Photo courtesy of Voorhies Middle School

The transition from elementary to middle school is tough on kids. It occurs at an uncomfortable time in their lives. It introduces them all at once to a different form of schooling. It offers new challenges but seemingly little support to meet them.

In literacy, there’s also an Alice in Wonderland reversal that knocks some off their game. Down the rabbit hole they go and what do they find there? Half as much classroom time for Language Arts, an emphasis on literature (as opposed to skills), and more whole class readings from a single shared text.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all comes in content area subjects. In these classes, kids raised on fiction are confronted with facts. With a different teacher for every subject, the textbook reading load increases. Content area teachers also present a range of other non-fiction resources for kids to conquer.

Writing changes, too. In elementary school, kids may have written a lot of fiction and other narrative forms. In middle school, the situation is reversed. Kids do much less writing in a downsized, literature-dominated Language Arts curriculum, and virtually all the writing kids do in the content areas is expository or persuasive.

Great Expectations

Though they know it isn’t true, middle school teachers hold the expectation—or just the hope?—that all their kids can perform at grade level. It’s not wishful thinking; it’s survival. With as many as 150 kids to attend to, middle school teachers don’t get to know their students as well as elementary teachers do. It’s also harder to offer individualized support. Many middle school content area classes are taught from a single textbook. If kids can’t read it, teachers have neither the time nor the training to help them.

At the same time, kids who struggle with literacy have just lost half their Language Arts instruction time. The use of that time has changed, too. In elementary school, teachers may have made an effort to match kids with texts they could read and were interested in. Middle school teachers wouldn’t want to deny this flexibility but the demands of curriculum, and the traditions of secondary school culture, leave them unprepared to do so.

Nationally, somewhere between half and a third of kids enter middle school behind in reading. In writing, however, probably more are behind. With less time for Language Arts, and a curricular emphasis on literature, it’s hard for kids to get the help they need to catch up. At the same time, the writing requirements of content area subjects are much more demanding than what kids experienced in fourth and fifth grade.

Content area teachers aren’t reading and writing teachers. They don’t teach literacy; it isn’t what they were trained in. Consequently, kids may struggle with both reading and writing in content area classrooms. They’ll struggle with their grades, too.

For many students, the path to academic failure and dropping out of school begins with a bad first semester in sixth grade. Grade point averages for many kids seem to slip a little in the transition from elementary to middle school. For some, however, they slip to the bottom—and stay there.

Middle school performs a “hard reset” on many kids, especially those with low literacy skills. Less remediation is available at middle school than at elementary, and expectations are higher, so it’s very hard for kids to catch up. Most just try to hang in. A pattern of low performance in middle school follows many kids to high school—where things get even harder.

At the Crossroads

Middle school is a crossroads. Kids who make it in just fine tend to make it out just fine. Kids who don’t, don’t. It’s these kids who are most likely to become our nation’s high school dropouts and it’s trouble with literacy that’s most likely to drop them the hardest.

At the Crossroads

Crossing over the threshold in sixth grade, we know that many of our middle schoolers are behind in reading and writing. While elementary school is survivable under these circumstances, middle often is not.

In middle school, kids have multiple teachers, multiple assignments, and a lot more work to do. They’re also expected to be able to do it on their own—or with a little help from home. For those students who can’t do the work, and especially for those who don’t have help at home, there are few options.

Kids who enter middle school two or more years behind in reading and writing are likely to leave middle school three or more years behind. That may mean entering high school to confront curriculum designed for 14- and 15-year olds with the skills of a 10- or 11-year old.

Opportunities for remediation are typically even fewer at high school than they are at middle school. There is also much less tolerance for skill deficits. By high school, we begin to see kids as grown up. We cut them less slack than we might if they were younger. They look like young adults; we feel they should act like young adults. But if they don’t read and write like young adults, they can’t pull of the act.

For high school students many years behind in reading and writing, one classic novel or one Social Studies research paper can destroy a semester. The pattern of low academic performance that precedes kids into high school tends to follow them all the way through—if they even get through.

Extending Our Ownership

When someone hands off a problem and expects us to fix it, it’s natural to be resentful. But resenting elementary teachers for passing along low-literacy kids to middle school teachers doesn’t help the kids improve. It’s also not a justification for perpetrating the same act on the next group of teachers up the line.

