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One of my main motivations for moving to Cusco, Peru last year was my eagerness to experience all the differences between my European background and the Latin American culture. I also wished to seek the roots of the culture I found myself surrounded by upon my arrival in Peru. I hoped to do so by immersing myself in the works of contemporary Peruvian writers and foreign scientists, as well as in those of the 16th century chroniclers, who were the first to write about the Incas and their customs. For me, as a literature student, reading traditional literature and the country’s classics was automatically the way to the heart of any culture.

Therefore, after visiting the cathedral on the main square and what remained of the once glorious Temple of the Sun, my footsteps led me to a bookshop that was recommended to me. Located in a typical colonial building in the city center, the bookshop seemed to be the nest of all I needed—until I approached its shelves. Along the walls of the little shop I saw glass, and behind that glass sat my dreamed-of chronicles and scientific publications on pre-Columbian Peruvian civilization, labeled with price tags demanding ridiculous money from me. The average cost of one of those books greatly exceeded my daily Peruvian salary.

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I thought the museum-like nature of this first bookshop—with books exhibited as artifacts and priced equally—must have been due to its location in the heart of the city. I left with no concerns and with a strong determination to look elsewhere.

Strolling down the streets of my new hometown, however, I struggled to find any more booksellers. It was indeed a sharp contrast to the historical center of my hometown—Prague, Czech Republic—which was infested with little bookstores and antique bookshops. The latter were my particular favorites, as in front of them, cardboard boxes with heaps of books (which the shops failed to sell and thus displayed on the street, demanding about fifty cents per book) concealed hidden treasures of Czech as well as foreign classics.

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at the solitary little bookshops in the tourist areas of Cusco, I finally wandered into the big bookstore on the city’s main street. Here, at least the glass had vanished, yet the books were still far from accessible—they were wrapped in plastic, and their price tags were equally as repulsive as they had been in the smaller shops. Taking a few books in my hands, I realized that they were priced so highly because most of them were imported from Britain, Spain and America, rather than being published in Peru.

All in all, I found myself in a bookless culture. When I visited some of my more wealthy Peruvian friends at their homes, I saw valuable sacred paintings, but never spotted a bookshelf anywhere. My own collection—five books I had managed to squeeze into my luggage when moving—was smiling sadly at me from a windowsill in my apartment, ready to be extended. Indeed a pitiful state, considering that during my last years at home, books had been my tenacious companions. Every day dozens of books would flow through my hands, and tall shelves would constantly surround me, whether it was in the school library or my own collection, sprawling along the walls of my living room.

Now, in the seemingly bookless Peru, without the appropriate literature, I felt I was left with no means of fully exploring the local culture. But ironically enough, one of the most significant elements of the local culture, and one of the biggest cultural differences between my birth country and my new home, was sitting on my doorstep without me even noticing it: the disparate attitude towards books and writing.

In Europe books gleam with the aura of wisdom. I remember sleeping at my grandparents’ house when I was a child, an enormous bookshelf by my bed. I was still unaware of the magic concealed in books; but even back then, my subconscious demanded respect for the silent wisdom of the written word. A respect for books seems to be automatically engraved in every European, whereas in Peru that is hardly the case.

“You’re forgetting that you’re now living in a culture that lacked writing until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors,” a friend reminded me when I started venting to him about the high prices and unavailability of books. “Pre-Columbian cultures had no writing whatsoever, whereas your culture has been praising writing and books for millennia.”

I had to admit that he was right, and upon that realization a new desire was born inside of me—a desire to question the descendants of the pre-Columbian tribes about their attitudes to books and writing; a desire to try to get to know the way of thinking of an illiterate culture.

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The other day I came across the perfect opportunity. While sitting in a tiny pub in Chinchero, a little village outside of Cusco, trying the local maize beer called chicha, an Indian spotted my foreign white skin and immediately approached me. As the conversation uncoiled I remembered one of my pet peeves.

“It all starts with the different beliefs about raising kids,” the Indian said, sipping his chicha, which eventually formed a little moustache above his slowly moving lips. “How do your children learn? They are taught things from books. Our children are different: they learn by seeing, by living.

