The Huffington Post – Karin Chenoweth
“It turns out that reading instruction is one of the most complex tasks our schools undertake. You can get a sense of its difficulty from the fact that 52 percent of eighth-graders whose parents graduated from college can’t read at the proficient level as measured by the Nation’s Report Card. Fourteen percent can’t read at a basic level. Although this is a problem that hits every demographic group you can name, the numbers are much worse for kids whose parents didn’t finish high school, for kids who live in poverty, and for kids of color. Those numbers constitute a huge part of what we know of as the achievement gap. Achievement gaps are often blamed on the personal attributes that kids bring with them to school — whether they live in poverty, whether they come from single-family homes, and so forth. But anyone who has looked at this issue also has to say that a contributing factor has been that, too often, reading instruction has been hit-or-miss or, sometimes, completely wrong-headed.”(more)