Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
Last summer was the second one Tayonna Taylor, an incoming second-grader, spent working with a reading tutor: her mother. Tayonna, who wears glasses and had the sniffles, sat with her mother, Tasia Carlton, in late July in Emily Roggie’s classroom in Wissahickon Charter School in northwest Philadelphia.
Seven groups of parents and children sat together on too-small chairs. Three more children sat alone — their parents were with siblings in another classroom. There were a few dads, but mostly moms. Dress ranged from office wear to abaya and hijab, with many in blue T-shirts from Springboard Collaborative, which runs this program. Remnants of a potluck breakfast of donuts and juice sat on a table to the side.
“Let’s try to find one you haven’t read before,” said Carlton. Tayonna pulled out “The Teddy Bears Have a Dream.” Carlton took her through the picture walk — going through the book without reading, using the pictures to make predictions about what’s going on.
“Looking at the picture and knowing the title, what do you think this book’s about?” she said.
“He’s dreaming he’s flying in the sky,” said Tayonna. They turned some pages. “Why do you think he’s sad?” said Carlton. “Make a guess and later we’ll find
out if you’re right.”
“Somebody got something he didn’t?” said Tayonna.
Carlton chuckled. “We’ll see,” she said.
Carlton and Tayonna, who turned 8 this week, are old hands at this. “Last year this helped her a lot,” Carlton said. “But in first grade she didn’t move much until the end of the year. So we’re getting her to be more confident.
“English is such a funny language — it’s frustrating to learn to read. But she can use the pictures to figure out words. When she can figure out a big word like ‘restaurant,’ she says ‘I can do this.'”
Two weeks ago, I wrote about two programs that use AmeriCorps volunteers or community volunteers to help children learn to read fluently by third grade, which is crucial to school success. Several readers wrote in to ask: But what about parents? Shouldn’t they be the ones tutoring students?
For the most part, schools systems say no. They ask parents to make sure the child reads a set number of minutes each day, or to read with the child. But kids who are behind in reading need more than just time with a book. And schools have been reluctant to ask parents to provide it — in large part because the low-income children who need it most often have parents who are less involved in their education and may lack the skills and confidence to help.
“When we think about increasing instructional hours, we think about extending the school day,” said Alejandro Gac-Artigas, who founded Springboard. “But another way is by increasing hours at home. The education system as a whole, though, has written off low-income parents as unable or unwilling to help their kids. We do shockingly little to capture the value of low-income parents. We treat families as liabilities rather than assets.”
More learning is particularly important over the summer. A landmark study (pdf) published in 2007 found that middle-class and poorer students progress through the school year at the same rate. Then how to explain the three-year achievement gap between poor and non-poor students at the beginning of ninth grade? One-third of the gap was a result of the difference that existed when they started school. Two-thirds came from the summer. Middle-class children don’t regress as readers during the summer — because they go to the library, do educational activities, take classes. Poor children, however, lose between one and two months in reading achievement. (Springboard uses the figure of three months, which others dispute.) Year after year, it adds up.
Teachers spend precious time remediating the summer slide. “It took my students to the end of November for reading levels to catch up to where they had been at the end of the school year,” said Sharifa Kelly, a second-grade teacher at Wissahickon and the site supervisor for Springboard.
Gac-Artigas founded Springboard in 2011, when he was just 22. He was teaching first grade with Teach for America, horrified by the summer slide. That summer he set up a four-teacher pilot with 42 children and their families. By the end of the summer, the children had gained 2.8 months in reading.
This past summer, Springboard worked with 1,200 students in 20 schools — public, charter and parochial — in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. In Philadelphia, Springboard is the only summer learning program the school district pays for. Springboard trains teachers for the summer program, and has now started to help them coach parents to help their children during the school year. The full cost of the summer program is about $900 per child, including the teacher’s salary, which is paid by the school.
Wissahickon invited the lowest-performing two-thirds of students — those who are a year or more behind in reading — to spend five weeks, every day for four hours, at the Springboard camp in classes with their teachers. On Wednesday mornings, however, parents attended with their children, and spent an hour learning techniques for reading with their children at home.