It’s important to recognize that middle school is not a way station where kids bide time until we kick them upstairs. It truly is a crossroads. Kids who don’t cross have a long and sorrowful road ahead of them. So it’s vital that we build a bridge, catch them up, and commit to sending them off with at least a reasonable chance of succeeding in high school.

We can do this by taking some of the following actions:

• Providing sufficient instruction time for literacy. Kids who struggle with literacy need more time for reading and writing, not less. Two periods a day—one for reading, one for writing—gives kids who are behind a chance to catch up. Literacy is the foundation of all other academic subjects. Investing in a solid foundation is a smart investment, well worth losing an elective.

• Take a skills-based, as opposed to a literature-based, approach to literacy. While it’s important for kids to read the classics, it’s more important for them to learn to read. Spending six weeks on To Kill a Mocking Bird is a waste of time if most students can’t read it. Low-literacy kids desperately need intense skills-based instruction focused on raising ability levels, not traditional literature-based instruction focused on exposure to classic literature.

• Raising the reading levels of low-performing students. For low readers, we must take a very specific path that dramatically accelerates their growth. This involves large amounts of reading time, in school and out, in books that match their independent reading level. It also requires an emphasis on reading fluency. We may begin low-performing kids with fiction but at the middle school level we must transition them to academic non-fiction as soon as we can.

• Providing comprehension instruction in the text forms kids need for middle school success. In traditional Language Arts classes, kids typically encounter only three types of texts: novels, plays, and poetry. Unfortunately, these forms show up rarely, if at all, in Social Studies, Science, and Math. Understanding non-fiction can be very different from understanding fiction. Who better to help kids learn the differences than their Language Arts teachers?

• Providing Language Arts instruction in expository, persuasive, research, and other informational writing forms. Some Language Arts teachers do some of this already, but not nearly enough, especially for kids who struggle with literacy. Even though this emphasis alters the traditional Language Arts curriculum, the change is necessary to respond to student needs.

• Allow students to receive guided help in Language Arts on work they are doing in the content areas. Why can’t kids work on a Social Studies report during Language Arts time? Why can’t kids get help with their Science reading from the best reading teaching they have? Kids who need a lot of literacy support in middle school need it from their literacy teacher. Content area teachers can and should support Language Arts methods to some extent, but they don’t have the experience or time in their curriculum to help kids learn to read and write. At the same time, the best way for kids to improve their content area skills in reading and writing is by getting help in the context of doing content area work.

• Teaching kids effective study skills. Studying is a funny thing; everyone just assumes that everyone else know how to do it. We ask kids to learn tremendous amounts of information but we don’t teach them how to read it thoughtfully, write it down in an organized way, and memorize it effectively when they study it. For kids with low literacy skills, explicit instruction in these areas is extremely important.

• Sharing key literacy practices across the curriculum. In a skills-based Language Arts curriculum, kids will learn new skills. Why shouldn’t they be encouraged to use them in other classes? Content area teachers don’t have to take the lead in teaching these skills. But it will help kids tremendously if they know they can use the reading and writing skills they’ve learned in Language Arts across the curriculum.

• Consider an eighth grade retention policy. We can be almost certain that kids with “D” and “F” grades in middle school will have the same lack of success in high school. We also know that kids with such low academic performance are at high risk for dropping out. So why send kids on to high school when we can predict in advance that a significant number will fail? Perhaps we could create a special “bridge” year devoted to intense study in reading, writing, and math with the goal of improving eighth graders’ readiness for high school.

Struggling with literacy is tough at any age, and it only gets tougher as kids ascend through the grade levels. Kids who don’t keep up in elementary school fall farther behind in middle school. And the gap between grade level and skill level grows with each year that passes.

The bottom line is this: kids with significant literacy problems are prime candidates for dropping out of high school. But the reverse is also true: kids with good literacy skills are prime candidates for high school success.

This means we can reduce the dropout rate by concentrating on literacy skills at the middle school level. If we wait until high school, things get very complicated. It’s hard to give kids extra classes in literacy because this takes opportunities away from amassing required credits in other subjects. At high school, there are fewer resources for helping low-performing kids. Strong social stigma also attaches to being tracked.

