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Hello. I’m Lori Connors-Tadros, the project director for the Center on
Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes.
We were recently funded by the U.S. Department of Education Office
of Elementary and Secondary Education as one of 22 comprehensive centers.
Our project is designed to support state education agency staff and
their partners in enhancing outcomes for children birth to third grade.
We are pleased to provide support to Read Wisconsin, the Department of
Public Instruction’s reading resource portal and community of practice.
On April 15th and 16th, they will be launching the Literacy UnConference,
a virtual website with information, research, and resources designed to
support effective practice of kindergarten through third grade literacy leaders,
principals, and family members.
I am pleased to introduce Dr. Susan B. Neuman,
professor in educational studies at the University of Michigan
specializing in early literacy development.
She was formerly the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary
Education and worked to establish the Early Reading First program and the
Early Childhood Professional Development Education program.
At Michigan, Susan has directed the Center for the Improvement of
Early Reading Achievement and currently directs the research program
on Ready to Learn.
Today she will present research and work on the literacy achievement
of children living in poverty.
I now present Susan Neuman.
Thank you so much, Susan, for joining us today.
- It is delightful to join, and I thank you so much, Lori, for the invitation.
Today I’d like to talk about an issue of great importance in our country,
focusing on the instructional practices that support literacy development of
children living in poverty.
I think we are all familiar with the problem.
We’ve heard a great deal of information from the press, from our peers in schools.
We know that many of our children are not thriving in schools today
as much as we’d like.
And we also know, and this is the tragic element, is that these issues
are tied not to their native ability, but to their environment --
the children’s environment.
And so one of the things that I want to talk today about is how we can
improve the environment to ensure that all of our children are successful
in learning to read.
There are some predictable risk factors that have shown again and again
in our studies to impact children’s achievement.
We know, for example, that children who come from poor or marginalized
populations are likely to come to school lacking the vocabulary and some of the
background knowledge that they will need in order to begin to learn how
to read and learn other skills as well.
We also know that children of families who speak a language other than
English will often come to school not having some of the linguistic skills that
will enable them to quickly learn English.
They'll have many other skills, and they'll have skills in their native
language, but this is often difficult to translate into early instruction in our
curriculum and in schools.
And we know also that another risk factor is mother’s education,
that parents who have less than a college degree are often families
who do not have some of the -- who have not been provided with the
opportunities so that children could come to school ready to learn and
ready to be successful.
And the tragic element, as I mentioned, is this is very predictable.
We can see based on the National Assessment of Educational Research --
Educational Progress, sometimes called our national report card, that children
who are below basic levels of proficiency in our schools are likely to be poor and
from minority and poor populations.
And so, in some respects, you can look at this graph,
and you can say there is good news.
And the good news is that we know it’s environment, and it’s some of the
environmental elements that account for these differences
and not children’s native ability.
All of our children are highly capable of learning.
It’s the environment that doesn't work to their benefit early on.
And this early environment will impact them in very strategic ways that
affect their achievement.
The most critical element is poverty.
And we know increasing amount about the effect of poverty.
We know, for example, that sustained poverty -- poverty over time --
has a very detrimental effect on children’s learning.
We also know that poverty early in life -- children who are infants and who are
in poverty when many of the nutritional factors are so
critically important, that will have a great impact than intermittent
poverty over time.
We also know that, again, those children who have had sustained poverty
over time, who live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods, will often have
difficulty in learning to read.
So we might ask, why is that the case?
We know, obviously, that poverty is a horrible thing, but what and
how does it affect children’s achievement?
This is what some of our research has really been designed to look at.
And it’s important to understand poverty’s effects, because it’s then
we can try to improve our interventions to directly impact it.
The first thing we know is that children who come from poverty circumstances
often have limited materials and resources.
So we might say to a family, read to your children.
Read to your children right away.
But sometimes these families do not have anything to read to their children.
There are no books in their immediate environment.
There are no libraries that are open late at night because it’s unsafe.
They are not able, based on limited resources, to buy a book or buy print.
And so these children who have not been exposed to print early on,
this will have a long-term effect on their ability to recognize environmental
print and begin to map print and its reference in oral language.
We also know that poverty is very harsh and *** individuals.
It creates depression.
Many of us know that, if you feel that you are in jeopardy of going hungry
or may not be able to get groceries for your family, or you may not be able to,
you know, pay for the light bill, you know how difficult that is and how
life has such challenges from day to day.
There is a great deal of research that has shown parents’ stress and
parent depression due to the issue of poverty.
