Poverty and Literacy

Nathalis Wamba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

There is a mutual dependence between poverty and academic achievement, creative pedagogies for low-income pupils, school models that 'beat the odds', and the resiliency of low-income families dedicated to the academic success of their children. This book examines the connection between poverty and literacy, looking at the potential roles and responsibilities of teachers, school administrators, researchers, and policymakers in closing the achievement gap and in reducing the effects of poverty on the literacy skill development of low-income children. There are numerous suggestions about how to improve schools so that they respond to the needs of low-income children; some argue for school reform, while others advocate social reform, and yet others suggest combining both educational reform and social reform.

Without a strong foundation in literacy, children are all too often denied access to a rich and diverse curriculum. Reading and writing are passports to achievement in many other curricular areas, and literacy education plays an important role in moving people out of poverty toward greater self-sufficiency post-graduation. Schools and home environments share responsibility for literacy skill development; in school, literacy equals the acquisition of reading and writing skills, but it is also a social practice key to social mobility. The achievement gap between low-income, middle-class, and upper middle-class students illustrates the power of socioeconomic factors outside school.

This book was originally published as two special issues of Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties.

Introduction

Nathalis G. Wamba

Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing, New York, USA

These articles collectively investigate the mutual dependence between poverty and academic achievement, creative pedagogies for low-income pupils, school models that “beat the odds,” and the resiliency of low-income families dedicated to the academic success of their children. Each article also explores potential roles and responsibilities of teachers, school administrators, researchers, and policymakers in closing the achievement gap and in reducing the effects of poverty on the literacy skill development of low-income children.

Opinions abound about how to improve schools so that they respond to the needs of low-income children. There are those who argue for school reform, and others advocate social reform. Yet another group seeks to combine both educational reform and social reform. Regardless of where one falls on the continuum in relation to school reform, community reform, or both combined, comprehensive literacy education amounts to an essential component of any strategy focused on improving schools and closing the achievement gap. Without a strong foundation in literacy, children are all too often denied access to a rich and diverse curriculum. Reading and writing are passports to achievement in many other curricular areas (Kellett & Dar, 2007; Machin & McNally, 2006). Lastly, literacy education plays an important role in moving people out of poverty toward greater self-sufficiency post graduation.

Schools and home environments share responsibility for literacy skill development. In school, literacy equals the acquisition of reading and writing skills, but it is also a social practice key to social mobility (Gee, 1991). At home children develop substantial literacy skills and unique competencies through interactions with their siblings and families and through their consumption of popular culture (e.g., music, films, theater, television). Drawing upon the work of Vygotsky (1962, 1978), one can argue that effective literacy educators need to build upon (and respect) the background experiences and cultural practices of their students, especially when attempting to teach them unfamiliar academic skills and concepts.

Reading is the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind legislation, a fundamental skill upon which formal education and access to content knowledge depend. A child who cannot read well will likely fail in school (American Federation of Teachers, 1999). If literacy skill development provides one way out of poverty, then reading and writing proficiency amounts to critical capital for children from low-income families. Longitudinal reading research demonstrates that children who do not learn to read early in their school careers invariably continue to be poor readers (Torgeson, 2000). In addition, poor readers tend to become less responsive to intervention as they grow older and their difficulties increase (Lane, Gresham, & O’Shaughnessy, 2002; Torgeson, 2000).

Ethnographic research has shed light on a wide range of culturally specific literacy practices among different communities. This research suggests that literacy involves more than just encoding and decoding symbols (Bowman, 2002; Delgado-Gaitan, 1990; Heath, 1983; Valdes, 1996). When schools integrate the cultural capital of middle-and upper middle-class children and ignore the cultural capital of other children, they ultimately end up excluding children from low-income families, preventing these children from acquiring important tools and lifelong skills that can close the achievement gap and lift them out of poverty.

From the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) to the No Child Left Behind legislation, the U.S. public education system has gone through a series of school reforms that can be best summed up in three words: standards, accountability, and testing. Strategies to improve schools include, but are not limited to, developing new curricula and standards, providing teacher training, and fostering a better use of technology. However, the reality that factors outside school heavily constrain school reform does not receive the attention it deserves.

