Literacy: Now read this
Literacy, the ability to read and comprehend the written word, has always had a high economic, political, and cultural value. Those who are blessed with high literacy are favored with high social status. They receive the best jobs, and are paid the most. As we are now in the Information Age (some call it the Data Age) literacy has been assigned the highest possible value. Virtually every new job created in the coming years will require a community college or a four-year college education, whose educational requirements are unattainable to the nonreader. Those few remaining jobs available for the nonreader are being replaced with machines and robots at an accelerating rate or simply done away with.
While this vast and profound shift toward literacy is ongoing, we have learned that in the American system of education, if a child cannot read at grade level at the end of the third grade, he or she generally never learns to read in any suitable, economically useful way.
We also know those who live in poverty in our country almost entirely come from the weak readers of those who cannot read at all.
Fully 70 percent of our prison population consists of people who cannot read above the fourth-grade level. Even more shocking is that 85 percent of all children involved the juvenile justice system cannot read above the fourth-grade level.
Modern western civilizations have many serious problems, none however are as serious as poverty and crime. Several countries have all but fully solved these conditions. Finland is one of those. A statistical comparison of Finland with the U.S. is useful.
ADULT LITERACY RATE
Finland 100 percent
USA 86 percent
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION RATE
Finland 95 percent
USA 76 percent
POVERTY RATE - CHILDREN
Finland 5.7 percent
USA 22 percent
INCARCERATION RATE
PER 100,000 POPULATION
Finland 57
USA 680 (not a misprint)
COST OF PUBLIC EDUCATION AS A PERCENTAGE OF GDP
Finland 6.5 percent
USA 6.9 percent
As these statistics indicate Finland has essentially solved poverty and crime through literacy. In fact you will find that most every modern society that has a high literacy rate also has a comparatively low crime rate.
As I live within the boundaries of SD 271 I will address SD 271 exclusively, however every citizen in every school district in America can make the same arguments.
In SD 271 16 percent or approximately 130 children read below the required level to have any reasonable expectation of succeeding in the fourth and subsequent grades. We also must remember that a similar number of our little third-graders encounter the same struggles year after year with metronomic regularity.
As indicated above it is from these children that the future members of the poor and the incarcerated are drawn. Making their condition more poignant we know that our state constitution requires these students to attend SD 271 because it benefits the state for them to do so. They and their parents have no choice in the matter unless the expensive option of private education or home schooling is chosen. These children are forced to spend the bulk of their waking hours from ages 6 to 18 in a system that has failed them by the time they reach their ninth birthday.
Further, the catastrophic effects of this academic failure stays with these children forever as they live out their cold and difficult lives in a fog of incomprehension.
For we who live within the boundaries of SD 271, it is on us. We bear the burden of the knowledge of what we have allowed to occur. It isn’t the fault of the federal government or of the state government or even the fault of SD 271. The problem is not one of intent. The problem is one of the structure of the educational system itself.
We are the government — or more accurately the government is us in another form. The government exists because we willed it into existence. It is our creation. We fund it with our tax dollars. It is our agent for accomplishing certain tasks. It is nothing more than that. When government succeeds we succeed, and when government fails we have failed.
Thus as we fail our little third-graders, we fail ourselves. We permit the impermissible, we accept the unacceptable, we act as the guarantors of their bleak futures, with poverty in the midst of wealth, failure in the midst of success, and despair in the midst of a world of optimism, and crime where no crime should occur. These children as early as 8 years of age with trusting eyes and happy smiles, literally “fresh from the hand of God” (Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop) stand before us full of hope and eager expectations as we turn our backs to them.
This cannot stand.
There is much good news however, and a path forward.
First: If you were to choose a school district capable of bringing the literacy rate from 84 percent to 100 percent you could choose none better than SD 271. It has the finest teachers and staff to be found anywhere in the Northwest.
Second: This region has for some reason a large engaged group of publicly minded volunteers who see no barriers to any task they want to accomplish.
Third: Current citizen efforts together with SD 271 staff and teacher have been working for over three years to bring the current literacy gap of 16 percent to zero. These efforts include Jingle Books. This program has given more than 80,000 books to kindergarten through third-grade students of Kootenai County. This year the program was expanded to include all public school K to third-grade students of Kootenai County.
There is also a successful program called Kids Camp which provides a summer reading program for struggling readers preparing to enter the second and third grades.
Fourth: We have every reason to believe that as a direct consequence of these and other activities the Inland Northwest Community foundation, a Spokane-based philanthropic organization will award a $600,000 three year grant to enhance the reading skills of the very group of youngsters we have just been writing about. The funding may begin as early as this coming summer.
Will all of these activities solve the reading gap of our youngest and most vulnerable students. Our moral obligation to these children has not been discharged. They are however the necessary foundational pieces for us to reach the goal of 100 percent literacy.
The path forward. We understand that it will be a difficult task to reach the goal of 100 percent literacy as they claim to have reached in Finland. Mountain climbers will tell you that any mountain worth climbing reserves its steepest and most difficult challenges for the last quarter of its terrain. So it is with us. If the task is an easy one we would of course already have done so.
Our first task is to convince our SD 271 trustees a goal of 100 percent literacy possible and the struggle to do so is worthwhile. When this occurs the trustees can direct our dedicated and talented staff of professionals to come up with a written plan detailing how and when this high and difficult goal can be achieved.
Our second task is to continue to engage our citizen volunteers to redouble their efforts to create new and effective ways to stimulate learning in addition to keeping Kids Camp and Jingle Book alive and successfully working.
Thirdly and most importantly the parents and guardian of our children must constantly work to improve their parenting skills from the time of conception to adulthood. Our children must come to school regularly, well fed, well rested, healthy and live in an environment that is drug-free.
Our children must know they are loved unconditionally. They must read and be read to, talked with and encouraged to grow and learn each day and at each stage of their lives. When struggling, our parents should have easy free access to professionals to assist them in their parenting efforts. Without broad-scale parental support, all other efforts may be futile.
As an optimist it is easy for me to observe that America is optimistic by its very nature. All that I have written here it is with the idea that I am writing to other optimists. As optimists and as free Americans we can see to the success of this goal. We can achieve what we want to achieve. And finally what better goal is there than 100 percent literacy.
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Norman Gissel is a resident of Coeur d’Alene.