And this often spills over into their interactions with their children
and their interactions and involvement in school.
As many of you are aware of, some of our families have
two and three jobs just to make it every month.
Many of these jobs are scheduled at very odd times, and so therefore,
they may miss critical times where they have meals with their children.
Sometimes these environmental factors have negative effects on their
interactions and involvement with their children.
They may be short-tempered with their kids.
They may limit their oral language development.
They may so “no” perhaps more than they'd like to.
So we know that the interaction and involvement is likely to be less
if you’re in poverty circumstances than for those who are
middle-class and above.
The third effect of poverty affects something that is less familiar to many
people, and that -- this is that it affects their social and information capital.
And social and information capital are relatively new terms, so I’d like to just
take a moment to talk about these a little bit more.
Social capital is your ability to advocate for your child.
Many of us do it. We do it very informally, but we do it nonetheless.
Many of us have worked very hard to get our own children to have the
best teachers, to find out the scuttlebutt at our schools to find who our child
would do best with and who to kind of stay away from.
We have social capital, and we know how to work the system.
And so many of us, if our kids had difficulty or whatever, we have found
a way, a strategy, to go around the system to get the
best education for our children.
So that is a form of social capital.
We connect, we have a rich network, and we use that network all the time
to benefit our children.
It’s a natural.
But poor families don't have that sense of self-efficacy.
They don't feel that they have social capital.
If someone tells them no, they actually believe it.
They will be told that this is their teacher, and regardless of whether
that teacher works to the benefit of their child, they accept it.
They don't know how the bureaucracy works.
When they are given a bureaucracy, they give up.
And so one of the things that we know is, in our work with parents,
we must give them more social capital.
We must give them strategies to work the system -- informal techniques
to help them help their child.
The second term is information capital.
And this is also very important and something that I've developed and
focused on in my recent work.
Information capital deals with the amount of information
in our society today.
We live in a knowledge economy where knowledge is privilege.
It’s almost like the currency of our economy today.
People who know a lot get better jobs.
People who know a lot get into creative endeavors and
venture capitalists -- you've heard of that term.
And what we know, then, is that the information requirements for our
children are getting tougher and tougher.
But information capital is not just having great knowledge and
background knowledge and lots of facts or -- at your fingertips.
Information capital is an understanding of how to problem-solve and reason.
It’s higher-order thinking.
It allows us, in the day-to-day, to take what we know and apply it in
new and creative ways.
Information capital enables us to think outside the box and reason.
And that is what is creating new knowledge in our knowledge economy.
And this is something we have to strive for, especially in the early years.
It is not enough for children to just learn how to read and write.
What they have to do is they have to learn how to read and write in order
to gain information and information capital, which will enable them to
learn even more.
So we did a study that we report in our new book called
“Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance.”
And I show you this graph only to highlight the enormous differences
between children who live in poverty and children who live in greater affluence.
We were in two communities.
One, which is like a little middle-class neighborhood.
It’s a beautiful little area in a big city -- Philadelphia.
And basically, what we tried to do is, we said, what were the resources
that children would likely have in this little neighborhood that they lived in.
And what we did is we walked every block, and we looked at
every street sign, and we gauged every place where we could possibly
find a book to read to our children.
And we found in this little community of -- which houses about 1,200 children,
we found 16,453 reading resources for these children.
In other words, a parent could read to their children virtually every day,
a different book, throughout their schooling, and still have more to read.
We found 11 places to buy books, and we found when we went,
we tried to -- in an interesting experiment, we went into the
local library in this community, and we just watched as children
entered the preschool area and observed the kinds of
activities we would see.
And what we found in that setting is that children would
come to the library weekly.
They would often come with their adults -- parents or nannies
or grandparents.
And of that time they were in the library, 47 minutes out of 60 minutes,
they were read to.
In other words, there was virtually very little time that that child would
just go into the preschool area and play on his or her own.
And we counted the number of words over that period of time, just to give
you an estimate of how often that child was read to -- the amount of exposure
to printed words.
And we found that there was approximately 2,435 words read or
spoken to the child.
We did the same experiment in our concentrated neighborhood of poverty.
And we found that there were only 358 reading resources for these
children -- for 7,000 children.
That meant approximately there were 13 -- maybe 13 titles for
every child over time.
We could only find four places to buy a book.
And unfortunately, most of those books were coloring books.
In other words, there wasn't even any print in those books.
We also then did the same experiment.
We went to the little library.
We watched the children as they came into that library.
And the tragedy was, we found the same number of children
coming to the library.