Middle school is an interesting time; it’s like a free warm-up period. Classes don’t count toward graduation, so if kids head for high school with a different mix, the consequences are minimal. Math is probably the only subject where sequential coursework is truly vital. Kids are also new to a multi-subject day, so altering the mix of subjects, especially if it keeps some kids with the same teacher for more than a single period, could be very helpful.

Each of the changes presented here represent significant alterations to the typical middle school structure. As such, they are difficult to implement. But sacrificing large numbers of students to a traditional structure is inconsistent with what that structure was created to achieve. The function of middle school is to transition kids out of elementary school and prepare them to succeed in high school. If the traditional model needs to be reorganized to accomplish this goal, it’s worth the effort.

For all the diversity in our country and in our schools, our teaching of literacy shows surprising consistency: It is consistently ineffective.

Reading is the first “R” for a reason: it’s hard to be successful in other subjects without it. Reading also carries with it the societal expectation that it will be the first important thing children learn in school. Kids feel this expectation, too. Kids expect to learn to read in kindergarten and to become more confident readers in first grade. Adults expect these same things. For kids who don’t make these milestones, the stigma of academic failure often attaches. Teachers begin to treat these kids differently—and they begin to think of themselves differently as well.

Kids know almost instantly that reading is very important, and they want to be very good at it. Soon they also discover that much of the knowledge we want them to acquire depends on reading. Not being able to read early in school is a double curse—frustration with the task itself and frustration with all the tasks that require it. Struggling with reading is something many people remember long into adulthood even if they eventually catch up and become literate.

No Help In Sight

For struggling readers, things get worse the farther they go in school. Few of our schools offer effective approaches to remediation for children who fail to master fluent decoding, effective expression, and easy comprehension of simple chapter books by the end of third grade.

The remediation challenge has both intellectual and emotional components. Teaching older kids the basics of reading is difficult. Some have internalized bad habits or incorrect information; virtually all have learned the shame of failure. Having endured several years of unsuccessful struggle, intense work on reading is the last thing they want to do. Older children who receive additional help may also feel self-conscious about it, especially if they are pulled out of regular classroom activities. They may also find the types of texts available to them for practice to be too childish or otherwise uninteresting. Reading short books with big print, when their friends are reading long books with small print is a constant reminder that they are different—and not in a good way.

In the end, however, the problem of catching kids up comes down to time and teaching. Most of our schools lack sufficient numbers of people well-trained in high quality reading instruction.

Primary grade teachers know that their focus is early literacy. They prepare for it in their pre-service training and remain focused on it for most of their careers. But teachers at fourth grade and above don’t expect to have to work with kids who have first and second grade reading skills. They are trained to focus on reading to learn, not learning to read.

Even reading specialists may not be able to give struggling readers the attention they require because they don’t have enough time to spend with the large numbers of kids who need help. When they do, taking kids out of their classrooms for extended periods of time leaves them behind in other areas.

The conclusion here is simple: we must provide effective reading instruction in kindergarten and first grade for every child. We must also ensure that every child reads with fluency, expression, and comprehension by the end of third grade. In most school systems, no practical alternatives exist given the constraints of time, talent, and tradition.

The Way It’s Has Always Been

With something so serious, one would think that great urgency would surround this issue in almost every school. But the notion of teaching kids to read by third grade is relatively recent. Officially, it only occurred in 2001 with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. As unpopular and as flawed as this law may have been, it asserted a correct idea: that all children must be literate by the end of third grade.

Prior to this, our nation had no such commitment. While no one wanted to see kids struggling with reading, few felt pressured to be certain that every child succeeded in a timely manner. It’s as if we have always carried with us a complacency about early reading achievement defined by the hope that kids who don’t do well in their primary years will somehow catch up eventually—and that even if they don’t, they’ll probably turn out okay in the end.

This idea, grounded in the well-intentioned emotions of hopeful educators, however, has never aligned with the shocking statistical reality that low literacy skills are linked closely to low academic performance, increased high school dropout rates, and high incarceration rates, especially for young men of low-socioeconomic circumstances.