James S. Kim, an associate professor in Harvard’s graduate school of education and an expert on literacy programs, said that effective summer reading programs had several components he called ABC: Access to both fiction and nonfiction, Books well matched to a child’s reading level and interests, and a routine that increased Comprehension. “Children should understand the book and transfer the routine to books beyond the program,” he said.
Springboard has these components. Each week parents learn a new skill: The first week, it’s how to pick appropriate books. Each child gets a bag of seven fiction and nonfiction books at different levels to keep — they are encouraged to read many more books from the school or other libraries. To gauge level, the child reads the first two pages of a book on her own; if she stops frequently, that book is too hard, and if she races through without stopping, it’s too easy.
Then the parents learn various ways to ask the child open-ended questions before, during and after reading. When I visited, Roggie helped a boy named La-Kie do a picture walk through a book in the “Fly Guy” series: The fly wreaks havoc in the school cafeteria. Before he read, they went through each page and La-Kie described what he thought was happening and made predictions. (“When words came up, his brain was ready for them,” Roggie explained later. “It’s more about understanding and less of a guessing game.”) Then La-Kie read the book, and then he recapped it, discussing whether his predictions were right.
After watching La-Kie, parents tried it with their own children. Not everyone absorbed it. One dad played with his phone through much of the hour, and another mom helped her child too much — when the child couldn’t sound out a word the mother just did it for her, and Mom didn’t ask her the open-ended questions.
But most parents master the routine quickly. Instead of a summer slide, Wissahickon’s kids in the program this summer gained an average of 3.6 months of reading achievement, as measured by the Developmental Reading Assessment, a widely used test of fluency and comprehension. In Springboard as a whole, students gained an average of 3.4 months. Wissahickon is one of several schools piloting a new program for incoming kindergartners; only 23 percent of the incoming kindergarten students were ready for school at the beginning of the summer; five weeks later, 63 percent were.
One of Springboard’s achievements is to show that with a well-designed program, low-income parents do get involved in their children’s education. Gac-Artigas says that parents average over 90 percent attendance — and public school parents do slightly better than charter school parents.
The common wisdom holds that these families don’t show up to parent-teacher conferences or get involved during the school year. There are several reasons they do get involved with Springboard.
First, it’s the summer. Every parent wants an affordable (in this case, free), safe place for kids to spend time — and since there’s no school bus, parents have to bring them. On Wednesday mornings, like every other morning, parents are already there.
There is also the lure of prizes. Students who meet their goal of advancing three months in reading get a backpack full of books and school supplies at the end. Students who exceed the goal win a tablet, which comes loaded with the Raz Kids app, which has hundreds of books classified by level. Last year the prize was a laptop.
Tayonna won both. “These are great incentives, but from the beginning I stressed to her we’re not doing this to get that out of it,” said Carlton. “She wanted to do better. It so happened she exceeded. Not to judge, but the prizes teach children you only put the extra effort in when you can get something out of it.”
Kim agrees. “In the developmental literature, one important predictor is whether parents embrace an entertainment view of reading — not to get a prize, not to get a reward,” he said. “Strategies that seem sensible in the short term aren’t always the best strategies — like paying parents to show up or paying kids to read books.”
Springboard believes the most important reason parents show up is the home visit — “If you get a home visit, you’re there. If not, no,” said Kelly. At the beginning of the summer, the teacher visits each child (classes are typically 15 kids, much smaller than during the school year). The teacher emphasizes their shared goals for the child, and explains that parents need to attend the Wednesday morning sessions, and that children must read with their parents or alone every night. Parents, teacher and child sign a simple contract.
Why does this work? Kelly said the teacher demonstrates her own commitment before asking families. Gac-Artigas stressed that that the teacher tells parents they will learn a simple, repeatable routine for helping their child to read, a routine they can use no matter what their level of literacy — necessary, because a fifth of adults in Philadelphia are functionally illiterate.
“In our experience, people want to do things they’re good at and avoid things they’re bad at,” he said. “Middle-class parents have enough knowledge to feel they are successful. If you can help parents who haven’t had a good educational experience feel they’re good at providing a better educational experience for their children, they will want to do this more often.”
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”