We Can Beat Illiteracy

The revelation that Jacques Demers, NHL coach extraordinaire, is essentially illiterate brought out the usual chorus of commentators trashing the public schools of Canada. Equally usual, that chorus is more interested in politics than literacy, for the most significant literacy problems in Canada are to be found in Canadians over 34 and a large proportion of the illiterate or marginally-literate in that group never, or scarcely, went to a Canadian public school.

It is a depressing fact, however, that, according to Montigny and Jones in an article in Perspectives, 25 percent of Canadians aged 16 to 34 are either low or lacking in literacy skills. Taken by itself, this is an unacceptably high number for a society like ours, especially, as the authors note, that there is a high correlation between a person's level of formal education and his level of literacy and a similar correlation between his literacy and his economic success.

Jacques Demers is a remarkable exception to a rather firm rule.

We could reduce that 25 percent significantly if we went about it right. We could start by demanding that schools that enroll students between Grades 7 and 9 be required to throw as many resources as necessary at the students with reading problems. That would certainly cost some money, and would certainly affect the schools' mandates, but if all students entered the senior secondaries at least functionally literate, the societal rewards would be enormous. Such a mandate would certainly do more, in the long run, to influence illiteracy rates in BC than all the government's present literacy initiatives put together.

Phoenix reading

I know this goal is attainable because of an experience I had in the early 1990s, when I was an English teacher in a middle school.

Phoenix had been a junior-senior high in downtown Campbell River, and was, when I joined the staff, newly configured as a grade 7 to 9 middle school. As in any other institution experiencing a major upheaval, there were adjustment pains, which the staff was determined to deal with as quickly as possible. It seemed to many of us that the significant number of students who apparently couldn't, or perhaps wouldn't, read was a fundamental issue and so, led by our principal, Kieran O'Neill, we decided to do something about it.

I'd been involved in this kind of initiative before, when there had been considerable "sturm und drang" with negligible results, so I wasn't particularly optimistic. This, however, turned out to be one of those relatively rare cases in education when the stars aligned. The district provided appropriate funding. Peg Klesner, the expert who was imported to assist us, was an inspired choice; an expert who actually provided workable ideas. Our learning assistance teacher, Richard Hamilton, turned out to be a bulldog of implementation. The staff really wanted success, and, therefore, worked hard to make the program succeed.

The school implemented several strategies, of which the most obviously effective was a program targeted specifically at the students with the most serious problems with reading.

Rasping

We started by giving the student body a standardized reading test, thus identifying the students we wanted to concentrate on. These were then grouped by grade and reading level, eight to ten per group. A schedule was drawn up for classes in a process called "repeat reading" of half to three-quarters of an hour each. These ran every day for a minimum of thirty days. The students were pulled out of their other classes to attend and were tested both before and after the program. Statistics were kept. We called the program "Reading: Accelerated Skills Program", or RASP.

Not surprisingly, many students weren't keen to participate. However, non-participation was not an option. Equally unsurprisingly, almost all of them made real, observable improvement in their reading skills and eventually left the school much better readers than they had entered it. For the time RASP operated, very few students left Phoenix unable to read at or near grade-level.

So we know it can be done. We also know the costs of illiteracy. Then why is there not a RASP program in every junior high and middle school in BC?

Actually, there are some very good reasons.

The most obvious one is staffing. At the time Phoenix embarked on this program, we were able to dedicate a full-time teacher to its implementation. That teacher worked intensively with very small student groups. Nowadays, middle schools tend to have the poorest staffing ratios in the secondary system and particularly in the core subjects. There's no way most of them could free up even one full time equivalent, not without making a very bad situation even worse for their English, math, and social studies colleagues. They could, of course, dedicate the learning assistance teacher to the task, but that would be detrimental not only the school's weakest students, but also to the teachers of most of the courses in which such students were registered.

Who decides?

Another good reason is school mandate. Anyone not intimately familiar with public schools in our time can be excused for not understanding the pressures they, their administrators and their staffs are under. Suffice it to say that schools do not get to decide what's important and what isn't for individual students, except within very limited parameters. Yet, that's what is required: the decision has to be made that literacy is of such fundamental importance that almost everything else that happens academically to students is secondary.

As, of course, it is.

Thinking this way about student illiteracy also requires a shift in thinking about those students handicapped by their lack of reading skills. At present, we typically teach students how to read in the elementary grades and then, if they haven't yet mastered reading at an appropriate level in the secondary grades, we usually provide some way around the problem. We say such students have an "alternate learning style", and require their subject teachers to modify their programs and expectations to recognize this fact. In short, we help them to cope with the fact that they cannot read.

Although there are positives to this approach, in that it retains students within the system, it doesn't solve the underlying problem. We still have to do everything we can to teach such students to read. If they continue to "cope", they'll be unlikely to finish school. Their chances of economic success will be diminished. They'll inevitably become a part of our shameful illiteracy statistic.

Jacques Demers "coped" very well, and nobody thinks this is OK.

Justus Havelaar is a newly-retired English teacher who lives in Campbell River and finally has some time to write.