With Literacy and Justice for All: King's Call to Action

_{Acting Education Secretary Dr. John King, Jr., reviews his notes before testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016, for his confirmation hearing as Education Secretary. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)}

RCEd Commentary

Thursday, Secretary of Education John King issued a call to action: Give all children the knowledge-rich, awe-inspiring education that is essential for literacy, curiosity, and lifelong learning.

“I hear frequently and passionately from educators and families who feel that key elements of what makes up a well-rounded education have been neglected,” King said. “I count myself among those who worry that the balance has shifted too much away from subjects outside of math and English that can be the spark to a child’s interest and excitement, are actually essential to success in reading, and are critical to a child’s future.”

King, the African American son of educators who endured a tough childhood in Brooklyn and ultimately earned three Ivy League degrees, understands educational justice better than most.

“Too often, it’s kids from low-income families, and kids of color… who lack access to a wide range of challenging courses once they get to school…. The bottom line is clear: a rich range of course offerings isn’t a nicety. It’s a vital part of a thorough education and a crucial element of social justice,” King said Thursday.

To be blunt, it’s appalling that the nation’s top educator needs to give such a speech. What is the purpose of schooling if not to immerse students in learning about our world through scientific, historical, and artistic lenses? Sadly, under No Child Left Behind, that purpose often took a backseat to driving up reading and math proficiency rates.

Now the good news, according to King, “the Every Student Succeeds Act makes the work to provide a well-rounded education to all students easier…. States now have the opportunity to broaden their definition of educational excellence, to include providing students strong learning experiences in science, social studies, world languages, and the arts.”

States do now have the flexibility to refocus schools’ efforts. Of course, they also have the flexibility to ignore these issues. It’s up to all of us to ensure that the new freedom is used responsibly—especially to equalize opportunity to learn.

To get there, leaders and educators will have to rethink their approach to reading comprehension.

When elementary schools take time away from science, social studies, and the arts to increase time on reading, they are likely to slow children’s growth in reading comprehension. This slowing won’t be apparent right away. But in later grades—when students are expected to read historical speeches or science textbooks or musicians’ biographies—they’ll struggle. Reading comprehension is not a “skill” like riding a bike. A child does not become a strong reader by learning and practicing reading alone.

Reading comprehension—the ability to make meaning from text—is largely a reflection of a child’s overall education. It depends on a rich education science, social studies, and the arts as well as reading. Secretary King gets this and, to his credit, he’s using his bully pulpit to deliver this long overdue message. UVA cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, who King named in his remarks, says it best: Teaching content is teaching reading.

With King’s words ringing in their ears, it’s up to state policymakers to ensure all children, particularly the disadvantaged, benefit from a knowledge-rich curriculum from the earliest possible moment. As policymakers craft new accountability plans under ESSA, we should ask: Do these policies incentivize schools to patiently invest in building students’ knowledge and vocabulary? Or, do they spur schools to look for quick gains?

As Nell K. Duke, one of the nation’s top reading researchers, and a colleague wrote, “Perhaps the greatest obstacle to improving primary-grade reading is a short-term orientation toward instruction and instructional reform. When the aim is to show reading improvements in a short period of time, spending large amounts of time on word-reading skill and its foundations, and relatively little on comprehension, vocabulary, and conceptual and content knowledge, makes sense…. Yet the long-term consequences of failing to attend to these areas cannot be overstated.”

With ESSA, we must refocus our efforts. According to a survey, K–3 teachers spend just 16 minutes a day on social studies and 19 minutes on science; in grades 4–6, just 45 minutes a day are devoted to social studies and science combined. A recent study led by Susan Neuman, who is at the forefront of literacy research, paints an even grimmer picture. In observations of 55 kindergarten classrooms, Neuman’s team found an average of two minutes per day of science and one minute of social studies. Worse, the little vocabulary instruction that occurred was sporadic and, because of disparities across classrooms, likely to increase the achievement gap.

Valorizing knowledge acquisition is the secret sauce that’s missing from education policy. Preferred policy areas—like teacher quality, choice, charters, and merit pay—are agnostic to curricular content. This is a hiding-in-plain-sight lever that policymakers have seldom thought to pull. ESSA must change that.