Literacy Vs Urban Literacy

Jen Spinelli Geog 493 Literature Review

Urban Literacy: At It’s Worst or Finest?

All across America, literacy and early education of children has become the focus of concern for parents, teachers, and policy makers. Education has been positively linked to students’ future success in school, their likelihood to continue education past high school, and their future career opportunities. A strong foundation in reading and linguistics is a key factor in children’s academic development and future opportunities. As a result, a great deal of time, money, and energy has been invested in designing programs that focus on developing children’s knowledge and use of the English language in order to provide them with this necessary educational foundation.
However, upon close inspection, it seems as though many of these programs focus on correcting only one or two of the many factors at work in the issue of illiteracy in America’s urban youth. While a variety of reading programs are available in almost every school, there are still a significant number of illiterate and struggling students across the nation. “Of particular concern is the school preparation of children from economically disadvantaged homes – children who continue to fare less well in school than more advantaged children” (Stipek 711). 40% of America’s fourth grade students lack basic reading skills, but the illiteracy rate increases to 68% for low-income rural and urban areas (Literacy

Rates).
Research has shown that children who grow up in poor, urban areas struggle the most with reading for a variety of reasons. “Despite significant federal and state investments in compensatory education programs, persistent achievement gaps among students of various ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds have been difficult to close” (Neuman 92). This shows that resources are available to schools and districts that face issues with low literacy rates, but the problem persists. In a study of gaps in reading achievement by Parkinson and Rowan, statistical analysis was done on the test scores of high-, average-, and low-risk students upon entering kindergarten through the end of third grade (Neuman 80). Placing these scores on a statistical normal curve helped determine how much the gap between these groups increased as education progressed, and showed significant evidence that socioeconomic factors impact the education of young children. These test scores were then used for further statistical analysis to determine the amount of additional instruction time it would take at-risk students to reach the same achievement level as average and low-risk students. By calculating the standard deviation of each group’s test scores, Parkinson and Rowan were able to then convert that to months of additional instruction necessary to decrease the gaps in reading achievement. In order to match high-risk students achievement with that of average-risk students, 1.6 months of extra instruction would be necessary at the beginning of kindergarten, but by the end of the third grade, the time had increased to 4.7 months. When comparing high-risk and low-risk students’ achievement, 2.8 months of instruction were needed at the beginning of kindergarten, whereas the end of third grade required 7.8 months (Neuman 80). While Parkinson and Rowan acknowledge variations and possible issues with the data they collected and
analyzed,

these calculations still show the effects of socioeconomic factors on educational achievement. In a similar study by Stipek and Ryan on disadvantaged preschoolers and academic motivation, this education gap is explored as a result of lack of motivation. Surveying and calculating the academic achievement of several classroom groups in preschool and kindergarten proved a similar gap in academic achievement to that found by Parkinson and Rowan. “The results of this study paint a clear picture of children from relatively low-income homes beginning school at a considerable academic disadvantage” (Stipek, 720). Through several cognitive assessments of skills including problem solving, reading, and language skills, this study attempted to identify where students of low socioeconomic backgrounds struggled the most. Statistically significant differences were found in each of these assessments for each age group, so to further investigate these results, motivation and gender factors were researched as well. “In contrast to the findings on cognitive variables, the results revealed almost no motivation deficits for the economically disadvantaged children” (Stipek 721). What little differences were found connected to gender were rare and did not suggest any real pattern of academic achievement. While this study looked into gender and motivation as factors in academic achievement differences, these proved insignificant to explain the achievement gap between students of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Rather than continue to focus on individual factors, like gender and motivation, that had been proven to have little significance in explaining the education gap, other researchers have taken up the banner of family involvement and home environment on children’s academic development. According to McLoyd and Purtell, “contemporary

researchers tend to interpret links between family income and home environment within an investment model (i.e., the notion that income is associated with children’s development because it enables families to invest in the human capital of their children by purchasing materials, experiences, and services that benefit the child’s development and well-being) rather than within a cultural deficit model” (Neuman 58). Reasoning behind this focus can be found in the history of urban areas and the families that live in them, presented by Shirley Heath. In the article Oral and Literate Traditions Among Black Americans Living in Poverty, Heath explains, “in the late 1980’s, nearly half of all Black children lived in poverty, and most of these, especially in urban areas, grew up in households headed by a mother under 25 years of age who was a school dropout” (Heath, 3). She continues to explain how ethnic groups, linguistic differences, and religious or regional factors can make finding trustworthy childcare difficult for single mothers, putting further financial strain on the environment. Financial strain can have a negative effect on the focus put on education in homes with both parents and/or high socioeconomic status. This can also erode family bonds and leave students more vulnerable to the presence of drugs and other negative inner-city influences. By getting involved in drugs, gangs, and other harmful influences, education is forgotten, crippling academic achievement and future opportunities, and prolonging the cycle of poverty in poor urban households. While Heath explains the prevalence of this cycle of poverty through interviews and personal perspectives she collected, Manuel Bueno explains the many and persistent affects it has on early childhood development. “A shortfall in early childhood development will have irreversible consequences on individuals’ future lifetime

