You can’t legislate literacy - Tom Dunn

" When the foundation for acquiring language skills is not laid properly, a child is places at a disadvantage that will, in all probability, last a lifetime."

The political intrusion into the decision-making process governing public education has been as destructive a force on children, especially those in need, as has ever existed. Once politicians decided it was within their purview to dictate how children should become educated, the public discourse became less about what the research teaches us and everything to do with political partisanship, party platforms, acquisition of power, and money-grabbing. As a result, it has been difficult to engage political decision-makers in intelligent conversations about what is best for kids, let alone expect them to enact anything meaningful for them.

As a result of this political ineptitude, we are now saddled with more than two decades of nonsensical educational policies that have been based on political myths instead of on what we know about how human beings develop into successful adults. Our children have paid the price for this incompetence.

For years now, lawmakers have created foolish federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind (which falsely promised that all students could attain a pre-determined, politically motivated academic standard), Race to the Top (which has wasted untold hundreds of millions of tax dollars on “reforms” that were supposed to boost student achievement, but did not do so because they did not address the reasons children fail), Common Core (which erroneously promotes the notion that new academic standards will somehow guarantee success in life), and school choice initiatives (which operate under the illusion that if you place a child who is failing in a different school without addressing the reasons for that failure, a magical transformation will occur). Accompanying these failed mandates has been the student-testing debacle. Here, students are tested incessantly and the results are used in a wrongheaded evaluation of schools, school administrators, and teachers.

The fact is, the only thing poorly conceived legislation guarantees is that another generation of children will suffer while adults in power play their foolish political games. Nothing exemplifies this dysfunction more than the confusion politicians feign about how children acquire literacy skills. What we know about the development of literacy skills is really quite clear. We know, for example, that literacy begins developing at birth and that the years before a child enters school are integral to this development. In fact, this is the time when the very foundation of one’s literacy skills begins to develop. This explains why the earlier in life one tries to learn a second language, the easier it is. When the foundation for acquiring language skills is not laid properly, a child is placed at a disadvantage that will, in all probability, last a lifetime. For policy makers to pretend as if this isn’t true and to create policies as if schools can undo the damage done by parents who are not properly engaged in their child’s earliest educational development does a horrible disservice to our youth. It is particularly harmful, as a rule, to children who are raised in poverty and who do not receive the at-home stimulation they deserve.

The fact is, a child’s out-of-school experiences, not the school he or she attends, is the single most important factor in literacy development. We know that a child is given the greatest opportunity to thrive when he or she is provided an enriched learning environment in a home in which a parent, grandparent, sibling, or other caregiver properly interacts with him or her. Having an adult read to, talk to, sing to, and otherwise immerse a child in an enriched language environment beginning at birth provides him or her an advantage over a child who is not likewise engaged.

It is also true that parents’ responsibility for educating their child doesn’t end once he or she enters school. A young person’s maximum opportunity for success exists when the parents, the school, and the student are all engaged in the educational process. The best results occur when a child spends all day in a school appropriately engaged in a rigorous academic setting and then returns to a home just as enriched, in which those same skills are reinforced. This is true because acquiring and improving literacy skills is not unlike any other skill one hopes to perfect; practice is the key to mastery. So, parents who want to give their child maximum opportunity to succeed make sure their child attends a school in which a rigorous environment exists where basic skills are emphasized, then ensures that he or she practices these skills with the proper supervision twelve months a year—not just for an hour a day in a classroom during the months school is in session. Constantly engaging him or her in meaningful language-based activities is essential for literacy skills to continue to develop appropriately.

Remaining engaged during the summer is just as important. Logic tells us that students who live in a home devoid of language and who do not practice their skills will regress during that long break, while children who live in a home rich in language may see little, if any regression. The best way to stave off this regression is through continued practicing of activities that improve literacy skills. Keeping students engaged in books and in rich conversation is the simplest way to make sure their literacy skills stay intact, because the development of those skills is not a one-hour-per-day, nine-month-a-year process.

Our political leaders like to talk about increasing educational rigor and giving students the maximum opportunity for success, but they ignore what the data tells us. We know that children who grow up in two-parent households where the parents are highly educated, who emphasize education, and who are engaged in their child’s school life perform substantially better than children who do not have that support. We know that illiteracy correlates with poverty. We know these things but policy-makers pretend as if these factors play no role at all. They act as if parents can play no role in their child’s educational development and that schools and special programs can make up the difference. We have decades of data proving that isn’t true and that the way to maximize childhood literacy development is for parents or other caregivers to create a home environment that is rich in language and in which books are plentiful and used liberally so their child enters school with the necessary foundation where highly qualified teachers can build on that foundation. Unless we as a society acknowledge these simple facts, two decades from now we will be wringing our hands in angst about the devastating effects of childhood literacy just as we have been doing for the last two decades.

Tom Dunn is the superintendent of the Miami County Educational Service Center and a frequent writer on education policy.