Text of Paper by Thomas E. Zurinskas for the Spelling Society Convention, which was formerly the Simplified Society of 1908 and now The English Spelling Society (TESS)
June 8, 2008, in Coventry, England
The Costs of Poor Reading Skills
Introduction.
Hello. Greetings to all. I am truly honored to have been invited to speak at this conference on the 100th anniversary of the Simplified Spelling Society, now called the Spelling Society.
My name is Tom Zurinskas creator of truespel. For over 20 years phonetic spelling has been my passion. Truespel is the world’s first and only spelling system based on English that can also serve as a “pronunciation guide” in dictionaries. You could think of it as the end result of the quest for a regular, phonetic spelling of English. And you need to know where you are going before you start to go there.
Truespel (spelled as one word with one “l”) is available for free via the converter at truespel.com. The web converter there takes truespel everywhere by respelling the entire internet in truespel phonetics.
I thank the Society members for their input on truespel through the SS email forum.
Executive Summary
We in the SS feel that the non-phonetic spelling of English is the final brick wall that must be broken down to increase reading skills. The data I give here show the frustration of educators and governments in boosting poor reading skills and the commensurate costs involved. With governments coming into play for reading instruction, perhaps they might at last focus on the primary problem that the SS recognizes – that the final barrier is English spelling itself.
The topic today is the cost of poor reading skills. My data are from internet articles and forums I’ve frequented over the years. Many costs are cited as well as many methods to relieve them. While it is frustrating to see failure, each failure is a step toward the right solution.
My own unique truespel approach is to recognize not only that English spelling is user unfriendly, but present phonetic spelling is user unfriendly as well. The truespel way forward is to solve both problems at the same time by first analyzing English spelling as I’ve done, finding the best spelling for English sounds as I’ve done, and going forward with a simple phonetic spelling that then leads to simplified English spelling. If English spelling were phonetic, it has the potential to cut down English dyslexia by half, according to Paulesu in Science 2001.
How Many Poor Readers Are Out There?
Statistics Canada in 1997 found that among 16- to 65-year-olds for six English-speaking nations 42% to 52% were very poor readers or illiterate.
In 2003 a sample of adults in USA was given a reading proficiency test and only 13% were rated proficient (87% not proficient). Surprisingly, only 30% of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy on that test.
For adult literacy, Thomas Sticht, an adult reading expert, reports that testing in 1992 and again in 2003 shows little or no improvement in literacy.
According to a 1992 study by the National Institute for Literacy, "43% of Americans with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty and 70% have no job or part-time jobs. However, of Americans with strong literacy skills, only 5% live in poverty."
A basic writing skills survey in the UK undertaken by educational software developer Basic Writing Skills recently revealed that 67.97% of Britain’s adult population has below average basic literacy skills.
The Biggest Cost is Education.
Researchers presented literacy costs at a symposium held at Columbia UniversityUSA.
- High school dropouts cost the US about $158 billion in lost earnings and $36 billion in lost state and federal income taxes for each class of 18-year-olds.
- Increasing graduation rates in the US by only 1% would correlate with about 100,000 fewer crimes annually, saving $1.4 billion a year in law-enforcement and jail costs.
- Increasing graduation rates in the US by 10% would correlate with a 20% reduction in murder and assault arrest rates, reported by a group called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. A lot of bad behavior comes from the low self-esteem of not reading well.
Reading Problems Lead to Dropouts
"Poor readers are six times more likely to drop out of school than typical readers, also they are three times more likely to consider or attempt suicide, according to a study by Stephanie Sargent Daniel.
Dyslexia is a big part of reading problems. Dyslexia (the inability to read by otherwise capable folks) accounts for 80% of all learning disabilities in the US and UK. It affects between 5% and 17% of the population according to the USA National Institute of Health. Interestingly, their report also says that phonics instruction is a good step for dyslexics to rewire their brains. The brain needs channeling through the decoding part of the brain to build the automatic word recognition center of the brain. Proper instruction can accomplish this, as can be seen with functional MRI brain blood flow studies.
Dyslexia was found in 18% to about 22% of boys, compared with 8% to 13% of girls from ages 7 to 15 according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The US Congress Tries to Help
In 2002, the U. S. Congress passed the currently-in-effect No Child Left Behind Act. It holds that schools receiving federal dollars should use only educational programs or practices that have been proven scientifically effective.
Congress then established the “Reading First” program, to institute a “scientific” approach to teaching reading in the early grades. Reading First has been called “the largest concerted reading intervention program in the history of the civilized world.” Its cost so far is $5 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets.
