Interesting comment to this Walt Gardner column in Education Week on the role of parents in literacy development:
The solution is to immerse children from low literacy households in literacy rich environments from as early an age as possible.
Unless you are planning to remove children from their homes entirely, children from low literacy households are still going to spend the majority of their time outside of those literacy rich environments.
From Reaching Full Literacy in Pakistan by 2025, a report commissioned by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party Chairman Imran Khan released this week:
While it is tempting to argue that the priority is to ensure that no child leaving primary education is illiterate, the evidence from both Pakistan and elsewhere is that adult illiteracy has a direct effect on the performance of the young. In effect, addressing adult illiteracy is a key step to ensuring that all young people become literate, especially as adult illiteracy is one reason why children drop out of school early. (my emphasis)
Education leaders in Biddeford, Maine have come up with a great idea (reported in the Biddeford-Saco-Old Orchard Beach Courier): let’s take our early childhood education leaders and put them in charge of adult education as well.
If the people accountable for early childhood education were also in charge of our adult education system, I think we’d start to see adult literacy more thoughtfully integrated into school readiness strategies, as well as a stronger push for adult literacy outcomes that are more closely tied to the role that parents and other caregivers play in the literacy development of their children. (And the evidence continues to build that this is one of the key strategies we should be taking to address early literacy development.)
There are, of course, many great family literacy program models that do the kinds of things described here, but what appears to be unique and encouraging about this is that it’s a district-wide strategy.
A New Zealand Literacy group is citing research from Australia, of all places, as further evidence that “addressing adult literacy needs has the potential to create a legacy of inter-generational achievement.”
Research published last week in Australia on the effects of positive parental engagement on children’s learning has serious and urgent implications for New Zealand. Literacy Aotearoa is calling for the government to recognise that adult literacy issues affect not just the current generation of adults, but also the educational performance of their children. (my emphasis)
The study, ‘Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research,’ which was commissioned by the Australian Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau, notes that parental engagement has a positive impact on many indicators of student achievement. These include higher grades and test scores, enrolment in higher level programmes and advanced classes, higher successful completion of classes, lower drop-out rates, higher graduation rates, and a greater likelihood of commencing postsecondary education.
The study references academic research, using economic modelling to examine the impact of parental engagement. The research showed that parental effort has a large effect on student achievement, compared with school resources such as per pupil spending on teaching. That effort improved students’ academic outcomes to levels equivalent to those of students whose parents had received an additional four to six years of education.
The study also references a 2003 report into community and family influences on the education of New Zealand children prepared by the Ministry of Education.
“There are three lessons New Zealand can learn from this research conducted by our near neighbour,” says Te Tumuaki (Chief Executive) of Literacy Aotearoa, Bronwyn Yates. “The first is to confirm just how important parental engagement is. The second is to note the implications for children whose parents, despite their desire to see their children succeed educationally, are less able to positively engage in assisting them because of their own difficulties with literacy, language and numeracy. The third is to recognise the opportunity offered by this pre-Christmas report for government and communities to take urgent steps to address the high literacy needs of adult New Zealanders, as a genuinely change-making investment in families for generations to come.” (my emphasis)
Literacy & Policy 