Article #1 Issues in Urban Literacy Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap

Teale, W.H., Paciga, K.A., & Hoffman, J.L. (2007, December). Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap. The Reading Teacher, 61(4), 344–348. doi: 10.1598/RT.61.4.8

Addressing beginning reading instruction in urban schools, this article proposes that a curriculum gap exists in many K–3 classrooms that operate under the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First. The authors make a case for the inclusion of systematic and sustained instruction in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing in the early grades as well as attention to the Reading First emphases on phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and reading fluency.

The problem researchers studied is that although programs like NCLB and Reading First have been put into place there are still literacy components missing from the daily instruction that will show up in later grades. These areas that also need to be addressed are instructional lessons in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing in early grades. It is not enough to address only the literacy component with these children, such as giving them 45 minutes extra literature per day. To do so will leave children lacking in other core subjects. One study was the Chicago Public Schools since 2000 were using Reading First. The problem is in 2006-2007 the school district scored so poorly in instructional writing. The study was conducted with 100 Reading First classrooms in Chicago Public Schools. The researchers found that a good ending is more likely to happen if there is a good beginning. Somewhere the teachers had lost the connection between reading and writing. The program needed to focus on all aspects of word knowledge, fluency, comprehension, and writing at all grade levels. They also found out that writing can help with phonological skills.Another study was by the Center on Education Policy (CEP, 2007) this one surveyed 349 school districts found schools canceling gore curriculum like Science for an average of 90 minutes each week extra literacy development. A strength of the article is that it shows that an existing program can be improved upon and doesn't have to be totally changed. The studies were able to successfully identify the problems and make constructive strategies for improvement. A weakness of this article is their should be more linear studies done. There were a few urban districts identified in the article, but id doesn't have enough of a representation across the United States. The implications of this article is there needs to be a connection between reading and writing to have a successful literacy program. Just because we are teaching word recognition doesn't mean the students are comprehending the reading.