Excerpted from Chapter Seven of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 2006, 6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the print edition see Chapter Seven question list.

Chapter 7: The Print Climate in the Home,
   School, and Library—continued

Three case histories of print climate and scores: California, Boston, and DC

Just as climate affects sports scores, the same connection can be made between climate and reading scores. The last two decades of research by respected researchers like Neuman,³ Duke,⁴ Krashen,⁵ McQuillan,⁶ Allington,⁷ and Lance⁸ unmistakably connect access to print with high reading scores and, conversely, lack of access with lower scores. It's a shame the education experts haven't figured this out yet, even when one of the best researchers (Neuman) was an assistant secretary of education in Washington. Instead, they blame the teachers, curriculum, or students for the low scores, which is like the governor of Maine complaining his state hasn't had a horse in the Kentucky Derby since God knows when.

CALIFORNIA:

The most dramatic example of the impact of the print climate on entire school districts is the one involving three California communities, twenty and forty miles apart on the map but worlds apart in other ways. Krashen and colleagues at USC did a print inventory of homes, classrooms, and libraries in the three communities—Beverly Hills, Watts, and Compton.⁹ In Beverly Hills, high scores send 93 percent of its high school students to college, while relatively few go to college from Watts and Compton. In 1999, Compton’s state-appointed administrator reported that barely one in ten students was performing at grade level. One look at the chart below clearly shows the print desert surrounding urban children, versus the print "rain forest" surrounding others.

Krashen’s evidence¹⁰ (chart right) was presented to a state commission revising California’s language-arts curriculum in the 1990's after the state tied Louisiana for last in the nation in reading. With the state holding one of the nation’s largest child-poverty populations, and lowest support for school and public libraries, California politicians responded with $195 million for more phonics instruction.¹¹ How effective has that been? Last in the nation in 1996, even with the increased phonics funding the state's students still ranked at the bottom by 2004.¹² Not that the legislature was completely deaf to the school library crisis: In the late 1990's, they committed to an annual $28 per pupil expenditure for libraries, but by 2005 that had shriveled to less than one dollar pupil.¹³

All of this provoked the following response from a Los Angeles Times writer:

“The state’s long neglect of school libraries is a scandal. California is dead last among the states in the ratio of credentialed librarians to students; it has one librarian for every 5,036 students, more than five times worse than the national average of 1 to 953. Even the state’s adult prison system does better, with one librarian to 4,283 inmates.”¹⁴

                         Footnote: 15

BOSTON VS. THE SUBURBS:

Since school is supposed to make up for any home deficits, one would expect at-risk children to meet good classroom libraries—or some semblance of no child left without a good library. Instead, Nell Duke found the same deficits of home when she studied 20 first-grade classrooms in Massachusetts for a year, ten suburban and ten urban. Despite having teachers with an average 18 years experience, the urban students were more restricted in how often they could use the classroom library, the library selections were older and of a poorer grade, their class reading time was spent on less complex text , they spent more time copying and taking dictation, their teachers read to them less often and from simpler texts, the books-per-pupil ratio was half that of the high SES classrooms.¹⁵ Additionally, seven of the advantaged classes were read to from chapter books while only two of the low SES classes heard chapter books.

WASHINGTON, DC:

The inequities worsen as you move higher in the grades. Let's test that thesis in the epicenter of America's literacy efforts—Washington, D.C., boasting more literacy organizations per square mile than any other place in America (Google "literacy" + "Washington, DC" for a sampling). Despite all those government literacy offices, D.C. public schools' reading scores rank at the bottom with non-states Guam and the Virgin Islands. In poverty, the District of Columbia's citizens again rank at or near the bottom. With that in mind, let's drop by the John Philip Sousa Middle School in D.C.

In 1950, John Philip Sousa Middle School was one of the five all-white schools denying entrance to African-American students in what become a single case before the Supreme Court called Brown vs. Board of Education. Because of that, Sousa is listed as a National Historic Landmark.

Historic it may be, but 50 years later it's not a school most people, white or black, would want their children to attend. What was an all-white state-of-the-art junior high in 1950 is now 99 percent black, with students drawn from some of the poorest homes in Washington, D.C., and holding some of the lowest scores in the nation. In recent years teachers and students complained about the 30- and 40-year-old books in the library but the book gripes finally ceased. By the time the nation was observing the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the library was closed, used only when a sewage pipe leaked into a math class.¹⁶

NEXT: Marketing library books like those mega-book stores

Chapter Seven — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   Footnotes