opportunities. This will reverberate later in life in the form of lower quality jobs, lower wages, shorter life-spans, worse health and lower cognitive abilities, thus perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of poverty” (Bueno). Unlike many articles regarding early childhood development, Bueno also acknowledges the importance of non-nuclear family structures, emphasizing the importance of involving a child’s primary caretaker rather than the mother or father. Especially in poor urban areas, a household can include members of the extended family just as often as it can exclude a child’s biological parents. Bueno suggests creating early childhood development programs that are both multi-faceted and family inclusive. The most successful of the programs Bueno suggests is referred to as ‘parenting programs’ that work to include parents in children’s education to give them an active and responsible role in their child’s development, and provide reinforcement at home for the things learned in school. The value of these programs is also emphasized by a number of other authors. Charles R. Greenwood is one of the forerunners in the argument for the ecological-interactional-developmental model that investigates the home environment effects on early childhood development. He explains the Hart and Risley Code used to “measure individual children’s growth in learning to talk as well as the child’s language environment, consisting of parents’, siblings’, and friends’ talk heard by the child in the home and addressed directly to the child” (Neuman 116). By recording audiotapes of conversations and interactions, Greenwood was able to analyze these observations using Hart and Risley Code. Similar observations and analyses were made in classroom settings to study student’s responses to instruction. These findings were compared to those found in the home environment, where Greenwood explains some interesting connections.

Through the use of Hart and Risley, Greenwood was able to find that children from families of low-socioeconomic status were spoken to less frequently and with fewer words. Children from similar socioeconomic statuses also scored lower on vocabulary tests and struggled with basic academic skills, which crippled their early literacy and school readiness by kindergarten age. By this research, Greenwood was able to conclude that children from low socio-economic status were less exposed to language and therefore did not learn as much. Further investigation showed that this put a strain on the children’s school readiness, resulting in an education gap similar to that found by Parkinson and Rowan, which grows as students’ progress in their schooling. Class wide peer tutoring is a program developed and implemented by several researchers, including Greenwood, to investigate whether or not students of lowsocioeconomic status families respond better to one-on-one instruction with a tutor outside of the classroom. For ninety minutes a day, four days per week, students met with a tutor on top of regular instruction to complete lessons in reading, spelling, and math instruction. Results indicated that these lessons “significantly improved students’ classroom engagement during instruction and reduced socially inappropriate behavior, while accelerating reading, language, and mathematics performance on standardized tests” (Neuman 125). Once the positive impact of this supplemental instruction was established, further research was conducted with peer-assisted learning strategies in which students share the role of teacher in small reading groups. Thirty-five to forty-five minute sessions were conducted daily, in which students were broken up into groups of three to practice reading aloud to each other. Individual points are awarded and group totals are used to

determine a ‘winner’ each day. The immediate affects this peer-assisted strategy were significant increases in accuracy, fluency, and comprehension of the material read by students (Neuman 122). After explaining the details of both the one-on-one tutoring and peer-assisted learning strategies, Greenwood discusses their effectiveness as the results showed about 59% of participants exceeded the achievement of non-participants. “Students in urban settings, from low-income backgrounds, and of minority status experienced larger gains than students from suburban middle- to high-income backgrounds” (Neuman 126). It was also noted that younger students were affected greater than older students. This study shows that while peer tutoring and one-on-one instruction outside the classroom can improve student achievement, it cannot be used as a panacea for the achievement gap. While Greenwood put his focus on supplemental instruction programs to improve literacy in students from low socioeconomic households, Come and Fredericks chose to investigate the involvement of parents in reading programs. They claim that poor families avoiding schools is frequently perceived by educators to be a lack of parental interest in children’s education and, upon investigation of an inner city Georgia school, found that 45% of the children had no one to read to them at home (Come 567). This school had developed several programs designed to help increase the self-esteem of children through parental encouragement and involvement in literacy development. One program designed to include parents in children’s reading was a monthly rewards system. If a student read with a parent for at least fifteen minutes each day for a month, it was marked on a calendar, submitted to the teacher, and the student was rewarded for his or her accomplishment, boosting confidence and reading proficiency.