Persistent Problems

For all the advances we’ve made in our collective knowledge about the teaching of early reading, the past still dominates the present and predicts the future. For most of the last hundred years of reading in America, we have persisted a set of ineffective instructional practices:

• We teach decoding backwards. English is an Alphabetic language so we should teach it in accordance with the Alphabetic Principle. This means teaching from sounds to the letter patterns used to encode them in print. Most teachers in the U.S. teach “Sesame Street style”, organizing their teaching by introducing a letter by name every few days or once a week. Many teachers persist in using the more-than-a-century-old “whole word” or “sight word” approach when the structure of our language clearly indicates that segmenting and blending individual phonemes is superior.

• We rely too heavily on poorly conceived instructional programs instead of on simple science and common sense. Educational publishers pack their offerings with conflicting and often useless approaches to instruction in order make their reading programs large and competitive (on quantity of materials), and to encourage adoptions (via frequent additions). This leaves teachers confused as to what good reading teaching entails. Reliance on programs also reduces their ability to think for themselves, to learn the science of reading, and to apply common sense. Too often, a reading program becomes a crutch—and not a very good one at that.

• We separate writing from reading. Reading and writing are complementary activities. They can and should be taught at the same time. Having kids spell while they are learning to read reinforces sound-symbol correspondences. Taking dictation, practicing handwriting, and participating in teacher-guided writing can all be used to enhance reading concepts.

• We fail to match kids with texts at appropriate reading levels. When kids read texts that are too easy, their growth may stall. When they read texts that are too hard, they may become frustrated or develop bad habits as coping strategies for dealing with inappropriately challenging material. A majority of a student’s individual reading should be done in texts that match their independent reading level.

• We don’t require enough individual reading. Kids simply don’t read enough to get good at it. This is especially true of individual reading. Reading must become an over-learned automatic process. We need to make sure kids read extensively, especially if they don’t have print-rich environments at home.

• We don’t provide enough explicit instruction while children are reading. The perfect time to teach readers something is when they’re reading on their own. By contrast, most explicit reading instruction in our classrooms is done in group settings either before or after reading occurs.

• We don’t require the reading of enough non-fiction. We raise our children on fiction then expect them to succeed in a non-fiction-dominated curriculum. This puts kids at a double disadvantage: they fail to learn how non-fiction texts work and they don’t gain the subject matter knowledge they need to succeed across the curriculum.

• We don’t require enough reading across a well-organized curriculum. Even on those rare occasions when kids do read non-fiction texts, they usually select them at random. In general, our school curricula are not sufficiently coordinated to provide kids with a thoughtfully organized experience of knowledge acquisition.

• We don’t provide explicit instruction in fluency and expression as a scaffold to comprehension. Fluency and expression are the precursors of comprehension. Yet we spend almost no time teaching kids how to master these important sub-skills of reading. Without knowledge of the prosody of our language, many children struggle to comprehend even relatively simple texts because their reading is so awkward.

• We don’t leverage the instructional value of read-alouds. We read aloud to children regularly but often we fail use these opportunities to instruct through modeling and think-alouds. Kids need good models of reading to imitate. But to imitate well, they need an explicit understanding of what we’re doing.

• We don’t help kids develop sufficient background knowledge to help them understand more difficult texts later on. Reading comprehension is domain specific. Even if kids can decode a text, read it fluently, and understand all the words, they may not fully comprehend a text if they don’t understand the subject matter. A rigorous knowledge-packed curriculum is required.

Each of these items is an important piece of the reading puzzle, a bit of instructional leverage we can use to increase the power of our work. Improving even one of these areas (especially the first one regarding the teaching of reading according to the Alphabetic Principle) would make a significant difference to struggling students, especially to those who don’t have much support at home. Improving them all is the key to making sure that all children read well by the end of third grade.

Children who reach this benchmark have a high likelihood of graduating high school and moving beyond to meaningful life opportunities. Children who do not, do not. Third grade reading ability is one of the strongest predictors of future academic—and life—achievement that we know of. Part of the reason for this is developmental; the best time to learn to read is between the ages of four and nine. But part of it is structural; school simply isn’t designed to help kids improve their basic reading skills after third grade.

There’s a part of us that wants to believe that the 13-year ascent from kindergarten to high school is a smooth, unbroken path. It’s not. There are gates of a sort, spots along the way that we have to make sure kids get through. Perhaps the most important of these is 3rd grade literacy. Raising the third grade literacy rate in America would likely do more to increase the high school graduation rate than any other single goal we could set.