“You can notice the difference at first sight—your women carry babies in a stroller, where the younglings can’t see anything. Our women always wear children on their backs so that the child sees everything the mother is doing, and that’s how the child learns. We believe that what you learn from books is not real, and that you can only learn by seeing and experiencing.”

“That’s why you have no writing then,” I said. “You don’t need it.”

“That’s right. All we need to know, we learn by seeing and experiencing. We don’t, for example, need any Bible like you do; we don’t need to read about gods. We feel them. They are energy that is everywhere and you cannot learn that by reading, but only by feeling. If you read about it, it is no good and you learn nothing. All ‘energy’ disappears in writing, it only exists in feeling.”

“But reading can evoke a feeling,” I said.

“But is that feeling really necessary?” the Indian said to me, the dark skin of his face revealing wrinkles as he smiled. “Isn’t it just distracting you from feelings that are more important in life?”

As one studies modern books on the Incas, one discovers they did leave a lot of reading material, though not necessarily in written form. Modern scientists are constantly trying to decipher the message hidden in their architecture, pottery and particularly in their weaving, which has survived from the Inca times.

It seems that whereas the Western culture strictly separated manual and intellectual labor, the Incas did the opposite, combining the two to such an extent that it is impossible to say where one stops and the other begins.

So rather than getting overwhelmed by a sudden disillusion concerning literacy, I instead became aware of the different shapes and forms it can take. Writing was created to convey a message, but it doesn’t mean that it is the only means of doing so. On the contrary, we can in fact “read” many things that surround us without necessarily making the link between the object and the literary value it may conceal.

Jakub Hankiewicz has taught English for four years. After graduating with a degree in Czech and Czech Literature in his hometown of Prague, Czech Republic, he moved to Cusco, Peru to continue teaching English, as well as to pursue his career as a freelance writer.



Language is Our Heritage, But Will it be Our Legacy?

We recently received the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association. The award is given for the published paper that most significantly advances the profession’s understanding of reading/learning disabilities. Our paper, “Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students,” was published in Reading Psychology in 2010. We review our study here, and in doing so assert that summer reading holds implications for mitigating the rich/poor reading achievement gap.

The rich/poor achievement gap is huge: The reading level of twelfth grade students from low-income families stands a full four years behind the levels of middle class students. Four years! The gap can be clearly observed in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading achievement at fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Children from low-income families begin school already behind their more economically advantaged peers, but the gap just continues to widen with every additional year of schooling.

Various federal programs have provided schools with funding for programs that have tried to eliminate the rich/poor reading achievement gap. That is, in fact, the legislative intent of all of Title I programs in high-poverty schools. The most recent federal initiative under this Act was Reading First—an initiative that failed to have any effect on closing the rich/poor reading gap. Perhaps because of this failure, Congress has eliminated funding for the Reading First program.

In actuality, the federal funding made available to high-poverty schools is spent on so many different initiatives that asking whether the funds produce the intended outcomes seems largely forgotten today. But the truth is that the size of the rich/poor reading gap has remained the same since the 1980s. Whatever schools are using Title I dollars for—school-wide reform, commercial interventions, paraprofessional aides—that usage is not closing the rich/poor reading gap.

There is, though, one area that is central in creating the rich/poor reading achievement gap that almost no federal dollars address. Summer reading setback creates much of the rich/poor achievement gap. That is, children from low-income families reliably lose reading skills every summer while middle-class children actually gain a bit between June and September! The most recent research on this issue has been done by Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle at Johns Hopkins University. By following a cohort of children who were tested twice each year from first through ninth grade they offer three major conclusions:

• Reading growth did not differ between the two groups (rich and poor children) during the school year.
• By ninth grade, however, the reading achievement gap was about three years wide (ninth vs. sixth grade).
• Most of the reading achievement gap at ninth grade was due to the differential effects of summer vacation on children from families with different levels of wealth.

A meta-analysis conducted by Harris Cooper and his colleagues further demonstrate that children from low-income families lost reading achievement during the summer while middle-class children increased their reading achievement. Overall, combining the summer reading loss of poor children and reading growth of middle-class children meant that the rich/poor reading achievement gap grew about three months wider every year. By sixth grade, poor children were two years behind—even though their learning during the school year had matched the achievement of middle-class children.