This program was assisted by a school wide book exchange, in which the students themselves improved access to new reading material. “When they brought two books to school, they could exchange one book for a book to keep and the other for a book to donate to their classroom library” (Come 569). Accompanied by a cross-age reading program that paired students in different grades for cooperative reading groups, this book exchange reinforced by parental involvement proved to have significant improvements on children’s reading aptitude in the inner city Georgia school. These programs proved to be useful in the development of student’s reading ability and confidence, as well as the involvement of parents in their children’s education. However, inner-city schools are frequently a melting pot of ethnicities and languages, which can put more strain on children’s education if schools do not include language development in reading programs. In a study done by William Louden, a project called Literacy in its Place was investigated to compare literacy programs in rural and urban schools. Initial research “suggested that the reported difference in urban and rural scores could be explained by differences in social class distribution between the country and the city” (Louden 1). When these factors were taken into account, surprisingly little significance was found. Instead, it was found that children from working class homes, specifically homes in which English is a second language or dialect, were more academically disadvantaged than other students. Louden focuses the rest of his research on professional development for teachers to better assist multilingual students and their parents become actively involved in mastering the English language and developing reading skills. While this supports the consensus of the previously discussed authors that

children from low-income homes struggle more with school, it introduces language development as a new focus for further research. Mahiri and Sablo introduce research into language as a factor in academic achievement and literacy by investigating the voluntary writing of African American students in a California high school. “This study was initiated because, in our overall quest to look at ways that African American and youth culture could be used as a bridge to writing development, we wanted to learn more about the kinds of writing these students do for their own purposes outside of school” (Mahiri 165). In this case, writing is seen as an outlet through which students are free to express themselves in whatever vernacular they are most comfortable with, without conforming to school standards or expectations. By investigating students’ use of language in out-of-school settings, Mahiri and Sablo hoped to better link what schools view as important and meaningful in lessons, and what students find meaningful in their daily lives. In this study, it was found that minority students were predominantly in basic and academic classes, as opposed to honors or advanced placement, and performing well below the average scores on standardized tests. Statistics provided by the school, which remained unnamed, showed a 44% failure rate for African American students that began as freshman there. Through an analysis of several pieces of literature written by the students included in the research, and the methods for instruction used by their teachers, little connection was found to suggest culturally relevant topics were being included in instruction. Students were applying information obtained at school to improve their skills and express themselves, but instructors made little effort to do the same.

The teachers included in the study recognized that urban culture and schools were changing and that these changes would require them to adjust as well, but were having trouble doing so. Mahiri and Sablo also recognize that including culturally relevant material in school instruction and literacy activities would not solve the problems students faced with literacy development. However, their research suggests that it may help with the development of language and reading skills by giving students something that they can relate to and understand based on their own interests. Ernest Morrell addresses this in the article, Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development among Urban Youth. Ernest Morrell, a former teacher in urban schools, claims that low academic achievement is not the result of a lack of interest, intelligence, or other personal factors in urban students. Instead, he suggests that the issue lies with a lack of access to curriculum and resources. Working from the correlation Mahiri found with urban youth literacy practices and the types of practices emphasized by schools, Morrell suggests that “any investigation of popular culture must emanate from and serve the interests of members of marginalized groups…where students and teachers learn from and with one another while engaging in authentic dialogue that is centered on the experiences of urban youth as participants in and creators of popular culture” (Morrell 2). As an example, he explains programs he designed and used in his own classroom, where hip-hop culture, popular film, and the media were incorporated into each unit. When beginning a unit on English poetry, Morrell introduced the importance of learning the context in which poetry was written to obtain a better understanding of the literature. The same idea was applied to hip-hop and rap music that students in the class