For Reading First, schools choose from a list of approved reading instruction programs. Unfortunately, the schools have not picked so well. While Reading First is not hurting, it’s not helping students so much. Overall reading comprehension for the focused grades of 1, 2, and 3 has not increased. Funding has been reduced to $400 million this year by Congress, cut 60%. The cost of federally funded and mandated tutoring has doubled in each of the past two years. This is a cost to taxpayers. Tutors are paid as much as $1,997 per child and could become a $2 billion industry. Tutors can help keep a child from being held back.
A held back child means another year’s cost to educate that child. Education spending in the USA during 2004-05 on average was $10,377 per child. Some say an additional $20 billion should be spent, especially for high tech gear despite $500 billion of taxpayers dollars already spent for school improvements from 1995 to 2004.
Testing School Performance is Tricky
US national government data often differ from state data. They use different standards. Recent state data show the average fourth grade proficiency is 70%. However, the yearly national report card test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) finds that only 30% of US fourth graders are proficient readers.
Georgia just updated the difficulty of its tests, and the results out just last month show 40% of its 8th graders are in danger of being held back. Some test.
Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist from Microsoft, said in a September 2007 Parade Magazine interview that we need proficiency tests and that ours should be tougher and more uniform. "Testing is the only objective measurement of our students," he contends.
He also says that as for those who say tests will stifle creativity, lead to dull classrooms, and teach students only how to pass tests, he replies: "If you don't know how to read, it doesn't matter how creative you are. More than a third of the people with high school diplomas have no employable skills.”
Bill Gates argues for using phonics to teach reading. "When we gave up phonics," he says, "we destroyed the reading ability of those kids." Behind this statement one might think Bill might be thinking; “Wouldn’t it be great if spelling could be made more phonetic.”
The NAEP national report card says that high school senior scores in reading (as well as math and science) and graduation rates have all remained flat over the past 30 years.
The "Nation at Risk" study of twenty years of "educational improvements" since 1983 revealed no substantial change in our nation's educational status. The only way to reduce school dropouts and increase student performance is to put effective teachers in the classrooms, said Sandy Kress, who served as a senior education adviser to President Bush.
Dropouts
A lack of the ability to read can lead to high school dropouts, which create a big cost. Nearly 80% of dropouts depend on government health-care assistance.
In California each year, about 120,000 students fail to get diplomas by age 20, according to the California Dropout Research Project report of 2008. It’s estimated that each annual wave of dropouts costs the state $46.4 billion over their lifetimes because people without a high school diploma are the most likely to be unemployed, turn to crime, need state-funded medical care, get welfare, and pay no taxes. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “When more than one million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe."
Nearly half of the Latino and African American students due to graduate in 2002 when they started high school failed to complete their education, according to a Harvard University report.
Poor Reading Ability and Crime
A study reported in the American Journal of Child Development looked at pre-school twins in Wales, UK, born in 1994-5 comparing behavior and reading ability. No genetic link was seen. Those who had difficulties at age five with readiness to read, such as a small vocabulary and poor verbal skills, became increasingly involved in anti-social behavior - mainly bullying others, telling lies, stealing," "Their reading skills had gone down as well. And those who were aggressive when they entered school also fell further behind in reading," This was not exhibited in girls and was not genetically linked to twin siblings.
A 1999 on prisoners in Texas done by the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston found that 41.5% of inmates scored low enough on reading tests to indicate they were dyslexic.
More than a third of the adult convicts released from Texas prisons in 2002 were functionally illiterate, and half of those could not read at all according to the Dyslexia Research Foundation of Texas. They found much the same true for youths. Those who could not read were much more likely to end up back behind bars as adults.
Among teen offenders incarcerated by the Texas Youth Commission, the study found, "Eighty-three percent were reading below grade level when they were released, and almost half of those were reading at four or more levels below expectation."
That study said that for every 1,000 nonreaders released from prison it costs taxpayers $4.8 million more in recidivism than those released that can read.
That study also said that for every 100 teenage offenders released with a second-grade reading level, compared to an 11th-grade reading level, it costs taxpayers almost $2.6 million more in recidivism. The recidivism rate is 62% for slow readers versus 36% for good readers.
An Yet for Those Who Do Graduate from High School
"Only 18% of our high school graduates are ready for a good job or college," said Charles McMahen, chairman of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Business Council.
