Play & Literacy: Avoiding the Emerging Class-Based Divide

 

When the latest scores of our country’s national reading test arrived this spring, they were as depressing as usual: Two-thirds of American fourth-graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, cannot read at grade level. Among Hispanic and African American children, it’s even higher.

 

Considering the consequences of growing up as a struggling reader, you might assume that the solution is to help children build better reading skills as soon as possible. Research shows that the earlier specialists intervene, the more likely children will surmount reading difficulties. Surely, early literacy instruction is a good solution. What could be controversial about that?

 

Plenty. Debates over when to teach children to read — and how to do it — are now afire around the country. As reading skills are taught at younger ages, child-development experts increasingly worry about the new look and feel of classrooms for 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. They see children memorizing flashcards and coloring in worksheets. They watch with trepidation as school districts around the country adapt curricula to introduce letters and their sounds to children as early as possible.

 

The parenting blogosphere is filled with mothers who worry over whether to enroll their children in schools that are replacing playtime with lessons on basic literacy skills. Parents of young 5-year-olds — particularly those with boys — agonize over whether to wait an extra year before sending their children to kindergarten classrooms that seem too academic for their boisterous kids. In a piece for The New York Times Magazine last year, cultural critic and mother Peggy Orenstein captured the angst as she wrote about her struggle to find a kindergarten for her daughter that didn’t assign homework. As she put it, “How did 5 become the new 7, anyway?”

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Timothy Shanahan, a literacy researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has co-authored reports on the need for explicit instruction on basic skills, recently argued on his blog that “good teaching includes both didactic lessons and opportunities to practice and play.” Child-development experts who plead for more child-centered classrooms are not at all averse to putting early-literacy skills front and center within the games and playtime that are essential to early childhood. Educators shouldn’t have to choose between teaching literacy or encouraging play, says Patricia Cooper, an assistant professor of education at New York University. To her mind, it’s a “false dichotomy.”

 

But outside of academe — on playgrounds and listservs, in superintendents’ offices and teacher lounges — -the dichotomy feels all too real. Well-intentioned school leaders want to ensure that poor, minority children get what they need to improve their reading scores and have been told that helping such students requires direct and explicit teaching of literacy skills. And so a new class-based divide is emerging over how children are taught to read. At one extreme are children in high-poverty schools with teachers who have been asked to drill them on letters, words, and sounds that they were never really exposed to before arriving at school. On the other end are middle-class children whose teachers read them elaborate stories and encourage playful re — enactments and whose parents have been pointing out letters and reading them books since the year they were born. It’s a chasm that shows no sign of narrowing. How do we get out of it?

 

–> See the July/August issue of The American Prospect for the full article.