were familiar with. For the final project, students were given rap songs to choose from and interpret based on contextual concepts and interpretations that apply to English poetry. As a result, students were inspired to create their own rap/poetry, and were able to better engage with the material because it was tied to larger social issues they could relate to. A similar idea was used in units on popular film and current media. Several movies related to books and assigned reading material were watched in class while students took notes comparing characters, writing styles, and story structure. News segments were also watched to help students analyze portrayals of stories in the media, conduct interviews, and complete a research project on a current topic in the news. Based on his observations of the students in his classroom, Morrell found that “critical teachers and teacher educators can use classroom-based research to prove that there are ways to meet the challenges the new century offers and turn them into opportunities to connect to the worlds of students, to promote academic achievement, and to prepare students for critical citizen ship in a multicultural democracy” (Morrell 4). Through an investigation of current studies being done on reading programs and language development in urban schools, it is easy to see what students struggle with and why. Students from urban neighborhoods tend to be poor working families where English may not be the primary language. Some researchers have interpreted the struggles of these students as a lack of involvement from parents and programs have been designed to better include them in their child’s education. While these have proven to be somewhat successful, they do not solve any issues beyond increasing parental involvement. Other less successful programs have been designed to increase students’ access to school

resources, thinking that increased access will increase reading comprehension and proficiency. While this also proved somewhat successful, it can only be applied to schools where budget issues do not limit those resources. Family structure, student motivation, and gender have also been investigated as possible factors in the literacy of urban youth, but proved to have an insignificant effect. The most successful research and program development has been a result of combined individually researched ideas. Developing programs that incorporate popular culture has proven to engage students better than regular classroom material and often on more a personal level. Peer tutoring and other cooperative learning programs have proven to be somewhat successful because they allow students to encourage each other in their responsibilities, but this can by further increased by the inclusion of popular culture in the material. These ideas, in addition to increasing parental involvement and increasing students’ access to resources, have had the most significant impact on education and literacy development. It is the incorporation of urban culture into education that further research should be conducted on. By understanding what is important and relevant to students and including that in their education, a platform can be created from which literacy and language skills can be developed.

REFERNCES Bueno, Manuel. "Reversing the Cycle of Poverty: Targeting Early Childhood Development." Web log post. NextBillion. 10 Mar. 2010. Web. 23 May 2010. . Come, Barbara, and Anthony D. Fredericks. "Family Literacy in Urban Schools: Meeting the Needs of At-Risk Children." International Reading Association 48.7 (1995): 566-70. Web. 24 May 2010. Foorman, Barbara R., Jack M. Fletcher, David J. Francis, Christopher Schatschneider, and Paras Mehta. "The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children." Journal of Educational Pyschology 90.1 (1998): 37-55. Web. 23 May 2010. Greenwood, Charles R. "Social and Academica Achievement of Children and Youth in Urban, High-Poverty Neighborhoods." Educating the Other America: Top Experts Tackle Poverty, Literacy, and Achievement in Our Schools. By Susan B. Neuman. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes Pub., 2008. 113-36. Print. Heath, Shirly B. "Oral and Literate Traditions Among Black Americans Living in Poverty." American Pyschologist 44.2 (1989): 367-73. Web. 23 May 2010. Louden, William. "Literacy in Its Place: Literacy Practices in Urban and Rural Communities." (1999): 1-4. QJER. Web. 24 May 2010. . Mahiri, Jabari, and Soraya Sablo. "Writing for Their Lives: The Non-School Literacy of California's Urban African American Youth." The Journal of Negro Education 65.2 (1996): 164-80. Web. 24 May 2010. McLoyd, Vonnie C. "Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Child Development." American Pyschologist 53.2 (1998): 185-204. Web. 23 May 2010. McLoyed, Vonnie C., and Kelly M. Purtell. "How Childhood Poverty and Income Affect Children's Cognitive Functioning and School Achievement." Educating the Other America: Top Experts Tackle Poverty, Literacy, and Achievement in Our Schools. By Susan B. Neuman. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes Pub., 2008. 5372. Print. Moats, Louisa C., and Barbara R. Foorman. "Literacy Achievement in the Primary Grades in High-Poverty Schools." Educating the Other America: Top Experts Tackle Poverty, Literacy, and Achievement in Our Schools. By Susan B. Neuman. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes Pub., 2008. 91-111. Print.

Morrell, Ernest. "Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development Among Urban Youth." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 46.1 (2002): 7277. Web. 24 May 2010. Parkinson, Julia, and Brian Rowan. "Poverty, Early Literacy Achievement, and Education Reform." Educating the Other America: Top Experts Tackle Poverty, Literacy, and Achievement in Our Schools. By Susan B. Neuman. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes Pub., 2008. 73-90. Print. Stipek, Deborah J., and Rosaleen H. Ryan. "Economically Disadvantaged Preschoolers: Ready to Learn but Further to Go." Journal of Applied Developmental Pyschology 33.4 (1997): 711-23. Web. 23 May 2010.