Good Instruction Not Enough For Low-Income Students

Providing comprehensive instruction by quality teachers is all it takes to raise the famously dire reading scores of low-income schools, right?

Wrong.

A new study realeased by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that school and classroom characteristics have a greater affect on the reading development of individual children than familial background, the amount of reading done at home or even the quality of literacy instruction in the classroom. Notably, children from "minority segregated schools," those with minority populations of at least 75 percent, experience significant significant reading deficits, even when the latter factors are controlled for.

Tracking reading development in 1,913 economically disadvantaged children, researchers found that the higher the percentage of struggling readers in a classroom, the stronger the negative impact on every student's reading performance. Children in kindergarten and first grade attending classrooms with higher percentages of students reading below grade level showed constrained performance in reading at the end of each of their first two years in school. Benefits of comprehensive literacy instruction were seemingly erased.

The results of this study lend themselves to pose questions for further research. Why does reading performance go down as the percentage of minority students in a classroom rises, even if instruction and participation outside the home are adequate? If children who perform poorly or extremely well in a specific academic area are "tracked" does that do a disservice to all students?

They also put something of a wrench in programs such as those implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act which primarily at raising levels of instruction and accountability. Rather, these results show that more comprehensive programs which aim not only at improving instruction, but also at eliminating concentration of low readers will be necessary for disadvantaged children to meet reading standards.

Read more: Improving Early Reading Skills for Children in Poverty (PDF)

ABSTRACT: The ecology of early reading development for children in poverty