Some argue this suggests that schools serving children from low-income families should be open year round. Perhaps, but summer vacation is a longstanding tradition. Even were the funding available to support year-round schooling for all poor children (and not just the lowest-achieving poor children), one might expect that some (perhaps many or most) poor children would not attend school during the summers. Given the current state of the American economy it also seems unlikely that schools serving poor children will have the funds available to support year-round schooling.

Summer Books Study

Our study was stimulated by two factors: 1) Evidence that poor children have restricted access to books in their homes, schools, and communities and 2) because of that limited access poor children are less likely to read voluntarily out of school (during the summer months). Thus, we organized book fairs in each of 17 high-poverty schools during the spring. At the book fairs poor children could select up to 15 books for summer reading. Each book fair offered approximately 500 different books selected by us based on the children’s reading levels and interests.

We randomly selected almost 1,000 children enrolled in first or second grade to participate in the summer book fairs and also selected another group of students to serve as the control group (they did not attend the book fairs and did not receive books for summer reading). Our study, then, was premised on the research showing the power of individual choice of the book on the likelihood the child would read the book. It was also premised on the assumption that providing access to a number of self-selected books would lead to children actually reading the books during the summer and that summer voluntary reading would in turn impact summer reading setback.

Our study did not provide any instructional support. We simply distributed books to children from low-income families. Nonetheless, when we examined the outcomes after three consecutive summers we found that the children who had received summer books scored significantly higher on state reading achievement tests than the control children. The size of the effect on reading achievement equals that reported for attending summer school and exceeds the effect of adopting a national school-wide reform model! This at a cost of between $50 and $75 per child per year, a cost far below that of providing summer school or adopting school-wide reform model.

Since we completed the study we have heard from a number of folks who have adapted and extended our summer books program. In each case, though, improving the access of low-income children to books for summer reading has been the target. The long-term goal, of course, is narrowing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. The good news from these schools is that just improving access improves reading proficiency.

We are not surprised that improving access to books that kids want to read results in improved reading achievement. Development of every human proficiency requires practice, lots of practice. Children with no access to books are similar to hockey players with no access to ice. Without access to ice it is impossible to develop hockey players. Without access to books it is impossible to develop reading proficiency.

Just improving poor children’s access to books they can read and want to read may seem too simple an idea for improving reading achievement. But the evidence is clear. When children from low-income families are given the opportunity to select books for summer reading they will read those books during the summer months. Reading during the summer stems summer reading loss and effectively closes the rich/poor reading achievement gap that has lingered far too long.

Further Reading

Alexander, K. L., Entwisle, D. R., & Olson, L. S. (2007). Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. American Sociological Review, 72(2), 167-180.

Allington, R. L., & McGill-Franzen, A. (2013). Summer reading: Closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap. New York: Teachers College Press.

Allington, R. L., McGill-Franzen, A. M., Camilli, G., Williams, L., Graff, J., Zeig, J., Zmach, C. & Nowak, R. (2010). Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students. Reading Psychology, 31(5), 411-427.

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., & Greathouse, S. (1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 66(3), 227-268.

Guthrie, J. T., & Humenick, N. M. (2004). Motivating students to read: Evidence for classroom practices that increase motivation and achievement. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research. (pp. 329-354). Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.

Neuman, S. B., & Celano, D. C. (2012). Giving our children a fighting chance: Poverty, illitracy, and the development of information capital. New York: Teachers College Press.

White, T. G., & Kim, J. S. (2008). Teacher and parent scaffolding of voluntary summer reading. Reading Teacher, 62(2), 116-125.

Come see Richard L. Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen at IRA 2013, where they’ll be presenting “Summers and the Rich/Poor Reading Achievement Gap.” Richard will also be appearing as part of the Teaching Edge series with “What the Research Says About Teaching So That All Children Are Reading on Grade Level.” You can see what other sessions with which he and Anne are involved by searching the iPlanner.

Richard L. Allington is a professor of literacy studies at the University of Tennessee and past president of the National Reading Conference and the International Reading Association. His books include NO QUICK FIX: THE RTI EDITION.

