“In Raising Scores, 1 2 3 Is Easier
Than A B C”
by Motoko Rich
Excerpts from article:
Here at
Troy Prep Middle School, a charter school near Albany that caters mostly to
low-income students, teachers are finding it easier to help students hit
academic targets in math than in reading,
an experience repeated in schools across the country.
Students
entering the fifth grade here are often several years behind in both subjects,
but last year, 100 percent of seventh graders scored at a level of proficient
or advanced on state standardized math tests. In reading, by contrast, just
over half of the seventh graders met comparable standards.
The
results are similar across the 31 other schools in the Uncommon Schools network,
which enrolls low-income students in Boston, New York City, Rochester and
Newark. After attending an Uncommon school for two years, said Brett Peiser,
the network’s chief executive, 86 percent of students score at a proficient or
advanced level in math, while only about two thirds reach those levels in
reading over the same period.
“Math is
very close-ended,” Mr. Peiser said. Reading difficulties, he said, tend to be
more complicated to resolve.
The
article continues:
Studies
have repeatedly found that “teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores
than on English test scores,” said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia
Business School. He was a co-author of a study that showed
that teachers who helped students raise standardized test scores had a lasting
effect on those students’ future incomes, as well as other lifelong outcomes.
Teachers
and administrators who work with children from low-income families say one
reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension
is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists
Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old,
children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children
with professional parents.
By
contrast, children learn math predominantly in school.
“Your
mother or father doesn’t come up and tuck you in at night and read you
equations,” said Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the Wisconsin Center for
Education Research at the University of Wisconsin. “But parents do read kids
bedtime stories, and kids do engage in discussions around literacy, and kids
are exposed to literacy in all walks of life outside of school.”
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"I like it when my students cry, when they read with solemnity
and purpose, when the project of making meaning becomes personal. My
middle school students turn again and again to highly charged young
adult novels. The poems and stories they receive enthusiastically are
the ones that pack the most emotional punch. Just as teens like to take
physical risks, they are driven to take emotional risks. For teachers,
emotion is our lever. The teen mind is our stone. 