In other words, they wanted to experience the joys of being read to.
Yet, during that time period, there were no adults to
read to their children -- none.
And so what we would often see is, children would go to the library,
they'd pick up a book, they'd look for someone to read
to them, they'd put it down.
They would pick up another book, flip through the book, put it down.
And what we found is there were no words read to that child over time.
To give you an estimate, we found that the parents of affluence were
reading 14 times the number of words in print that the child in poverty
would never get.
So when talk about these differences, we’re talking about
extraordinary differences, not little differences at all.
This is only exacerbated -- we’re going to talk a little bit more about this --
by the Hart and Risley study that found that there was a
35 million-word catastrophe between children of poverty and
children of privilege.
Those kids, at the end of age three, from a middle- and upper-middle-class
family, were likely to be exposed to many different words -- 45 million words
over time, compared to the child of poverty, where they would only
hear 15 million words.
So what this means, and what this should say to us is we have a
tremendous challenge before us.
This is not a little challenge.
This is a huge challenge.
And so what we know is, given the high predictability of poverty and achievement,
we’ve got to do things differently than we have ever done before.
So what do we do?
How do we nurture children’s development?
And how do we begin to change the odds for those children who are
living in poverty compared to other middle-class children?
I think one of the things we recognize is that literacy starts early.
And we know that literacy is not just about reading.
That very often children yearn to write, even before they yearn to read.
And very often, those early signs are the child’s yearning to communicate
with adults and with each other.
And so we have to provide very, very rich early opportunities, right from the
very beginning, to ensure that our children are getting an understanding
of the functions of literacy early on.
One of the things that you'll see in this picture is we even start very early on
to teach children about the library habit so that they get used to the idea
that you can take books out, and the library is the gift that always
keeps on giving to our children.
We know that, in our early programs, there are five essentials.
And I want to go through these just briefly, but they're very, very important.
The first, of course, is creating a language-rich environment.
And we may all assume that we have language-rich environments already in
our classrooms, but we have found in our research that it’s not intensive enough.
I want all of the teachers to begin to think of what unusual and rich words
that they can teach their children every day.
So for example, when we go into our settings, we find that children
just love to learn very complex words.
We taught them just recently the word “camouflage” because we’re teaching
a great deal about science.
And we found that, going into the classroom,
they're likely to mimic what we say.
So they show me a new costume, and they'll say, “I’m in camouflage.”
They're very proud of the new language they're learning.
So we know that they need these very sophisticated words, these
content-rich words, and that we should be deliberately teaching words
that are above and beyond their current colloquial language every single day.
We need to think more deliberately, again, about the language
we use with children.
And just because they live in a high-poverty setting,
that’s not a reason to dumb down our language.
We need to increase the quality of our language evermore because it
becomes an orienting effort to have them hear those words.
The second thing we need is songs, rhymes, and wordplay.
Phonics and phonemic awareness are extraordinarily important
in these early years.
And the way in which children learn them, very often, is through
song and rhyme and playing with the idea of words.
We find this so much more effective than worksheets.
When children have songs, it creates a mnemonic device for them to
remember these words.
So for example, “Conjunction Junction,” that old song that I heard Bill Cosby
sing many, many years ago, these are still songs in my background
that I can sing on my own, and I remember conjunctions
because of that song.
The third thing we know is that read-alouds are very important,
that they often teach words, again, and concepts, that are beyond children’s
current expectations and knowledge.
And one of the things that’s very important for us to do is teach using
information books very, very early on, that children love narratives, but they
also want to master their worlds.
They want to become an expert in sports, in -- you know, all sorts
of areas -- cars, all about oceanography and wonderful things like that.
So information books give children those highly diverse vocabulary words
that they will need in order to be very successful.
Of course, the Common Core is going in that direction and makes a
big play for knowledge through text.
We know also that children make things their own through play.
And just because kids are going kindergarten through grade three,
that doesn't mean that play ends.
In fact, children often learn most in a playful environment where they feel
they can own ideas and they can play with an idea.
In fact, even in my research team, when I say, “Let’s play,”
what that often means is, let's think beyond -- you know, outside the box.
Let’s be creative in our thinking.
Children need that playtime as well.
And finally, developmental writing, which is understanding, inventive
writing but also understanding how those inventions can help us
tailor our instruction better so that children learn our phonics and
phonemic awareness really, really well.
And of course, here is the graph by Hart/Risley.
I’m just highlighting this to you one more time because it’s extraordinary.