In Maryland, 33% of incoming high school freshmen will need extra help in reading, according to the 2006 Maryland School Assessments released last month. In Virginia, 24% of 2007’s high school freshmen needed additional support. And according to 2005 test results in WashingtonD.C. public schools, 7% of middle and high school students needed special help with reading.
CaliforniaStateUniversity reports that 46% of freshmen entering the college campus last fall were unprepared for college-level English and 37% unprepared in math. The past seven years have produced no changes in English, slightly better in math.
Is English so important? The news from Feb 2008 is that the best predictor of college success is the writing portion of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) given to college- bound. The administers of the SAT compared test scores from 150,000 freshmen entering 110 colleges in 2006 to their year end grades. The study suggests that the writing test is the best single predictor of freshman grades.
The University of California drew a similar conclusion from an analysis of its incoming 2006 freshmen and their grades.
These findings show that higher literacy skills lead to higher education.
Immigration is a Factor
Hispanics, the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority group, now account for about one in four children under 5 years old in the United States, according to U. S. Census Bureau. The study reported in the May 1 2008 Washington Posts predicts that the Latino population will double from 15% today to 30% by 2050.
The number of students who are learning English has more than doubled, from 2.03 million in 1990 to 5.01 million in 2004, according to the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs.
Yet language teaching lags. In 2007, half of all language learners in the sample schools received no special instruction in English, US Census auditors report. The other half received two to three hours a day. Auditors also reported that between 2006 and 2007, 63% of the sample language learners remained at the same English proficiency level or regressed.
Don Soifer in July 2006 says that possessing strong English language skills is critically important to succeeding in the United States. Immigrants to the United States can raise their earnings by well over 20% if their ability to speak English is raised from "not well" to "very well."
There is an Upside to Being Bilingual.
Instead of being handicapped, bilingual children who learn their family's language as well as English do better at school, research suggests. A study appearing in the Review of Educational Research, by Robert Slavin and Alan Cheung of JohnsHopkinsUniversity, showed that children in bilingual programs consistently outperform those in all-English programs on tests of English reading.
A team from Goldsmiths, University of London, analyzed a group of primary school children in England using two languages in math and English lessons. They found that, using two languages actually deepened their understanding of key concepts.
What Can Be Done for Literacy
Teacher training is an issue. A report called "Educating School Teachers," released in September 2006 says “Despite growing evidence of the importance of high-quality teaching, the vast majority of the nation's teachers are being prepared in programs that have low graduation standards and cling to an outdated vision of teacher education,” The report, issued by the Education Schools Project says that 61% of education school alumni say their teacher-education training did not prepare them well to cope with the realities of today's classrooms, according to a national survey conducted for the study.
According to a recent report released by the National Council on Teacher Quality, only 11 of 72 colleges surveyed nationally taught all five of the basic tenets of the "science of reading" to prospective teachers. Those five tenets, according to the National Reading Panel of 2000, are the most effective approach to teaching reading. They include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The “No Child Left Behind Law” and “Reading First” programs adhere to these tenets. However, nearly a third of the surveyed institutions made no reference to reading as a science in any of their reading instruction courses. In addition, the report found that the most commonly used college literacy textbooks are not founded in scientific research at all and that many college courses for prospective teachers are more fluff than substance. If teachers did use the scientific approach to reading instruction, the National Council on Teacher Quality estimate the present reading failure rate of 20% to 30% could be reduced to 2% to 10%.
In my home state of Florida, teachers are evaluated yearly. In an attempt to provide accountability of instructors, Florida established the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) to test how well students have learned. In 2007 the failure rate jumped from 15% in 2006 to 19% in 2007 for third-graders. Third-graders can be held back if their scores are at the lowest level. Schools are given a grade from A to F based on student results.
In Miami-Dade and Broward county Florida, more than 22,000 of the 44,820 high-school sophomores failed the FCAT reading exam, and more than 11,400 failed the math test. (Note that there are about 50% Spanish speaking people in these counties.) They will have six more chances to retake the tests before their classmates graduate. If they fail, they will not graduate. Only about 15% who retake the reading test as seniors pass.
If students do well on the FCAT the school gets an A. To award high achieving schools, Florida distributed $134 million to more than 1,500 schools in 2006 that scored an "A" on the FCAT or made substantial testing gains over the previous year. Thus, schools are graded on students’ performance. This kind of accountability does not go over well with all people.
"Teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world," said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and former president of ColumbiaUniversityTeachers College. "Like the fabled Wild West town, it is unruly and chaotic. There is no standard approach to where and how teachers should be prepared. Accreditation does not assure program quality either, according to the report. In 2005, of the top 10 out of 100 graduate schools of education ranked by U.S. News and World Report, three were accredited, but in the bottom 10, eight were accredited. Looks practically like a reverse relationship.
However, teachers appear well trained. The National Education Association President, Reg Weaver says, "Today, teachers are more educated and experienced than ever before." The majority of the nation's 3 million teachers have at least a master's degree and average 15 years experience. In addition, more than 75% of all teachers participate in professional development related to their grade or subject area.
So, what’s going on, here? There are lots of efforts with not much improvement in reading. Have we reached a barrier beyond which we cannot go? Perhaps it can be shown now that different approaches, such as simplifying spelling, could be the only way to break through the lid on reading performance. Can we finally see the forest for the trees?
Improving Reading Instruction Methods
Linda Borg writes in November 2007 that some schools have turned to “direct instruction” to master basics of reading. Direct instruction is an old style teaching method. It has its roots in phonics or skill-based instruction, a bottom-up approach that starts with the basic parts of words and moves toward reading as a whole. First lessons begin with sounding out letters, followed by combinations of letters. Proponents of phonics instruction say that children are better able to decode words after learning how to decode sounds and letter groups.
A 1977 study, Project Follow-Through, compared the achievement of high-poverty students receiving direct instruction with students in other experimental programs. Direct instruction students outperformed students in every other program on every academic measure. Follow-up studies also showed that students taught this way in the early grades experienced lasting benefits, according to a report by the American Federation of Teachers.
However, there is a problem. The floundering “Reading First” initiative is also said to be following “direct instruction” methods and also following the advice of the USA National Reading Panel on the 5 tenets of best reading instruction techniques. Yet reading comprehension appears not to have gained significantly. A recently reported observation by some is the possibility of foot-dragging by educators toward the No Child Left Behind goal of 100% literacy by 2012, claiming backloading by educators to show best results at the end rather than beginning of the schedule.
Perhaps the UK will do better with their reading instruction patterned on the successful tests using “synthetic phonics” which appears to use the direct instruction method as well.
Other Tactics to Reduce Literacy Costs
Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning at the University of Washington, explained "Our studies now show that infants' abilities to distinguish speech sounds at 6 months of age correlate with language abilities." "The better infants are at distinguishing the phonetic units, the better they are years later at other more complex language skills. Already by 12 months, infants have the rules down,” Kuhl said. Children with language and reading problems have trouble distinguishing the basic sound units used in speech. It has been found by Stanovich (1986) that “phonemic awareness” is a key attribute of successful readers.
A 2008 Harvard Education letter cites a report that says literacy starts at home. Teachers have long urged parents to read aloud to their children. But now there is a second and perhaps more powerful message: Talk to your kids, too. Mounting research links language-rich home environments with reading success. Children from three to five are “ripe” for engaging in rich language learning.
To help with this, a USA company has developed an unusual approach. It’s a voice recorder that tucks into a child’s clothing and records all the sounds in the environment. At the end of each day software evaluates the exposure the child has had to verbal stimulation and the child’s own utterances. The device generates percentile rankings that help assess a child’s language development. The inventor, Terrance Paul, was inspired by a well-known 1995 study that found that professional parents uttered more than three times as many words to their children as did parents who were on welfare. The children in the less talkative homes turned out to be less verbal and to have smaller vocabularies. Other studies have suggested that these gaps affect later professional success.
Boys Versus Girls.
Boys are not doing so well in literacy and education. Today there are 133 female college graduates for every 100 males. During the K-12 school years, girls have long tested better in reading and writing on national exams. However, boys outperform girls in math and science tests, though the gap between the sexes is narrowing in these subject areas.
Boy/girl statistics are given by Indiana public schools:
Dropouts for 2002 and 2003 are 60% boys.
Held back pupils for 2002 through 2004 are 60% boys.
Special education pupils in 2002-2004 are 66% boys.
Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki writes in the Free Press Education Writer, May 2007, that Boys learn differently than girls. “You can teach boys anything as long as you don't do it in a boring way.” She says, “Women, with the best of intentions, teach classes in ways that are compatible with their learning styles. People are concerned. Boys are dropping out more than girls, fewer boys are graduating from high school than girls, fewer boys are going to college than girls. "I think a lot more of it has to do with temperament," Somers said. "Boys are a lot more active. So if you're not doing something to stimulate them they get bored. Boys can make the grade, if they're not bored.”