Anne McGill-Franzen is professor and director of the Reading Center at the University of Tennessee. Both authors are recipients of the International Reading Association Albert J. Harris Award for research on reading and learning disabilities.



Summer Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Reading Achievement Gap

Teaching Tips: What Should Be Common in the Common Core State Standards?

Alexis and Jayla came flying down the hall with concerned looks on their faces and tears in their eyes. The first thought that entered my mind was, “I am way too tired to deal with drama at 8:30 AM on a Monday morning,” but I put on my best teacher smile and said, “Girls, what’s wrong? You two look so sad.”

They looked at each other. They looked at me. They looked at each other. Finally, Jayla admitted, “Mr. Sharp, we have something very, very bad to tell you. You might want to sit down.” Alexis nodded and we headed into the classroom and sat down together at our round table.

Before we get into what they said, let me share with you a little bit about my classroom.

If you walk into my classroom on any given day you will see my fourth graders spread out all over the room reading a variety of wonderful books. You will probably see a couple of girls sitting under a table laughing their way through Andy Griffith’s A BIG FAT COW THAT WENT KAPOW. If you look on the carpet you might see a horde of graphic novel readers tuning out the rest of us as they lose themselves in the worlds of BABYMOUSE, BONE, ZITA THE SPACEGIRL, and SMILE. Keep your eyes open because I have a couple of students this year that pace while they read. We clear a path for them, mostly because we don’t want them to run into us as they devour R.J. Palacio’s WONDER or Katherine Applegate’s THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN.

I describe what my classroom looks like during reading because I want to share how celebrating all texts has created readers in my classroom that not only love books but also love and care deeply about the art of reading. I encourage my students to read a variety of genres: informational, fantasy, realistic fiction, historical fiction, poetry, etc. Students read middle grade novels, picture books, graphic novels, magazines and websites. We don’t discriminate.

Does that mean I’m happy if a fourth grader only reads graphic novels all year? No. However, I’m also not satisfied if a student reads nothing but historical fiction. I have the same conversation with the graphic novel reader as I do with the historical fiction reader. We sit down and talk about how cool it is they found a type of book they love to read, and we discuss the benefits of mixing a few different types of books into their to-read pile.

Sitting at our round table, I looked at my frazzled students and grew increasingly worried. As I listened, I found the situation much worse than I had anticipated.

Alexis and Jayla were at the local bookstore after school on Friday to purchase books for birthday presents. While they were there, they saw a very excited young girl pick up Kazu Kibuishi’s graphic novel, AMULET. They overheard the girl explain to her mom how excited she was to finally find a copy of AMULET, and she desperately wanted to buy it. The mom took the book, flipped through the pages and then threw the book onto the floor. My students choked up as they explained to me that the mom then told her daughter that comics are for babies. They described the girl’s expression as sad and embarrassed.

When they were done, the tears that were welling up in their eyes slid down their cheeks. I talked to them about how the situation made them feel and together we tried to see the mother’s side of the story.

You see, Alexis and Jayla reminded me of the importance in giving students the freedom to choose what they read. I certainly don’t believe teachers would go so far as to throw the books kids are reading on the floor, but I do believe that, as teachers, we don’t always necessarily value the choices our students are making.

It is of vital importance, however, that we do. I hope that by hearing their story, all teachers pause to ask themselves if they are doing everything in their power to help students find a series, an author, or a type of book that they will love. Because by celebrating our students’ unique tastes in books—whether it is historical fiction, fantasy, or graphic novels—we can encourage and cultivate their genuine love of reading.

Come see Colby Sharp at IRA 2013, where he’ll be moderating “The Serious Business of Writing Humor: The Importance of Funny Fiction in the Classroom” on Saturday, April 20, 2013. The panel includes authors Michael Buckley, Andy Griffiths, Laurie Keller, and Devin Scillian.

Colby Sharp is a fourth grade teacher at Minges Brook Elementary in Battle Creek, Michigan. He blogs at http://sharpread.wordpress.com/ and he helps run the Nerdy Book Club Blog. He co-hosts Twitter chats #titletalk and the #SharpSchu Book Club. He can be found on Twitter at @colbysharp.



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