What they found is, by the end of age three, the vocabulary of the
welfare child -- of the welfare parent was at the same level as the -- as the
child from the professional family.
That we would need 41 hours of extra intervention per week
in order to begin to close this gap.
So again, it’s not to discourage you.
It’s to encourage you.
But to say that we need more intensive interventions to begin to
recognize how extraordinary these differences are in the beginning and
to work to making sure that they begin to close the gap.
One of the things I think is a good let’s-remember kind of evidence is
evidence from our recent impact studies.
There have been a number of studies that have looked at Early Reading First
and its effects over time, Head Start impacts study, which has
looked at the long-term impact of Head Start, and even our
Reading First study that has looked at the impact of some of our interventions.
And what they all find is that there is a fadeout that begins at the beginning
of school, and that continues so that there are no discernable differences on
achievement at the end of grade three.
Now here’s what that says to me.
Number one, it says that perhaps we haven't been intentional enough
in our interventions early on, recognizing that language is the
foundation of early literacy achievement, and we’ve got to hit that harder.
Secondly, I think, what it tells us is that we’ve got to continue that intensity
over time, that we cannot expect that early education is an inoculation,
and that once we do it, we’re done, and we could, you know, say bravo.
What we need to do is we need to continue that intensity over time,
recognizing that these children are likely to need additional help and
instruction throughout their schooling.
I think one of the things we also know is that earlier interventions are better,
that we can prevent reading difficulties if we start very early, recognizing some
of our problems, remediating those problems early on to
prevent further problems.
That, again, speaks to the importance of what all of you are doing and
really getting it right in these early years, knowing that problems will
exacerbate if we don't help.
It also says, as I mentioned before, better targeted interventions.
That very often, we are trying to hit too many areas where the crux of the
matter needs to be targeted more effort in one area.
I’ll talk about this in a moment.
I think we also need to understand and calibrate our intervention to
children’s development.
So for example, in recent years, I have seen efforts to try and help
three-year-olds track print and recognize sight words.
But we need to say to ourselves, is that really the age
where we need to do that?
Or might our activity be better placed in oral language development
when the child is three and four with greater emphasis on tracking print
as they get to kindergarten where they really begin to understand the
understanding of that word and why it’s important to track print.
So I think we need to calibrate our efforts and our interventions
to children’s development.
I wanted to give you a quick example from our WOW curriculum.
Our WOW curriculum is just an example.
It stands for the World of Words.
And this is a little supplementary curriculum that is
12 to 15 minutes per day.
But what it does is it focuses on content-rich words early on.
And it’s an example that I’m highlighting because it focuses on a number of
features that I think is wise to highlight.
First, our WOW intervention has a teacher’s guide.
And we find that a systematic curriculum in the early years is extremely important.
What I mean by a systematic curriculum is, very often, a systematic
curriculum does a number of key things.
It focuses on particular learning objectives.
It also focuses on the amount of practice and review that is essential
if we are helping our children learn and sustain that learning over time.
It also monitors children’s progress all the time.
So what you are asking is, are the children learning?
And if not, what can I do to really ensure that they are doing so?
I wanted to also highlight, if you see this graph in green, in our curriculum,
we try to tell teachers why it’s important to do what we’re encouraging them to do.
So we’re providing professional development along the way,
giving them a conceptual reason for why these instructional practices are critical.
We also know, as I mentioned before, that children need more attention
to information books.
Information is critical, especially for kids who come from poverty situations.
They often are missing -- when they come to school, they're missing
not only the vocabulary and the phonemic awareness, but the
background knowledge, which makes things meaningful to children.
So we engage children in a lot of informational reading, knowing that
they really, really want to become a expert in a domain.
We also engage them in video.
And video is very important for young children, especially those
who come from poverty situations, because they often don't have concepts,
or a conceptual background, for words that we’re trying to teach.
So let’s say we’re talking about a fish tank here in this picture.
Sometimes it's helpful to see it before they can understand the word and
map that word onto a concept.
So video is a vivid way of giving them some of the conceptual underpinnings
of what we’re trying to teach in a fun way.
And finally, we use a lot of picture cards.
And the reason we distinguish picture cards from video is we often
want to highlight things to children in very visual ways that get them to
concentrate on aspects of things we’re trying to teach.
So in this case, in these pictures, we’re trying to teach children about a
katydid and that a katydid is a kind of insect, which is a very important
conceptual understanding for children.
And what we’re saying to them is that a katydid is a kind of insect,
and that an insect has six legs.
And we’re trying to count those six legs with the children so that they have a
better understanding of the concept of insect.
