One of My Favorite Articles Ever

This is a great article by a man who taught at the same university I was at twenty years ago. I met him several times, but did not know him well. He cared about students, and he cared about students others learned not to care about.  I hope you enjoy this:

The Benign Neglect of Adolescent Literacy

I was 23 years old, still very wet behind the ears, when I began my doctoral studies at Syracuse University in 1970. I chose Syracuse on the strength of its secondary reading program. My experiences with middle and high school students convinced me that there was much that I didn't know about how adolescents become literate and use reading and writing in meaningful ways.

I was fortunate enough to study with Hal Herber and Margaret Early, two of the most prominent scholars in the field of reading. They taught me well. Each mentored me in different ways, and their influence on my development as a literacy educator is everlasting.

Hal Herber reinvented the concept of "reading in the content areas" and pioneered the use of instructional strategies for text learning. I followed closely in his footsteps. Margaret Early, one of the most eloquent voices ever on matters related to adolescent literacy, challenged me to write well and think clearly. Both were powerful advocates of literacy instruction for older learners and were pivotal in making reading beyond the elementary school a legitimate area of study within the field.

Forgotten students

I had been teaching English in a high school just outside of Albany, New York, USA, prior to entering the doctoral program at Syracuse. One of my students during my first year as a teacher, Johnny Palcheo (whose name has been changed to protect the innocent), did my auto mechanical work whenever my 1960 Chevy died on me, which was often. Johnny was just two, maybe three, years younger than I when I first started teaching.

In the days before special education, and the identification of children and youth as "learning disabled," Johnny and others of his academic ilk were known as NR students. NR stood for non-regents, meaning that students classified as NR would not earn a regents diploma from the state of New York upon graduation. But NR could easily have stood for "not real." Johnny was one of the forgotten young men and women at school who largely went unnoticed, except when they got into trouble. He couldn't read well; he couldn't write well either, but he sure as hell knew how to take apart a carburetor and replace a timing belt with his eyes closed.

As it turned out, Johnny didn't graduate from high school, regents diploma notwithstanding. He dropped out of school and went to work at his uncle's garage full time. During that first year as a teacher, I taught two NR classes, two regents classes, and one advanced regents class. Johnny and his friends would do a number on me whenever I tried to introduce any topic that required reading and writing. I battled back the best I could, but often to little avail. In those days, I was light on teaching strategy and heavy on exhortation and intimidation. The more I urged them to learn with texts, the more they resisted. And the craziest part of it all was that these tougher-than-nails kids respected me. Some even liked me.

I was tough on Johnny, always challenging him to do better. There was a measure of respect between the two of us. And even though it's been more than 26 years since I last saw him, I won't soon forget our last encounter. Just before I left my English teaching position, my Chevy had to be towed into Johnny's uncle's garage for repair. I remember telling Johnny I was moving to Syracuse to work on my doctorate. "Whattya goin' for?" he asked. "You want to be a doctor?" I told him I wasn't going to be a "doctor doctor," the medical kind, but that I was going to study reading and become a college teacher. "Man," he said, "you read good already." Then he added, somewhat wistfully, somewhat defiantly, "F --reading. Reading robbed me of my manhood."

Reading robbed me of my manhood. The words, 26 years later, are still haunting. They have been a kind of motivation for me in my own work with students and teachers.

When I began teaching in the 1960s, society was too quick to write off low-achieving students like the Johnny Palcheos of the world. There was a time, I don't know if it exists any more, when the workforce could absorb a kid like Johnny. There was a place for him in his uncle's garage. But that was during an era when cars had carburetors.

Today, survey research shows that most. Americans spend more time reading and writing in the workplace than they do anywhere else. In today's society, there are a small and shrinking number of jobs requiring little or no literacy. Ask car mechanics today if they could survive without being able to read various manuals for the kinds of high-tech, high-performance cars that are produced.

When Johnny dropped out, sad to say, I was relieved. Sometimes kids like Johnny can become the hard-core recalcitrants in school (sometimes out of school) who make the life of a teacher tougher than it has to be. In my naivete, I took solace in the adage, "out of sight, out of mind."