A new 2008 UK study claims Boys at primary school perform 'significantly' better in English tests if they are taught in classes with fewer girls. Research from BristolUniversity, which used data from every state school in England, found that as the proportion of girls rose, the results achieved by their male classmates fell. Steven Proud, who carried out the work, concluded it 'might be beneficial for boys to be educated in single-sex classes in English.
In the US, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has broadened federal regulations on single sex programs. The number of single-sex programs in public schools nationwide has jumped from three in 1995 to more than 366 today, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
“Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women.” That's the upshot of a study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at SwarthmoreCollege. Dee's study is based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders that was conducted by the Education Department in 1988. Today roughly 80% of teachers in US public schools are women.
Smaller Schools Appear to Work
In New York City the mayor’s decision to break up many large failing high schools has achieved some early success. Graduation rates at 47 new small public high schools opened since 2002 are substantially higher than the citywide average for June 2007. For the smaller schools, 73% graduated in 2007 compared to 60% in 2006. Not least of all, 81% of their graduates apply to college.
Optimum USA high school size according to a 1997 study by Valerie Lee and Julia Smith should enroll between 600 and 900 students. Size matters, they believe, because it affects social relations within the school and the school's ability to provide a strong curriculum for all students. It appears that enforced bussing does not help.
Researchers at the National Foundation for Educational Research in England in 2002 looked at 3,000 high schools and found best results were obtained in medium-sized schools with a body of about 180 to 200 students per grade, and the worst in the very small or very large schools. Boys and girls also did better in single-sex schools, especially girls in single-sex comprehensive schools.
Private Schools No Big Difference
The Center on Education Policy released a report examining the academic outcomes for low-income students attending public urban high schools compared to those attending private schools. The study, based on an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools.
Homeschooling Appears to Work
At the Scripps National Spelling Bee in June 2007, 12% of the competitors were homeschooled compared to 2.2% of the nation's school-aged children.
Homeschooled students have won the past three Florida state spelling bees. Homeschool advocates say homeschoolers win because they have focus, family support and a genuine interest in their education.
In the national geography bee, four of the last seven winners of have been homeschooled.
While homeschooling was once illegal in many states, it has been legalized in all states since 1993. The movement is said to be growing by 10% or more a year.
Virtual Schools May Help
State virtual schools (attended at home via computers) are among the fastest growing programs in K–12 public education in the US. Twenty-eight states in 2006 have virtual school programs, up from 4 states in 1997. In 2005, some 139,000 students enrolled in at least one course through a state virtual school. Utah leads the way with Florida second.
Almost one-third of all Utah high-school-age students participated in Utah's ElectronicHigh School last year, 2007. Student enrollment in that program jumped from fewer than 1,000 students in 2000 to nearly 50,000 in 2006.
Virtual courses in Florida have grown seven-fold over the past six years. We might expect a half-million students to enroll in state virtual schools in just a few years.
Blogging Helps Literacy
A survey of teens, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, explored the links between out-of-school writing and informal electronic communication. Results show that 47% of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons compared to 33% of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53% of non-bloggers say the same thing.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that English appears to be defiant to the many attempts to improve reading. The biggest reason is the nature of the beast itself, the irregular letter-sound correspondence of English spelling and the difficulty it creates in decoding English as presently spelled. The quest of the SS has always been to regularize spelling and solve the decoding problem to help those least adept to read and write.
One proof that decoding is a problem is that data by Paulesu 2001 show that English has twice the number of dyslexics than languages more phonetically spelled. Thus, the SS has always had a worthy mission focusing on the major problem of English for learners. Perhaps in academia when all other efforts are exhausted for teaching reading and writing, the educational establishment will realize this.
We here in the SS have various approaches to ameliorating the problem. Many of us have given much effort to it, all with the best of intentions. I commend us all.
My truespel phonetic notation establishes a phonetic English spelling in a special way that can also serve as a “pronunciation guide” in our dictionaries. It is the only notation of English that can be the great integrator. It can link our dictionary keys, translation guides, and beginners reading instruction methods for the first time. Truespel serves as a model way to go in achieving an end result of regularization of English spelling. We need to know where we are going before we start going there.
My four books on truespel are on the table outside and I’d be delighted to talk to you all. My poetry book is there as well.
I congratulate the SS on its 100th anniversary. And I congratulate it on its insight. For it seems as though, with all the trouble that education has had in breaking through literacy levels, it might consider the message of the SS and join in making the English language easier for us all to do - Simplified spelling.
Thank you and good bye.
Thomas E. Zurinskas