All kids’ learning is emphasized in the literacy-rich environment, which highlights the value of speaking, reading, and writing. This entails choosing materials that will promote possibilities for language and literacy, reflection on classroom design, deliberate teaching and facilitation by teachers and staff, and reflection on classroom design, John Jezzini. Reading is a vital ability that characterizes a student’s academic success or failure.
Your child’s reading, comprehension, and language skills can improve by engaging in literacy activities at home. You can do various activities at home, such as reading aloud, painting, singing, telling stories, reciting, playing games, and rhyming. John Jezzini recommends that you can incorporate technology into your learning possibilities and tailor activities to your child’s age and aptitude level.
Advanced reading abilities, including categorizing, evaluating, and drawing inferences from written texts, are necessary for good positions in the country’s twenty-first-century economy. Soon, it will be abundantly clear that average students’ literacy abilities fall far short of international standards and that there is a significant accomplishment gap between students from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds, both of which have been exacerbated by the widespread acceptance of the Common Core State Standards and the impending administration of rigorous literacy assessments. In any case, disadvantaged kids would get better at reading, increasing their employability in the modern market. The difference between privileged and underprivileged students’ reading levels would narrow marginally.
But wait a minute. Even the highest standards will only be able to improve pupil literacy if they are a part of a wider plan. The pursuit of excellent standards is only the beginning.
How Reading and Writing to Your Child Can Help Them in Ways Other Than Literacy
According to an interview with John Jezzinni, kids who read and write at home—whether for homework or just for fun—are developing long-term study and executive function skills. Additionally, the new study demonstrates that while home literacy activities have already been linked to better test results, they also give students the skills they need to succeed in the long run.
“By showing up on time and producing their best work, good students often transition smoothly into becoming good employees. As long as your child is academically engaged at home, they can handle school on autopilot after that. All the qualities that make you a successful student also make you a good employee.
Additional components of a plan to raise student reading achievement and close the literacy gap have been identified in several articles. Four or more components stand out. The first is the adoption of evaluations that are now being created to go along with the Common Core by states. Two groups of states are now working on these exams, which will gauge how well children are performing concerning the Common Core requirements, particularly those for reading. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education are providing help.
The second is a standardized mechanism for reporting results that will give communities, schools, and parents comprehensive information about how their students perform compared to the Common Core and other communities. The third option offers a better curriculum for every grade and subject that aligns with the Common Core. Beyond these three, almost all academics and practitioners concur that enhancing teaching quality is the single most significant component of any plan intended to increase student literacy and decrease the reading gap. Therefore, teacher preparation programs must undergo significant retooling to create graduates familiar with the Common Core, can teach demanding subject matter, and have acquired the skills necessary to assist students in meeting the requirements. Schools of education will surely need to make even more efforts to prepare teachers who can assist underprivileged students in meeting the criteria. Similarly, professional development programs for teachers will need to improve from their current, largely ineffectual state.
In John Jezzinni’s opinion, when taken along with the Common Core standards, these four components of a comprehensive strategy would significantly increase average literacy success and close the gap. The next step is the difficult political task of creating standardize performance indicators that can be agree upon by states with high-performing pupils and those with low-performing students.
Going Beyond the Minimum Requirements: Next Steps
Adopting measures that improve schools is the key to solving the country’s literacy challenges, not abandoning reliable evaluation tools. After all, knowing exactly what the issue is and how big it is will help you find a workable solution. Based on current studies, we propose an approach that has the potential to assist students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, in acquiring the updated literacy skills necessary for participation in the 21st-century economy.
Numerous studies back up what most parents already know: that quality teaching significantly affects students’ academic success. We also know that pupils’ learning, even for those from low-income families, improves over time when they have the same excellent instructors year after year. Demonstrating that having a competent teacher may enhance adult earnings is undoubtedly the most important result of schooling in a society where large rises in inequality and wage stagnation among employees at the bottom of the income distribution have marked the past three decades. As a result, there is a consensus that having a good teacher can improve students’ abilities to learn, as well as their exam scores and their chances in life. We also emphasize the significance of strengthening education to assist disadvantaged kids in acquiring these more complex literacy abilities in light of our expectation that the new exams would reveal a very big gap in literacy between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils.
Teams can be recruited and retained in high-poverty schools by offering a mix of incentives and accountability. The best ways to combine incentives and accountability still need to determine. For instance, will it be cheaper for high-poverty schools to recruit effective teachers individually or as part of a team? Does it make more sense to employ a school principal and allow her to hand-pick her faculty or to assemble a strong teaching staff and let them vote on who should lead the school? Do high-poverty schools stand a better chance of luring teachers if they offer specific sorts of professional development? These are a few examples of the myriad concerns that will need to be address during the planning stages of projects to enhance classroom instruction in schools serving economically disadvantaged populations.
Evaluation criteria should give more weight to plans incorporating elements with a solid empirical foundation, such as Common Core-aligned curricula, a well-thought-out plan for professional development, and a thoughtful method for compensating educators. Proposals that include elements that show promise but do not yet fulfill high program evaluation requirements, such as those promulgated by the Institute of Education Sciences, would also be eligible for financing, helping to strike a balance between evidence-based and innovative components.
Each proposal must also detail the system’s ongoing evaluation of the plan’s impact on student literacy as evaluated by the new exams created in conjunction with the Common Core. Each plan for a school system will be evidence-based in two ways: its key components will align with what is known from the most recent research, and the plan’s effects on student literacy skills, particularly those of students from low-income homes, will be continually reviewed.
An emphasis on evidence-based aspects that emphasize basic reading skills, such as those recently assessed by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and the Social Genome Project, John Jezzini believes can help improve the teaching of advanced literacy abilities, especially in high-poverty schools.
