respect to food, the quantity, quality and frequency are all factors that can positively influence hyperactivity, aggression, impulse control, focus, attention, and concentration. Poorer children, then have a built-in handicap in school with their nutritional needs not being met, causing a deficit in the qualities that are necessary in learning and getting along with others. Of course, over time the lack of good nutrition leads to health problems from frequent general illness to more serious and specific problems like obesity and diabetes. A chronically sick student is not learning optimally, and is likely often absent.

Also contributing to these health and behavioral problems that limit learning is a lack of opportunity for movement and exploration. Urban children in poorer, often less safe neighborhoods are not encouraged to freely explore their environs. Their rougher and denser surroundings contribute to a lack of community cohesion. The children of these areas are less likely to be watched out for by adults who are present and know them in the neighborhood, and therefore they are less likely trusted to be free-range children. They have less access to green areas that provide connection to nature, unstructured play, and plenty of exercise. Their families cannot afford the opportunities for physical outlets like karate, soccer, or ballet. The alternative for these kids is often large chunks of time absorbing unsupervised media (the electronic babysitter) while their parents work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

The unfortunate confluence of these attributes of poverty: inferior modeling of rich vocabulary, lack of encouragement, lack of creative and physical freedom, and lack of good nutrition, and health conspire to entrench children further into the cycle of poverty and widen the achievement gap.


The approach of devoting a majority of resources and time spent directly on improving literacy skills and achieving literacy at earlier ages at first glance sounds like a good way to close the word gap. However, much research and well-documented studies have shown that free, active, and creative play in early childhood builds the necessary foundation for reading, writing, critical thinking and the like. At first glance it is counter-intuitive, but devoting enough time and resources on developmentally appropriate activities that indirectly but strongly improve literacy is a better strategy than time and resources spent on direct and early literacy efforts.

It is clear from the study that it is crucially important that preschoolers get a rich learning environment to lay the foundation for literacy and success in school, ultimately closing the word gap. A rich learning environment goes beyond just providing more direct time spent on literacy though. Schools should balance a child’s home life, just as parents should strive to provide balance for their children outside of school. For the poorer child, the school has to work harder to provide the balance that they need, by virtue of what is missing in their home life. Schools for these children need to provide the rich vocabulary, the encouragement to take risks, as well as the creative, physical, and nutritional enrichment that they do not get at home. This means allowing adequate time for recess and unstructured physical play outdoors. This means art programs that allow for creative exploration that also have the benefit of providing a meaningful framework for learning and keeping students interested in learning and attending school. This means making available nutritious, organic, whole foods for students throughout the day.

It is our obligation as educators to see the child as a whole person and to strive to meet all of their needs. Educating the whole child will improve not only their literacy but their overall achievement. We will also have done much to interrupt the affects and the cycle of poverty.

Case in Point: Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

There is a television show on Fox called Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader that seems to perfectly capture the irony of education today. In the show, adults compete with 11-year-old kids to answer trivia questions that are typically found on the tests these kids take during the school year. The questions include social studies, math and geography concepts. Here a some examples:
Rods and cones are found in what part of the eye?
- the cornea
- the pupil
- the retina

Which planet in our solar system has a moon named Titan?
- Saturn
- Jupiter
- Venus

What makes this show amusing to many is that quite often the students get more answers right than the adults do. Does anyone wonder why we focus our children’s education on trivia that doesn’t seem to be remembered or useful as an adult? Do the students wonder why they are tested on these facts when adults don’t seem to need to know them. I wonder!

In the Information Age we have very easy access to facts as we need them. This access has changed the way we adults behave. When we feel ill, we can look up symptoms on the internet to determine what may be the condition, the cause, and treatment. We still see doctors of course but they do not have the same absolute authority as before. They are not the only source of knowledge any more. Even my children’s pediatrician now walks in to the examination room with his lap top that helps to take constellations of symptoms and determine its cause, condition and treatment. They are not expected to have an encyclopedic memory of children’s illnesses and how to treat them. I am comforted that they have access to these tools.

In a similar fashion many people are starting to work on their own taxes this season using Turbo Tax and other such programs. We no longer need to rely on tax accountants as the sole source of meeting these needs, though we still value their specialized knowledge, especially when our taxes get complex. Even our tax accountants rely on sophisticated software to enable them to do their jobs more easily, efficiently, and accurately.

These examples show how the Information Age has empowered us. It has made knowledge common. It is shared and available for the greater good. Even very specialized fields rely on a repository of information, rather than the need to know everything.

If this is how life in the real world is now, is it necessary for our children to prepare for adulthood by memorizing isolated facts? No. But this is what standardized testing encourages. Our schools need to be places of inspiration and wonder. They need to prepare our students for adulthood by drawing out their innate and unique abilities, to cultivate a sense of curiosity, to broaden their understanding of the world. I want my children to understand how the body works as a whole and to be acquainted with vast and amazing universe we are a small part of. It is less important to memorize the names of moons and eye parts. A test should determine how well concepts have been assimilated. It should not be used to determine what to teach. That is backwards and counterproductive. Let’s not waste our children’s time in school.

