On Nov. 2, I hope that you will vote for me for Greenfield School Committee. Here’s why: In the United States a crisis creating untold pain and inequity plays out in homes and schools everywhere that doesn’t get much press. Unless you are the parent of a child struggling to learn, you might not even know about it. So, what is this crisis? According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Nation’s Report Card two-thirds of our schoolchildren are not reading proficiently. Half of those struggling readers cannot read at even a basic level.
What happens to these young people? Children who struggle to read suffer anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Three quarters of graduating third-grade students who do not read at grade level will never catch up. Many develop behavioral issues that contribute to destructive and dangerous situations in school. Almost 90% of students who don’t finish high school struggled with reading in third grade. They are then highly likely to experience unemployment and poverty. The large majority of youth in juvenile detention are functionally illiterate and 70% of U.S. adult prison inmates cannot read at a fourth grade level. This is the school to prison pipeline.
Our district’s data is much the same and these numbers tell the stories of real children living in our community. If things continue as they have been, only about three in ten kids coming to our Kindergartens this fall will learn read proficiently. Only one in twenty kids with disabilities coming to fifth grade this fall will be so lucky. Yes, just one. Can you picture their faces and choose which of them get to learn how to read well? Of course you couldn’t choose. Because we know that the ability to read is one of the strongest predictive factors in every life outcome.
The good news is that given the right instruction, the National Institutes of Health reports that almost all children can learn to read. Over the past few decades, researchers have established a body of research commonly referred to as the science of reading. Cognitive science has illuminated the pathways and processes by which our brains learn (and don’t learn) to read and debunked whole-language methods whereby students are taught to guess at words. Just over twenty years ago, Congress convened an expert group to examine the evidence, called the National Reading Panel and they highlighted five essential components of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These five components are taught explicitly and systematically in high-quality instruction called structured literacy.
Sadly, too many already cash-strapped schools have sunk huge amounts of money into outdated programs and the thought of scrapping them is wrenching. Compounding the problem, many universities do not offer to pre-service teachers the cognitive science of reading or how to deliver structured literacy instruction. Consequently, teachers are burdened with either shouldering the extra cost of advanced training or just doing their best with the often faulty and inadequate resources offered to them. And so, the same flawed system keeps producing the same heart-breaking outcomes for too many of our children.
Greenfield, I am running for School Committee because we know better and that means we have to do better. We owe it to our children, our teachers, our families, our community, and the world, to make a whole-hearted investment in a deeply thought-out literacy plan. This plan would mean we stop wasting precious dollars on flawed materials, invest in and support our teachers as the single best advantage we can give our students, and give our educators (and students and families) the tools they need to be successful. Any serious discussion about equity must treat literacy as the central, far-reaching and indispensable skill that it is. Literacy is the great equalizer and our students of color, economically disadvantaged students, disabled students and students who have experienced trauma stand to gain the most if we make this investment (and to lose if we don’t).
I ask you to please vote for Glenn Johnson-Mussad and Elizabeth DeNeeve as well. Glenn, Elizabeth, and I are supporting each other because we share the values of transparency, equity and respect. We believe the School Committee should actively seek out and listen to community input, be respectful and transparent, and center equity in every decision.
You can learn more about us online at voteforbettergreenfieldschools.org. Thank you for your support on Nov. 2. I look forward to serving our community.
Kathryn Martini, a Greenfield resident, is a candidate for the Greenfield School Committee.