This is just an example from our research over time.
We’ve done work with over 2,000 children now.
And we’ve begun to ask an interesting question, and that’s why
I highlight this graph here.
We’ve asked the question, not only should we begin to ask whether or not
children in our curriculum group -- do they do better than a control group
not having our curriculum?
But we’ve begun to ask the question, do these children begin to move
toward benchmark, or average, norm-based achievement?
And so what we have done in our research is to include two groups of
average and above-average children.
And with our intervention, we’ve asked, can these children begin to move toward
where those children are as they are finishing kindergarten?
And we find, with intensive intervention, yes, they're moving toward the
trajectory of where these children would likely be.
One of the things that we know -- I’m using this word very intentionally --
is that if we are going to succeed, we will need to accelerate their development.
Not just to improve, but accelerate children’s development.
And here are some ways I think we need to do it.
First, I think we need to get children computer resources early on.
Children love -- we have children at age three doing iPad technology --
learning words through iPads.
So we know that books are not just books, but we need books and
computer resources very early on.
Because they really enable children to engage in information and
storybook reading.
We also need, as I mentioned all through this webinar,
a greater focus on language development.
Oral language development is the underpinning -- the crux -- of
language development.
And so if children learn about language elements without having
the foundation of words and knowledge that underpin it,
it will not have any meaning for them.
So we need to engage them in more language activities.
We also need parent involvement program, as I mentioned, that focus
on social capital and engaging them in key interactional patterns
for their children.
So one of the things we have found is doing storybook reading with -- having parents
do storybook reading with their children, but having them work off their
children’s inquiries and questions.
Rather than being didactic, having them learn how to listen to their child,
how to respond to their child’s questions, is imperative in terms of
encouraging children’s language.
And finally, we focus on programs that support a more integrated learning
with science, math, and social studies.
Again, children want to learn about their world, and reading has
so much more meaning when it’s integrated in something children
really want to know a lot about.
We also know that, as I've mentioned again, greater intentionality
to our goals with specified learning objectives.
What I mean by that is, we should have a target of, here are the words
we’re going to teach this week, and we’re going to review them,
and children are going to know them by the end of this week.
We need greater intensity and greater dosage.
So we have to look at our program carefully and say, what do we need
to have greater depth and knowledge in, and perhaps get rid of some of the
programs that aren't providing a good payback in terms of
children’s development.
We also need greater attention to the strategic integration of content
and skills -- as I mentioned, science and math.
And mainly -- and making sure that our literacy learning is always
developmentally appropriate and powerful.
So when we can give children the skills, but then engage them in
playful opportunities to use those skills deliberately, that is
very powerful for instruction.
So finally, I ask the question, why does this matter?
AndI can tell you -- I think all of you know, it matters a lot.
First, we know that there’s a Matthew effect.
If children come to school behind, they are likely to stay behind
throughout their entire school career.
There’s a Matthew effect, where the rich get richer,
and the poor get poorer.
So those children who come in with poor skills are likely to need remediation.
Very often, remediation is taken out of vital science, math, and social studies
time or even physical education time where they need to move their bodies.
And so therefore, the children have exercises that are not
particularly meaningful to the children.
They often, then, don't particularly like reading and don't
engage in it very much.
And as a result, it gets to be a slippery slide downward, where the
children lack motivation for learning and lack a lot of time for reading.
But in my research, and what giving our children a fighting chance
really focuses on, is the importance of this for our knowledge gap.
What we are finding is that reading leads to greater knowledge.
And in a knowledge economy, we know that the more children
who are bound to read will likely be more knowledgeable than
those who do not read a lot.
And so getting children reading, and reading a lot, and reading
interesting literary and information text early on is critically important.
We have got to focus on reading volume early on in children’s lives,
how to select books that are challenging but achievable to the children,
knowing that the more words that children are able to learn,
the better they will be.
So we expect that children learn and know 80,000 words by the
end of high school.
We’ve got to get them reading early on.
Finally, I always end by saying we can't do it alone.
For those of you who are listening, our wonderful partners, our librarians
who do such phenomenal work, our hidden stars in our community,
health care professionals who are helping us day to day, our
wonderful and supportive parents who are caring and teaching our
young children, and our early care-and-education network.
We need all of you because schools can't do it alone.
We need a 360-surround for our children.
Knowing that we love and care for our children who live in
poverty circumstances, we are committed to their achievement.
And we are all working together to make sure that we
give them a fighting chance.
Thank you so much for your efforts today, and keep up the fight.
[ Silence ]