Educational reformers assume that if teachers know how to teach and the schools adequately support this task, children will learn irrespective of their socioeconomic status (Rothstein, 2004), a mindset that ignores the factors beyond the classroom that affect learning. Efforts focused solely on classrooms and schools could well be reversed by what takes place outside the school setting. In other words, the social, political, and economic environments in which schools exist can enable or disable school reform efforts (Berliner, 2005).

Socioeconomic factors impact academic success (see Duncan & Magnuson, 2005; Hoff, 2003; Jencks & Philips, 1998). These factors include, but are not limited to, housing, health care, the quality and accessibility of preschool, environmental stress, employment situation, and nutrition. In 2006, a representative sample of between 3,500 and 50,000 15-year-old students in 58 countries, some of them members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), took the Program for International Students Assessment test in each country. This test focuses on the key subject areas of reading, mathematics, and science. In reading, the United States ranked 15th out of the 29 OECD countries in reading literacy, with its score of 495 coming in near the OECD average of 500 (Lemke et al., 2005). In math and science, the United States ranked 25th and 21st, respectively. Cavanagh (2007) explained that not only did many industrialized countries outperform the United States, but also that wealth, poverty, or family background mediated the academic performance of the American students to a greater extent than it did the performance of these students’ peers in other higher scoring nations.

The achievement gap between low-income, middle-class, and upper middle-class students illustrates the power of socioeconomic factors outside school. Critics of this argument point to schools that beat the odds such that low-income youths have overcome barriers to their academic success. Islands of success exist, but little progress has been made to generalize these successes or to sustain them over time.

In “Children and Adolescents From Poverty and Reading Development: A Research Review,” Alpana Bhattacharya explores creative pedagogies and teacher training initiatives that help teachers understand and address the effects of poverty on student achievement. This article begins with a review of literature pertinent to the decoding and reading comprehension performance of struggling readers at the secondary level, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. The implications of poverty for the literacy instruction of diverse groups of students at the secondary level and in secondary content areas are also explored. Lastly, Bhattacharya describes effective instructional approaches for promoting decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills in secondary students who are at risk for school failure based on their low-income background.

Next, in “Race, Class, and Schooling: Multicultural Families Doing the Hard Work of Home Literacy in America’s Inner City,” Guofang Li draws on a larger ethnographic study to examine the literacy and cultural practices of everyday life as lived by three families of low socioeconomic status from three different racial and ethnic groups (Sudanese, Vietnamese, and White Euro-American). Li explores the complexity of reading and writing practices within each family as family members make sense of their daily relations in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender; as well as the production of such relations across cultural groups and within the contexts of the low-income neighborhoods and schools and the larger sociopolitical and socioeconomic formation.

Li suggests that urban education must be understood in relation to both an individual’s cultural and familial milieu and the interactive context between the individual and the most powerful cultural sites, such as schools. In the current climate, minority school failure is often blamed on the deficits of disadvantaged families (and their children) and on their parenting practices that induce failure. Li, however, argues that inner city working-or under-class families are often highly literate, committed to their children’s success, and capable of concerted cultivation. Yet despite ample commitment, persistence, and cultural capital, “the sticky web of institutional discourses” and the contradictions both within and between home and school cultural sites too often relegates students to failure and disadvantage.

An article by Margary Butzer, Edward Fergus, and Pedro Noguera titled “Responding to the Needs of the Whole Child: A Case Study of a High-Performing Elementary School for Immigrant Children” analyzes the strategies used by a highly successful elementary school that serves low-income immigrant children. These authors describe how the approach adopted in this high-performing elementary school enabled teachers and this school community to mitigate some of the effects of poverty. This case study helps document (a) potential instructional strategies, particularly those related to English language learners, that may be used to meet the academic needs of students; and (b) the social support system that might be accessed to provide social support systems for students and their families.

Kiersten Greene and Jean Anyon examine the ways in which poverty potentially limits educational achievement in “Urban School Reform, Family Support, and Student Achievement.” Their article begins with an alarming description of the level of underachievement of low-income urban students in reading and math. These authors argue that although educational reforms fill classrooms with more books and supplies, provide teachers with professional development, and reduce class sizes, these changes alone may not be sufficient in terms of improving the academic achievement of low-income urban students. Greene and Anyon present research to build a case for providing increased financial and social supports to low-income urban families. These supports, they argue, are correlated with significant increases in reading and math achievement and may be part of the foundation for raising the educational achievement of poor students nationwide.

