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| Image from www.aam.govst.edu |
I visited Charlie’s home on a cold, gray November afternoon.
He lived in a shack at the end of a tractor path crossing a field of corn
stubble. The unpainted shack sagged in the middle so severely the front door
would not close. In the crowded front room with a wood-burning fireplace were
Charlie, his mother, grandmother, an aunt and several other children. The
conversation did not last long since I was the only one with much to say. I told
them I was a reading teacher and that I thought Charlie was a
sweet boy who was
never a problem and that I wanted to do all I could to help him learn to read.
There were some questions I wanted to ask, some things I wanted to talk about,
but as I absorbed the barrenness of the room – the absence of paper, book or
any sign of written word – literacy seemed like a one-sided topic. I told his
mom I would send home a couple of books each week for Charlie to read or maybe
for her read to him. She nodded and smiled but did not make eye contact. I
told her I was concerned about Charlie missing so much school. It was a long
walk to the bus stop, she said. And the bus came early.
I left Charlie’s home with conclusions about his life,
perhaps some of them wrong; but, I felt confident that Charlie was responsible
for whether or not he attended school - a responsibility that came with all the
limitations of being seven years old.
As a reading teacher in South Carolina, I thought often
about the effect of poverty on the children I taught. Each year I worked with
about 40 of the poorest readers in grades 2 though 6. All but a handful of them
lived in poverty. The link between
poverty and literacy seems clear, but why? Why is poverty not an incentive for learning?
Words are freely available. Cheap print surrounds us. Every child spends five
days a week in a building that includes a library. Why do the majority of
struggling readers come from poor families? Access to printed words is
essentially free.
Today, 40 years after my visit to Charlie’s home, we know
more about the answer to this question about poverty and literacy. As it turns
out, there appears to be a price – a cost, if you will - for words both written
and spoken. And for young children living in poverty, it is the low volume of
spoken words that creates a literacy problem. Studies consistently find that
children living in poverty come to school knowing about half as many words as
children raised in better economic conditions. Studies of homes of three
year-old children living in poverty show they are only exposed to half as many
words as children in better circumstances.
Purely from a learning standpoint, it is poverty of words we
must worry about more than financial poverty. A child beginning school owning
only 50% of the words of her peers is in a deep learning hole. The consequences
of a small vocabulary are dire. We have not found a way to speed up the rate of
gain. We only partially understand the nature of the problem. Vocabulary
knowledge is one of the traditional indicators of intelligence. But a small
vocabulary is also a result of a lack of exposure to a variety of words. So, in
many cases, low intelligence is not the culprit.
Here is where an absence of word variety in the early years
leads: A few years ago I was helping my college students tutor seventh graders
who were 2 or more years behind their peers in reading skill. For a tutoring text, we were using the 7th
grade social studies book, a chapter on Ancient Egypt. I was sitting with a tutor
working with Lakeshia. As I listened to Lakeshia read the text she pronounced
words correctly but read sentences as if they were a list of random words –
expression absent in her voice. I had
told the tutor to stop her after each paragraph, ask questions and help her
with words that might be unfamiliar. As it turns out, there were many words for
which she had no meaning, words like - noble, artisan, scribe, fermented,
pestle, imitate, glaze, etc. On any given page, there could be 5 to 10 unknown
words. Try reading a text in which 5 to 10 words on each page are unknown. Frustration
will quickly drive you to discard it. But that is not an option for Lakeshia
and other 7th graders who often adapt to the circumstances with
either a vacant or belligerent demeanor.
A proper solution for educating children in poverty evades
us. We fail to understand both the
problem and the solution. It is very difficult for educators and politicians to
grasp the nature of the problem because we are not poor, or at least have never
lived within a family that has been impoverished over multiple generations. Many
have known financial poverty. From my parents and grandparents I glimpsed the
Great Depression – grandparents living in homes without running water, heated
only by wood or coal. They were poor by an economic definition. But they were
far from poor in words. Their capacity with words built a circle of hope,
creativity, problem-solving and, ultimately, a path out of temporary poverty.
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| Image from www.asergeev.com |
The world as I have known it, is not the world that Charlie
and Lakeshia live in. Their impoverishment has a much longer history than ours
and encompasses both money and words. We can invite them into our worlds via
magnet schools, charter schools and vouchers to private schools, but why would
we
think any significant numbers of those children are going to cross that gulf
between their world and ours. Their fear and skepticism is almost as great as
ours. Why don’t they deserve a well functioning school in their neighborhood
with a faculty and administration committed to the long haul?
