Reading- it’s something you do on a daily basis. You’re doing it right now, but reading can be hard. According to Rebecca Silverman, an associate professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, “[reading] is not a natural phenomenon. There’s no specific region of the brain for reading or writing. Through evolution, humans have hijacked other parts of the brain – auditory, visual – and combined them into a network of channels to develop the ability to read and write” (Spector). Because we are all different and the network has developed differently for each of us, literacy levels develop differently for everyone. Because of varying literacy levels, many school-age students suffer from low literacy issues. This issue often affects an individual throughout the entire duration of their lifetime. According to Kristen Brown, a Washington County School District Curriculum Coordinator, literacy scores have been stagnant in Washington County School District for years and years despite varied curricula, added interventions, and retrained teachers (Brown). In an effort to raise literacy scores, specifically low literacy scores, the school district is seeking a solution for this long-suffering problem. According to Brown, two possible strategies that have previously been underused are under consideration to increase these reading scores: increasing parental involvement and engagement through the use of literacy education and parent access to interventions or using phonics as the center for teaching reading in the classroom by retraining and educating teachers and providing support to implement this new focus. While both of these are viable solutions, if the Washington County School District (WCSD) wants to raise its low literacy scores, we must remember the old adage that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In other words, having Washington County School District rely on parents’ freewill to increase low literacy scores is something the district can encourage, but not control; phonics will provide the better solution for increasing low reading scores as the district has jurisdiction for implementation of schoolwide phonics curriculum and training.
Before we dissect the solutions at hand, it is important to remember that there are pros and cons to both of these methods. Neither method comes without concerns or is a complete cure-all. In addition, neither method should be used in isolation. The WCSD is looking at these methods to supplement current and evolving methods (Brown). These mediums were chosen because both methods have substantial research to support their use (Holt). In addition, these methods have been overlooked and underutilized in WCSD in years past (Brown). As such, they provide new hope to overall stagnant reading scores and specifically stagnant low literacy scores throughout WCSD.
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To begin with, increasing parental involvement and engagement in literacy has been proven to increase literacy scores. According to the article, “How Parent Involvement Leads to Student Success,” “[The most accurate predictor of academic achievement is] not socioeconomic status, nor how prestigious the school is that a child attends. The best predictor of student success is the extent to which families encourage learning at home and involve themselves in their child’s education.” Julie Holt, assistant superintendent of San Juan County School District echoed this research by stating that there was an obvious correlation between a student’s success in education and the amount of parent involvement and engagement a parent is contributing. San Juan School District (SJSD), found in rural south-eastern Utah has faced this uphill battle since its beginning. Due to widespread school boundaries, low population in many areas, and the cultural backgrounds of many students, parental involvement in past years was nearly nonexistent. Holt describes students who live nearly 90 miles from a school and who are driven 40 minutes by parents to catch a bus for another hour-long ride just to get to school each day. If students participate in after-school activities and take a late-bus home, some students are gone from 5 am to 9:30 pm. According to Holt, when these factors are combined with the cultural mindset of many parents in this area, the district realized that while parental involvement was essential, it was also very unlikely. This was reflected in literacy scores.
In a school laden with some of the highest poverty levels in the state and some of the largest boundaries (land size) in a school, leaders of SJSD knew they would have to get creative to increase parental involvement. According to Holt, one of the most effective methods employed was to hire Liaisons. These Liaisons go and visit the students and the parents at their homes to help educate the parents on being involved and engaged. They help them to know what is going on at the school so that the parents can help their students more fully. The district has also designed materials to help assist the parents to work with their children. This way, they don’t just know what the problem is, they know how to work on the problem. “As a school, you have to be really creative to get parents involved… you have to prove to the parents that they want to be there. Providing food at things like workshops, which parents attend with their child can really help to get parents out and involved.” Holt further explains that A huge part of engagement is understanding what is going on at a student’s school. This is not just simply being a part of a student’s life. Having a parent to teacher, “face-to-face conversation” is really important for a parent to become involved with their student’s education.”
According to Holt, most of the time, it is the responsibility of the school to reach out to the parents because helping the student comes down to knowing what is going on at their child’s school, whether it’s what they are learning or what kind of activities are going on. Holt clarifies this statement by saying, “If parents are wanting to become more involved, they can ask their student’s teacher, ‘How can I support my child,’ or ‘What can I do to become more involved?’ Ultimately though, it is the schools’ responsibility to increase involvement and engagement with parents. Holt is passionate about the efforts of SJSC. This school district has placed a great focus on increasing parental involvement to increase literacy. According to Holt, research shows that when parents are more involved in literacy, scores increase. However, research also shows that when parents are more involved and engaged with a student’s school life in general, scores also improve. “Parent involvement is huge, as far as a student’s success in their education. When parents are involved, a student is successful.”