Lastly, in “The Short Supply of Saints: Limits on Replication of Models that ‘Beat the Odds,”’ Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobsen examine the characteristics of teachers in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP is a chain of schools that are often cited as exemplar charter schools that “beat the odds.” According to Wilder and Jacobsen, KIPP students’ test scores are typically higher after just a few years compared to the scores of other Black and Hispanic urban students in regular public schools. Although previous research has examined the representativeness of students who attend KIPP schools, less attention has been paid to the teachers who are committed to doing “whatever it takes for students to learn.” These authors argue that such models cannot practically be replicated on a large scale because few teachers are willing and/or able to make the time and financial commitment required of teachers in these model schools. They suggest that experts instead focus on building communities that beat the odds through a wide array of social and economic reforms that support children’s health and social development.

References

American Federation of Teachers. (1999). Taking responsibility for ending social promotion: A guide for educators and state and local leaders. Washington, DC: Author.

Berliner, D. C. (2005, August 2). Our impoverished view of educational reform. TCRecord. Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=1206

Bowman, B. (2002). Love to read: An introduction. In B. Bowman (Ed.), Love to read: Essays in developing and enhancing early literacy skills of African American children (pp. vii–ix). Washington, DC: National Black Child Development Institute.

Cavanagh, S. (2007, December 12). Poverty’s effect on U.S. scores greater than for other nations. Education Week, 27(15), 1, 13.

Delgado-Gaitan, C. (1990). Literacy for empowerment: The role of parents in children’s education. New York, NY: Falmer.

Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. A. (2005). Can family socioeconomic resources account for racial and ethnic score gap? The Future of Children, 15(1), 35–54.

Gee, J. P. (1991). Socio-cultural approaches to literacy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 12, 31–48.

Heath, B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74, 1368–1378.

Jencks, C., & Phillips, M. (1998). The black and white test score gap: An introduction. In C. Jencks & M. Phillips (Eds.), The black and white test score gap (pp. 1–51). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Kellett, M., & Dar, A. (2007). Children researching links between poverty and literacy. York, England: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Lane, K. K., Gresham, F. M., & O’Shaughnessy, T. E. (2002). Intervention for children with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Lemke, M., Sen, A., Pahlke, E., Partelow, L., Miller, D., Williams, T., … Jocelyn, L. (2005). International outcomes of learning in mathematics literacy and problem solving: PISA 2003 results from the U.S. perspective. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

Machin, S., & McNally, S. (2006). Education and child poverty. A literature review. York, England: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

National Commision on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A nation at risk: The imperative of educational reform. A report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools: Using social, economic and educational reform to close the black-white achievement gap. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

Torgeson, J. (2000). Individual differences in response to early intervention in reading: The lingering problem of treatment resistance. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 15, 55–64.

Valdes, G. (1996). Con respecto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological process. (M. Cole, V. John-Streiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Children and Adolescents From Poverty and Reading Development: A Research Review

Alpana Bhattacharya

Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing, New York, USA

This article reviews the relationship between poverty and reading achievement in America’s schools. It then discusses how to advance the reading proficiencies of students from economically impoverished homes. It gives particular emphasis to school–home partnerships and sociocultural literacy practices.

In her article “High-Poverty Schools That Beat the Odds,” Cunningham (2006) stated that “poverty is the largest correlate of reading achievement” and “schools with large numbers of poor children seldom achieve their goals at the end-of-grade literacy tests” (p. 382). Similarly, Neuman (2006) reported that children from low-income families score on average 60% below children from higher income families, and once the children from poverty fall behind, they tend to stay behind.

Although explanations for this achievement gap are abounding, there are two primary and contrasting schools of thought. One view argues that children from poor families receive no or few valuable literacy experiences at home. The other view argues that children from poor homes receive varied literacy experiences from print-embedded activities, such as watching a character on television read a book, reading names from a comic book, and reading the ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Children and Adolescents From Poverty and Reading Development: A Research Review
• 3. Race, Class, and Schooling: Multicultural Families Doing the Hard Work of Home Literacy in America’s Inner City
• 4. Responding to the Needs of the Whole Child: A Case Study of a High-Performing Elementary School for Immigrant Children
• 5. Urban School Reform, Family Support, and Student Achievement
• 6. The Short Supply of Saints: Limits on Replication of Models That “Beat the Odds”
• Index