Guest Blog Tania Fowler - One Child at a Time
Illiteracy. One Child at a Time.
by Tania Fowler
I tutor kids who can't read. They should be able to, they are in 5th and 6th grade after all, but for one reason or another, they can't. Lord knows they try. They really try. They look at me with big wondrous eyes and want to do well and I want them to. I tutor to: students of a somewhat transient population; children from the poorer subset of America with an array of faces that lean heavily toward the non-white segment of our population. These 10 to 12 year-old's aren't even approaching grade level in reading.
My own kids, all well on their way as adults, went through this same public school district but got a very different education; an excellent range of knowledge and skill development to help them navigate the world. Why the unevenness? Largely because this gargantuan-sized school district continues to mirror what has been happening in our society for the past 30 years. Those parents with the resources and educations to propel their kids forward, do, and those with minimal resources and perhaps a lower level of education who don't know how to advocate...no demand, a good education for their kids, can not. Parents with resources self-select into schools with similar values around education. But all schools should emulate strong values around education; that is the business of schools after all. So who gets stuck on the education bridge to nowhere? Kids who, by virtue of their births, more often than not get caught up in the politics and arcane educational initiatives that say test, test, test and test again so that no child gets left behind. You'd think with all of this testing we'd be seeing actual, educational results, kid by kid. Interventions (like classroom reading specialists, summer school, and after school programs) that once helped to offset or limit kids' falling behind have long since been limited or axed. The point of testing should be to change the trajectory of education for the better. So I am mystified as to how all this testing is actually changing the trajectory of these kids' education for the better...now.
So last week, after working with a delightful 6th grade girl I'll call Kayla, who hopes to go to college and be a scientist one day, but cannot read the word 'yesterday' or 'really', I headed home wondering, 'what the hell is going on?' Kayla barely knew the sounds of the alphabet and knew none of the rules of long and short vowels and so on. She is in 6th grade! Take Kayla and all of her 38 classmates, multiply them by millions and you get the next generation getting left behind faster than ever before. Technology has put the world on a rocket and getting left behind now is to the 10th power of being left behind a mere 10 years ago. There truly is NO time to waste.
In working with Kayla I started to notice that she wasn't tracking the words well so I got a strip of white paper and followed the sentence one word at a time for her, obscuring all of the extraneous words from her view. Her pacing picked up by quite a bit - she did better. I wondered if anyone has noticed this about her reading? Her teacher was out that day replaced by a sub but I will mention it when I go back later this week. What can be done for this adorable wanna-be scientist who, by the way, had a very capable discussion of science with me. She is smart and curious, she could be something...if she got a good education. This week I'm buying phonics cards and doing research on the net on how to teach reading because she IS going to read. Her life and her children's lives will depend on it.
But this band-aid approach should NOT, must NOT be the answer. One child is not more expendable than another child simply because of parental abilities. That is not the promise of the American Dream taught to me. These children in school, now, today, do not have time to wait for their school to be transformed into a charter school or for the next generation of education leaders to come along. They need help NOW or they will be lost and become a burden to the system that so many loud voices can't wait to complain about later.
Fifteen years from now we won't pass them in the halls of our companies, sit in a cubicle or a meeting with them and we'll never get the benefit of their thoughts and ideas to solve the next generation's problems. Truth be told, we won't notice them at all except to complain about them as takers. As a society, we have to do better than this.
Tanya Fowler is Founder of Interplay Coaching, based in California
by Tania Fowler
I tutor kids who can't read. They should be able to, they are in 5th and 6th grade after all, but for one reason or another, they can't. Lord knows they try. They really try. They look at me with big wondrous eyes and want to do well and I want them to. I tutor to: students of a somewhat transient population; children from the poorer subset of America with an array of faces that lean heavily toward the non-white segment of our population. These 10 to 12 year-old's aren't even approaching grade level in reading.
My own kids, all well on their way as adults, went through this same public school district but got a very different education; an excellent range of knowledge and skill development to help them navigate the world. Why the unevenness? Largely because this gargantuan-sized school district continues to mirror what has been happening in our society for the past 30 years. Those parents with the resources and educations to propel their kids forward, do, and those with minimal resources and perhaps a lower level of education who don't know how to advocate...no demand, a good education for their kids, can not. Parents with resources self-select into schools with similar values around education. But all schools should emulate strong values around education; that is the business of schools after all. So who gets stuck on the education bridge to nowhere? Kids who, by virtue of their births, more often than not get caught up in the politics and arcane educational initiatives that say test, test, test and test again so that no child gets left behind. You'd think with all of this testing we'd be seeing actual, educational results, kid by kid. Interventions (like classroom reading specialists, summer school, and after school programs) that once helped to offset or limit kids' falling behind have long since been limited or axed. The point of testing should be to change the trajectory of education for the better. So I am mystified as to how all this testing is actually changing the trajectory of these kids' education for the better...now.
So last week, after working with a delightful 6th grade girl I'll call Kayla, who hopes to go to college and be a scientist one day, but cannot read the word 'yesterday' or 'really', I headed home wondering, 'what the hell is going on?' Kayla barely knew the sounds of the alphabet and knew none of the rules of long and short vowels and so on. She is in 6th grade! Take Kayla and all of her 38 classmates, multiply them by millions and you get the next generation getting left behind faster than ever before. Technology has put the world on a rocket and getting left behind now is to the 10th power of being left behind a mere 10 years ago. There truly is NO time to waste.
In working with Kayla I started to notice that she wasn't tracking the words well so I got a strip of white paper and followed the sentence one word at a time for her, obscuring all of the extraneous words from her view. Her pacing picked up by quite a bit - she did better. I wondered if anyone has noticed this about her reading? Her teacher was out that day replaced by a sub but I will mention it when I go back later this week. What can be done for this adorable wanna-be scientist who, by the way, had a very capable discussion of science with me. She is smart and curious, she could be something...if she got a good education. This week I'm buying phonics cards and doing research on the net on how to teach reading because she IS going to read. Her life and her children's lives will depend on it.
But this band-aid approach should NOT, must NOT be the answer. One child is not more expendable than another child simply because of parental abilities. That is not the promise of the American Dream taught to me. These children in school, now, today, do not have time to wait for their school to be transformed into a charter school or for the next generation of education leaders to come along. They need help NOW or they will be lost and become a burden to the system that so many loud voices can't wait to complain about later.
Fifteen years from now we won't pass them in the halls of our companies, sit in a cubicle or a meeting with them and we'll never get the benefit of their thoughts and ideas to solve the next generation's problems. Truth be told, we won't notice them at all except to complain about them as takers. As a society, we have to do better than this.
Tanya Fowler is Founder of Interplay Coaching, based in California
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