Incidentally, if you did not know the answer to the example questions, you are not alone. The retina works with the rods and cones and Titan is a moon that orbits Saturn. I looked it up in seconds on the internet. I don’t need to know that kind of trivia in my day-to-day life and I bet you don’t either, unless you are an Optometrist or an Astronomer.

Alternatives to High Stakes Testing

High stakes testing is for the benefit and purposes of the institution on a micro level (a school) and a macro level (public schools in a national sense), not for the student. Offering one standardized test to prove competency gained by a year of school makes it easy for the school to quickly and easily determine the achievement and aptitude of its students in a measurable, efficient, and objective way. Ideally the data it yields makes it very easy for:
• a school’s leaders and teachers to determine how well they are doing their job and where to devote more time and resources
• a teacher to determine retention or promotion
• a school district’s leaders to determine school closures, teacher pay and firing and hiring decisions
• a college to make acceptance decisions
• scholarship allocation
• a lawmaker or politician to determine new policy
• a community to understand how well local schools are doing in order to make choices on which schools to choose for their children
• a student to understand how smart he is as compared to others nationally and locally. From this the student can make decisions about staying in school or not, which college to choose, eligibility for college, subject matter to study, etc.

This score card reading and the resulting decisions can all be achieved without having to invest any attempt at understanding the curriculum, the day-to-day lesson plans, the classroom dynamics, and the student’s daily home lives (including the circumstances on test days). It does not require the score card reader to bother with information about the individual student over the course of the year such as special needs, improvement, attention, attitude, breakthroughs in understanding, participation, and effort. A high stakes test cannot take any of these factors into account. To get a clearer, more accurate picture of a student’s achievement and aptitude, a more holistic approach is required, and this can be time consuming, subjective, non-standard, and messy. A teacher (ideally with a parent’s input) is in the best position to collect, assess and report that kind of comprehensive data on each student and to use it in the student’s best interest.

Examples of holistic, ongoing assessments – what to look for:
• To assess children’s kinesthetic abilities during preschool years, we would observe their motor skills in balancing, skipping, walking backwards, etc.
• With elementary age students the teacher observes concentration, lesson retention, composition of artwork (which can give clues to their development), social interactions, and speech among other things.
• Older students can show their abilities and improvements with lesson retention, integration, and application.

Examples of student activity - how to assess:
• Students can write and illustrate notebooks to strengthen subject retention and feel a sense of ownership in their learning.
• They can create portfolios over the course of the year.
• Give presentations to practice preparation and confident public speaking.
• Team projects with observations of teamwork, overall team success, and peer reviews. This can go further with a science fair style event where community is invited and the team must describe their project, their conclusions, and answer questions.
• Research papers
• Oral interviews or essay style exams

This kind of data, not gathered with a Scantron, makes it hard for others divorced from the day to day functioning of the classroom to make decisions based on the voluminous and non-standard data. But the question must be asked, what are schools for? Are they for the benefit of students or for institutions? I think we would all agree that schools are intended to provide an education for all children for their benefit and for the benefit of a nation as a whole. If this is true, then we need to do a better, more thoughtful and careful job of determining how well students are doing and how well we are serving them. Of course it is beneficial to have assessment data, but taking the easy way out with high stakes testing is the least telling and most damaging way to attain it and make decisions based upon it. Our current assessment models are producing more dropouts (disproportionately minority students) than accountability.
According to the book “Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools” by Sharon Nichols and David Berliner, the “pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system.” They provide extensive research and documentation to make their argument, which is based on Campbell’s Law, which states that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that they indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Additionally, the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) strongly opposes “the use of large-scale testing as the sole determinant for making critical, high stakes decisions about individual students and education systems, including access to educational opportunity, retention or promotion, graduation or receipt of a diploma.” Further, they argue that standardized test scores should not be used to establish rewards or sanctions for any school or its staff.

The effect and severity of punishments associated with high-stakes testing are disproportionate with the offense. There is something wrong with punishing a school or a teacher for a student’s test results when many of the factors that significantly impact student achievement, like attendance or parental involvement are beyond their control. Furthermore, it is often the case that the schools that get punished by withheld funding are the schools that need it the most. This punishes all students and staff. Even worse, the punishment of a withheld diploma or a promotion can have devastating, life-long consequences for an individual. We need to get away from the lab rat model of punishment and reward and focus on the goal of education.
Finally when we put so much stock on a high stakes test, it sends the message to administrators, teachers, parents, students, politicians – our communities in a broad sense, that the test is the goal, not the learning, understanding, knowledge, preparedness and personal growth that we talk about as being the goal of education. This testing reverses the process and the motivation of education and encourages teachers to teach to the test, which changes the mode of teaching to rote memorization of facts and the mechanical practice of testable skills. It has the negative consequence of narrowing the curriculum with emphasis on basic skills. What about the arts that foster creativity and innovation, which employers say is sorely lacking in today’s employees? What about big-picture thinking or a cooperative work ethic? What about emotional intelligence or critical thinking? These skills are important predictors of success in life but difficult to test. There is so much more to a solid education than what is possible to test.