Read-Aloud Handbook-chpt 7, pg 1

This is an excerpt 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 list.

Twenty-two years ago, in the midst of a great political campaign, one candidate painted America as a "shining city on a hill." And he was right. And then the opposition speaker declared that America was really "a tale of two cities." And he was right, too. It depended on your vantage point.¹

And the same arguments can be made about American books. There are places in America where they have so many books, in a manner of speaking, they throw them out on the lawn on weekends to get rid of them. (Check out New England weekend yard sales.) And in the same country, under the same government, there are homes, schools, and communities that scarcely have seen a new book in 40 years.

To put it all into perspective, let's change the word "reading" to "rodeo." For the sake of discussion, let's say the nation's leaders suddenly decided that rodeo was the most important subject in our schools' curriculum. (This not as far fetched as you might think: if the price of gas keeps going skyward, some people are going to be looking very differently at horses.) There would suddenly be new courses created around horsemanship, saddles and equipment would have to be ordered, riding coaches credentialed, and mandatory riding and roping classes begun in rodeo lab classes. All of this would culminate in mandatory grade-level "rodeos" (including "exit rodeos" for the high school seniors) to ensure that "no rider was left behind."

And sure as the sun sinks in the west, there would be states that excel and those that fail. In fact, to show this idea isn't all that wacky, the list is already available! To find it, set your browser for the professional rodeo circuit's world standings. It doesn't really matter which event you look under, so let's check the standings for "bareback riding," a very difficult event. You can see a list of the top 20 money-winners for that event in the chart on the right. Now focus on where the competitors come from. See anyone from New Jersey? Rhode Island? How about Delaware or New York? Already we can easily predict which states are going to be on the "failing schools" list—the places that have the fewest horses. It's tough to get good at rodeo if you're missing a horse.

The professional rodeo standings here indicate which states have the most and fewest horses, just as reading scores reflect which states have the most and fewest books. Simply put, do the math.

And it's just as difficult to get good at reading if you're short of books. No Child Left Behind ensures that children who are behind in reading are entitled to after-school tutoring and extra help with phonics. Nice. But giving phonics lessons to kids who don't have any print in their lives is like giving oars to people who don’t have a boat—you won't get very far.

As I showed earlier in the Introduction, Morrow's study² clearly showed those kindergartners with the highest intrerest in books were the ones with the most print in their homes.

Before going any further, allow me to state that the great disparity in the American print climate —home and school—is entirely fixable. Price is not a problem. If we can rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of $1 billion a week, we can fix all the urban school and public libraries in America. Easy. All we have to do is believe it's worth it. If we have to, we can build a strong case that it would come under Homeland Security. Today's desperate, unemployable 15-year-old semi-literate in south central Los Angeles is tomorrow's unemployed home-grown terrorist. If you doubt it, ask the people in Oklahoma City or anyone in the Middle East.

Visiting an Urban School Library

ow important is the "newness" of a library's collection? The University of Evansville's Jack W. Humphrey points to a study that showed no growth in the state of Indiana's junior high school library collections, with 58 percent of the nonfiction books being 15 years old and 30 percent with copyrights at least 25 years old. When Humphrey and others organized the Indiana Middle Grades Reading Network, they channeled book grants of $10,00 into individual middle school libraries. Typical of results was Attica/Junior/Senior High School where quarterly book circulation was 1,385 in 1983, then down to 548 in 1991. After the new books arrived circulation shot up to 1,543 for the quarter.¹

Anyone familiar with urban education will attest to the fact that the nation's poorest print climate can be found in urban America. Michael Winerip, then the education writer for The New York Times, visited Edward Williams Elementary School in Mt. Vernon, NY, in February, 2004. Largely a white community 40 years ago, today Mt. Vernon is mostly black, nestled between the impoverished Bronx and affluent Westchester County. Williams Elementary is the district's poorest school, with 90 percent free lunch and 10 percent living in homeless shelters.

With relatively few, if any, books in these children's homes, what kind of school library would be serving the school's 500 students? Winerip found just what the stereotype predicts: Most of the books had copyrights from the 50's and 60's when the school served a white population. This made most of the nonfiction collection impossibly out of date, and offered a dearth of relevant current fiction for children, although the Freddy the Pig series was there in its entirety and uncirculated since 1967.

Harry Potter? None. Gary Paulsen? One. Langston Hughes? None. In fact, Winerip noted a list of contemporary African-Americans whose lives were unexamined on any page in the school's library, thus making Black History Month reports nearly impossible. Not that the shelves were entirely empty. There were books on television (copyright 1955) and the telephone (1967), among others, that insult the young mind in search of reality on a printed page. Even if a book is on the shelf, finding it is another matter: there is no card catalog or computer data record. Winerip's entire article can be found online at:
www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/education/10education.html.²

Issues such as these are replicated in the lowest scoring districts of the U.S., but go unmentioned in the 500 pages of the Reading First agenda where daily doses of phonics skill and drill are promised as a magic elixir to low scores. Giving phonics drills to children with no access to books is like giving oars to people who don't have a boat.

In Mt. Vernon, the "elephant in the room" is poverty, something largely ignored by the No Child Left Behind Act. For more on that issue, click ELEPHANT.