The debate rages how to get kids to read

October 29, 2009

Photo Credit: Andrew Lampard

The last book Glenn Afriyie, 15, read was “Holes,” by Louis Sachar, an adventure story whose main theme is racial equality. It was assigned to him last year in school. The next book the ninth-grade student at Jonathan Levin High School of Media and Communications in the Bronx will read has also been assigned to him through school. He has no interest in reading it.

“It’s called ‘Winn Dixie’ or something. I don’t know. It’s some story about a girl and her dog,” Afriyie said while sitting outside of his school’s building during first period. He is not allowed to enter the school until after first period if he is late, he said. Armed New York police officers enforce the rule at every entrance.

The book Afriyie is referring to is actually called “Because of Winn-Dixie,” written by Kate DiCamillo. It was shortlisted for the Newbery Award for excellence in youth literature in 2001, the year after it was published. Afriyie said that his teacher gave his class an offering of books and they chose DiCamillo’s novel. He added that he would likely not read it.

City teachers and administrators are faced with Alfriyie’s teacher’s problem at the start of every year: how do you get students to read the novels assigned to them? In some schools in the city, teachers are allowing students to choose most of their reading instead of reading from a curriculum list. The results of this practice may be exposing fissures within the durability of the canon of classic literature that has been taught in schools across the country for decades.

According to William Havemann, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education, no set reading curriculum is mandated for students in grades nine through 12. In an email responding to questions for this article, he wrote that every school in New York City uses a “balanced literacy” approach to reading that sets standards for writing early on and encourages independent reading from an administration sanctioned library in the classroom or elsewhere in the school. The Department of Education’s website said that reading and writing standards are assessed by the Global Regents Exam in 10th and 11th grades.

Dr. Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, is concerned about the practice of not assigning core literature, such as George Orwell’s futurist classic “1984” and Harper Lee’s exploration of prejudice, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” to every student in a high school class. For Ravitch, these books help constitute a shared cultural literacy among students.

“In a democratic society, it is useful for people to be able to debate ideas. To do so, they need certain shared reference points about history, politics, government, etc., just to have a discussion,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When children are free to choose whatever they want to read, everyone might be reading different books. They might choose books that are trashy or books that have no intrinsic merit.”

On the other side of the debate are educators who think that many students, especially those of different ethnic origins than the writers of canon literature, cannot identify with what they are reading. Dr. Mary Ehrenworth, 44, the deputy director of Columbia University’s Reading and Writing Project, agrees with Ravitch that there are certain things kids must know, but Ehrenworth finds it problematic that Ravitch “never addresses who gets to pick those books. The books are “’To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘Of Mice and Men,’ ‘The Crucible,’ it’s pretty much an iconic, white male curriculum that’s been around for years,” referring also to John Steinbeck’s novella about the great depression and Arthur Miller’s McCarthy-era play.

When told of Ehrenworth’s statement, Ravitch responded that the district, schools, and “certainly the teachers” should decide what the children read.

Larry Sherman, a ninth-grade English teacher at Jonathan Levin High School only assigns material from the traditional canon for reasons he admits are selfish: “I enjoy reading and talking about what I think is good literature.” He added that other teachers at his school work independent reading into the curriculum, but he will not because he does not trust his students to pick suitable material for themselves to read. “Great works are great works. They’re about things that matter today, like life and love,” he said.

Ehrenworth said she is more concerned about teaching students how to read, than she is about helping them achieve fluency in a cultural history that is likely different from their own. “Cultural history is not going to get thousands of kids to read,” she explained. “I want to teach them how to love reading. They’ll then get to the classics when they’re ready.”

She cited New York City’s dropout rate of 42 percent as evidence that the City needs to adopt new reading methods: “One of the reasons they dropped out is because they couldn’t do the work, and they couldn’t do the work because they couldn’t read, and that’s not okay.” Regardless of the classics’ literary merit, Ehrenworth said she believes the books are resting, unopened, at the bottom of Bronx students’ book bags.

At Jonathan Levin High School, Glenn Afriyie’s school in the Bronx, the four-year graduation rate is listed at 25 percent by insideschools.org, a non-profit website operated by Advocates for Children of New York.

Taneya Lewis, 16, a senior at Jonathan Lewis, is someone who reads the books assigned to her. Currently, her class is reading an anthology of 50 classic short stories. This week’s story is “The Other Side of the Hedge,” by E.M. Forster, whose protagonist is consumed with achieving success in life. Lewis said she prefers reading material that she can relate to. “All of this is set in the past. I want to read something black. I’m black. I want to read about things that happen around me,” she said.

Lewis is not alone in wanting to read about issues that surround her in the Bronx. Samantha Q., 16, who did not feel comfortable giving her full name, is a sophomore at Jonathan Levin. She is also the mother of a 1-year-old boy. She said she wishes she had had more access to books about underage sex and teenage pregnancy instead of the stories with far-away themes and places.

Across town in the East Village, one school, East Side Community High School, has implemented the Reading and Writing Project’s independent study workshops into its curriculum. Jen McLaughlin, 40, a 10th grade English teacher still teaches some class-wide texts, but does so in conjunction with allowing students to choose other books for themselves. Under this pedagogy, students will read approximately 30 books of 300-500 pages a year, she said.

McLaughlin, like Ehrenworth, said her primary job is to teach kids how to start reading on a consistent basis. The only way to do that, she said, is if they choose to read what they are interested in. “Who am I to say what is worthy or not worthy for them to read? The main thing is for them to be reading,” she said.

Every day, McLaughlin records their page numbers, discusses the book with them, and gives them ideas for other books she thinks they might like. She said she is firm with students that they develop as readers. If a student were to start off with a book about video games, she said, she will perhaps suggest a fantasy book at a higher level as their next book.

The results at East Side, which teaches some of the city’s most disadvantaged kids, are impressive: Ehrenworth said that 80 percent of students who arrive at East Side in the sixth grade read below their reading level; by the time they reach the 10th grade, 85 percent read at their grade level. East Side has a 58.3 percent four-year graduation rate, according to insideshools.org, slightly under the 60.7 percent city average.

As for the cultural literacy that is gained from teaching the literary canon, McLaughlin said she is not convinced. “A lot of the students I teach are not being included in the American Dream,” she said. “They are the ones being excluded.”

Back at Jonathan Levin High School, three students loitered across the street at the end of the day. One of them, Ana McNeill, a black student in the 11th-grade, took out her homework, which includes Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” about a New Hampshire town and its residents in the early 1900s. She chose it from a selection of mandatory reading decided by her teacher. “I’m not going to read it,” she said as she shoved it back into her bag.