Privilege and Reading Achievement

From the Washington State Report Card, 2023

Why Care About Reading

Grade-level reading proficiency means a student can comprehend what they read well enough to make conclusions about it and answer questions correctly more than 50% of the time. These are also vital survival skills needed throughout life in our modern world.

Privilege Benefits Reading Achievement

Wealth and access provide experiences that build a vast library of the specific skills needed to read and write in English. As a result of that access, privileged students tend to arrive at school with a greater breadth and depth in:

1. Familiarity with English oral language (vocabulary, linguistic structures, idioms, etc.)
2. Background knowledge of the world (from pyramids to pumpkins).

Ample Provisions* to Address Inequity

Students already contending with intersectional stresses and challenges from poverty, homelessness, racism, oppression, and marginalization ALSO have more ground to cover when they are learning to read, relative to more privileged peers. High-quality daycare and preschool are an excellent start. But when reading instruction starts in Kindergarten, it’s imperative that we proactively address the consistent, well-documented impact of inequity:

1. Build in time and support to backfill background knowledge.
2. Provide the most effective and efficient form of reading instruction (Structured Literacy**) in general education classrooms. First, we need to train and support teachers in this complex, non-intuitive approach so they can deliver it with fidelity.

*’Ample provision’ is a term from Washington State education law that specifically addresses the obligation to modify public education to meet the needs of all children. Failure to do so violates the law. We have yet to implement ample provisions for adequate literacy instruction or measures to counteract the direct impact that inequity has on literacy.

**The ‘Science of Reading’ is a body of research that has honed effective literacy practices for 75 years, including neuroscience. ‘Structured Literacy’ is an approach to reading instruction based on that research. It includes explicit, sequential, and mastery-focused instruction. The foundations are oral language, background knowledge, and a series of decoding strategies and discrete skills based on linguistic principles that extend far beyond phonics. This instruction spans years and teachers need extensive training to do it well. Fewer than 10% of us will read to our intellectual ability, if at all, without Structured Literacy. As of 2024, 38 states have passed or proposed laws mandating Structured Literacy instruction starting in general education. Many of these laws specifically ban all forms of ‘balanced literacy’ practices and programs.