While parent involvement appears to be a critical component of increasing literacy scores, this method is not without hazard, one major downfall is that teachers and school administrators cannot control the learning that happens at home. Alternatively, they can attempt to increase the parents’ awareness of where their child is and where they need to be. A really great way to make parents aware is to have them sit down with their child and their child’s teacher and have the teacher tell them exactly that- what level of reading ability they are on, and where they are expected to be. Once this has been done goals to aid improvement should be set. According to Janet Goodall and Caroline Montgomery, one of the biggest blocks between teachers and parents is that they don’t understand the other’s goals for the child (401). The parent and student could plan to read together for so many nights a week, or the teacher could send home individualized homework that assists the child and the parent in reaching those goals. Besides these individualized meetings, workshops, and activities can also be put in place. But let’s face it, parents don’t want to go and sit in some boring meeting about reading after a long day of work! According to Holt “As a school, you have to be really creative to get parents involved… you have to prove to the parents that they want to be there. Providing food at things like workshops, which parents attend with their child can really help to get parents out and involved.” Another great option would be to only have a couple of grades come during something like a ‘literacy night’ and the teachers of the grade levels who are not in attendance could plan fun activities that students can do while their parents go to workshops with their child’s teacher so that they can better learn and understand where their child is and where their child needs to be. Karla Brooks Baehr, Superintendent of Schools, is cited as saying, “Parent involvement is more than just parents”; parent involvement requires a strong partnership between a school, a community, and a family (Myers 1). Baehr makes an excellent point, however, the major downside is that not every parent is going to do this- show up to workshops, or even sit down and read with their child. This means that not every parent is going to reach out or respond to teachers reaching out, and therefore it is very likely that these parents won’t ever know that their child is struggling. While teachers and school administrators can encourage parental involvement, the truth is there is a lack of control over what goes on at home. And as such, while it can be used to help bring awareness to the fact that the child is below where they need to be, it isn’t a very effective solution.
Furthermore, in recent years the district has been considering the idea of utilizing some of the time when students are at school to have teachers teach phonics skills to their students. Brown stated that the old way of having paras, who don’t even have a college degree to verify that they even know how or what to teach within phonics, just isn’t working. Alternatively, students could be grouped into levels of proficiency- during class time. The teacher would work on phonics with the lowest level of literacy students; this is logical because the teacher who has a degree in teaching should know how to teach and what they need to be teaching. Paras could still assist in the teaching process by working with proficient and above-proficient-level readers. This ultimately should drastically raise the scores of the students who are below proficiency. The other students who can read adequately should also be making improvements because they are still being taught new word sounds etc. However, some teachers argue that practicing phonics will just make kids hate reading. Brown counters this argument by stating that it’s better to have kids know how to read and don’t really enjoy it than it is to have these kids go through the rest of their lives unable to read!- She went on to say that when you look at what the teachers who have the highest literacy scores are doing differently, “it comes down to the fact that they are focusing on phonics.” Holt and Brown have paralleling views about phonics. Holt says that San Juan County teaches systematic phonics in the early grades, they also use it for remediation for older students that don’t have good foundational skills and comprehension. Both Holt and Brown mentioned how the use of phonics has made a huge difference. Holt went on to say “That being said, not all children need intense explicit systematic phonics instruction. The research is very strong for at-risk students, especially in the early years.” When students learn phonics skills their reading ability and adaptability improve greatly. Eric J. Gee, a Utah State University doctoral student who has written on the effectiveness of whole-language reading is cited as saying “A teacher using a skills-based [phonics] approach would specifically teach children the effect of a silent ”E“ on the end of a word” (Clark 443). In other words, the teacher would explain things like how the letter ‘a’ makes a different sound in the word rat verse the word rate because of the silent ‘E’, as opposed to leaving the students in a muddle of confusion and just expecting them to figure it out for themselves. Phyllis Schlafly, who taught her own children to read and markets her own phonics program made it very clear that non-phonics methods turn the English language into a “guessing game...The student looks at pictures and memorizes the couple of hundred most frequent words and then is allowed to get many guesses wrong. When you're on the operating table, you care whether your doctor knows the difference between spine and spleen” (Clark 444). It is important for students to be able to read, not only to be able to read but to read well. They need to be able to go out into the world with the skills and tools they have been taught, through the phonics method, in order to be able to tackle those tough words. Teachers who use the phonics method won’t just be teaching their students to read, they will be teaching their students how to have confidence in their ability to combat these difficult, foreign words.
Overall, while both solutions do have their merits, teachers and school administrators of Washington County School District should take the phonics approach, because it is something that can be easily monitored and they will have control over. It also establishes rules that students can use in order to read words that the student has never been exposed to.
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