While it may have been easy to write off low-achieving students, it's just as easy, especially today, to lull oneself into believing that if kids can read the words with some degree of fluency and accuracy, they can read effectively enough to handle the conceptual demands inherent in texts. Often they can't, because like my regents students, they were never shown how to. What I learned in my early days as a teacher was that my regents students--kids who were most like me in high school, promising students who sometimes worked hard and sometimes didn't--also struggled with texts.

Although they had developed fluency, the ability to read print smoothly and automatically, they didn't know what to do with texts beyond just saying the words. In today's parlance, we describe such readers as not having sufficient "strategy awareness" to know when and how to use learning strategies to think deeply with texts.

The dilemma facing most adolescents, then and now, is that few effectively learn how to use reading and writing to explore and construct meaning in the company of authors, other learners, or teachers. when I first began teaching, I deluded myself into thinking that I was teaching these kids what they needed to know and be able to do.

However, I soon realized that they often read just enough to answer the questions I asked or circumvented reading altogether. At least the kids in my NR class were genuine in their resistance to reading. I knew where I stood with them. But the kids in my regents classes were somewhat disingenuous. They went through the motions and played school the best they could.

So for one class period each day, I sought the safe haven of my advanced regents class. I thoroughly enjoyed working with students who seemed to know how to use texts as a springboard to solve problems and explore the significance of what they were reading. These kids were good academicians--high achievers--who knew how to play school well. But frankly, outside of school, literacy was not prominent or significant in many of their lives. They knew how to read and write, but often chose not to.

Many years later, my wife and I witnessed our daughter, Courtney, playing school with the best of them. In her preadolescence, she loved to read books, but the older she got, the less she engaged in reading outside of an academic context. Reading and writing were tools that she could rely on when she needed to use them, but little else.

Sidelined adolescents

These remembrances remind me of why I became a literacy educator. While I can look back over the past 30 years and recognize the knowledge base that has developed to support the teaching of literacy beyond the elementary school, I also sense that the public, and even professional, attitude toward adolescent literacy is one of benign neglect.

While the United States engages in a schizophrenic debate over whether young kids should be taught phonics in a systematic way, where's the debate over what happens to young children's literacy development beyond the second grade? Since the 1960s we have learned much about the literacy needs of older learners. The literacy development of a 12-year-old in middle school or a 17-year-old in high school remains as critical a concern to society as the literacy development of a preschool child or a child in the primary grades.

Literacy learning in the lives of middle and high school students is complex and complicated. Yet I and many of my colleagues who identify strongly with the needs of older literacy learners often wonder whether there's a strong commitment among political leaders, policy-makers, curriculum planners, and school administrators to support and sustain adolescents' literacy development.

The benign neglect of adolescent literacy is more real than apocryphal. Let me offer two striking and disturbing trends. First, in some colleges of education, a course in "content area literacy" is no longer required of middle and secondary school majors.

The logic behind the elimination of such a pivotal and important course is more corporate than educational. As colleges of education "downsize," deans are no longer hiring adolescent literacy educators. Rather, they are opting to have students take either a "generalist" type course that deals with instructional problem-solving or have subject matter instructors incorporate literacy into their methods courses.

In an ideal world, such moves may appear logical. But they aren't. If this trend continues, we may be on the verge of producing a generation of middle and high school teachers who have only superficial knowledge of the literacy instructional needs of adolescents.

Second, research funding for adolescent literacy is minuscule in relation to the big bucks federal and state agencies spend on early literacy and early intervention research. The U.S. Department of Education in all likelihood will call for research on early literacy up to the third grade as it prepares to fund the next national reading research center. Although I applaud the funding of research for early literacy, what is the implicit message that is being signaled? As one of my colleagues noted in personal communication, "While I support literacy dollars being spent on young children, I am disappointed that the young adolescents in our middle and secondary schools are now moved out of the picture--sidelined, so to speak, at the very time when middle grades education seems to be taking off in the country."

By RICHARD T. VACCA