Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates
It’s a fact: The ability to read, and hit key proficiency benchmarks in elementary school, is the foundation of a quality education. But statistics indicate students in poor communities, and particularly African American and Latino boys, are struggling to build a knowledge base on sand.
That’s why on National Read Across America Day, the annual celebration of the birthday of author Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—experts from education policy think tanks to the White House are focusing on literacy as a way to stem the stubborn “graduation gap." Reading is being promoted as a way to end the above-average dropout rate of minority kids compared with whites—and plug the school-to-prisons pipeline.
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“It’s one of the early warning indicators,” said Gary Chapman, executive vice president for impact and operations for Communities in Schools, a national network of organizations committed to ending the dropout crisis. by the time they get to high school, “if kids are offtrack in any of those areas, they’re much less likely to graduate.”
“We find in so many ways it’s their lack of on-level reading abilities that’s driving their lack of interest in school,” he said. Now that the U.S. public school system is majority-minority for the first time in its history—and most of those children receive free or reduced lunches, a sign that their parents are struggling—breaking the link between dropout rates and literacy is crucial, experts say.
Education policy analysts agree that mastering reading by the end of third grade is a critical touchstone for young learners. That grade is the turning point between learning to read and reading to learn. Students who miss that benchmark are up to four times more likely to drop out of high school. Among struggling readers, the dropout rates are twice as high for African American and Latino students as they are for white students.
While parents and other caregivers are usually a child’s earliest reading teachers—something taken for granted in affluent white communities—the problem of struggling readers is “more an indication of the poverty level that’s Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates - Yahoo News: