The California Department of Education (CDE) hosted a webinar in January to equip local educational agency leaders, educators and other stakeholders with best practices and actionable strategies to improve literacy outcomes for Black students.
With Black History Month in full swing, now is a perfect time for administrators and governance teams to revisit the discussion between two experts who spoke on how the state’s pivot to the science of reading, state leaders’ calls for all students to be able to read by third grade, recent state funding initiatives, teacher training investments, legislation, new screening requirements and more are a promising start. However, it’s how these things translate to the classroom that will make all the difference.
Embracing student language
For students to truly benefit, there needs to be a change in long-held mindsets about how the education system dictates to students how they should speak, rather than embracing their oral language styles when teaching them how to read, explained Julie Washington, a professor and dean of the School of Education at University California, Irvine, where she also directs the California Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub.
Her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect and assessment outcomes and identification of reading disabilities among Black children, as well as on the relationship between language production, comprehension and development of early reading and language skills for children growing up in poverty.
“Considering the cultural language that students bring to the classroom is really critical for assessing their competence and for teaching them to read,” said Washington, comparing what schools must take into account for Black students to the cultural shift that has happened around embracing bilingualism among Spanish-speakers.
“We have this mistaken notion when kids come to school that they don’t know anything. Oh, contraire — They know a lot. They are not blank slates. They have a lot of skills, talent and abilities that we should be building on in the classroom when they get there,” she continued. “Every child comes to school, regardless of their race or ethnicity, as experts in the language and practices of their own speech communities. They bring that expertise to school with them, and then we discard it, and that’s problematic.”
Instead, LEAs should embrace translanguaging, or giving students access to their entire linguistic repertoire when they’re learning something language-based, like reading, writing and even math. If people, particularly children, are to succeed in learning language-based skills, they need access to their expert language in order to learn this new one, Washington explained.
“In my early years, I worked with [Los Angeles Unified School District], where they had a program that was focused on academic English mastery, and it was really focused on code switching. I would never support teaching kids to code switch in a classroom,” she said. “What I would encourage you to do is to leave them alone. Let them use their own language system to support what they’re learning. Our job is not to teach code switching and to teach reading. Turns out if you learn how to read, you learn how to code switch. You’re learning a different code as you’re reading. We see kids, as they’re learning the written code, also using that code in oral language. You don’t have to do anything really explicit in order to make that happen. Most kids will learn to use the language of school by learning to read and write and engage in school.”
Other changes worth implementing
The other panelist, Tracy White Weeden, founder of Upstream Education, emphasized several shifts LEAs could make to improve literacy rates among Black students. First, she underscored the importance of working with families. “We want to create conditions where parents feel safe, where they understand the assets that they have that are transferable to their student,” she said.
Additionally, every individual in the system — from the bus driver to the superintendent — needs to know how to support efforts to roll out literacy programs.
“Often, that’s the work that doesn’t get done. There’s an initiative, it’s pushed out, and then people are already overwhelmed and they’re like, ‘okay, here we go again, this too shall pass,’” White Weeden said. “But we need to captivate people’s imaginations about what this vision is and how they get to be a part of it. It’s not top down, it’s an all-hands-on-deck model. It’s about a very coherent approach that involves all oars in the water, and it takes a lot of planning, but it can be done.”
Ensuring assessments and screeners are evaluating students fairly and accurately is also critical to avoid further over-representation of Black students in special education, as is adapting teacher training programs at the university-level to account for how to better address the needs of Black youth.
In response to the question, “What is one key piece of advice that you would give districts and schools to keep equity and culturally responsive practices at their heart of their literacy initiatives to ensure that Black and African American students are being set up for success?” Washington pointed to a need for better state alignment — a call echoing CSBA’s calls for California leaders to adopt a coherent state support and operations plan to aid LEAs in closing the achievement gap.
“One of the things people talk about, the Mississippi Miracle, it was not a miracle. It was an alignment from the statehouse to the schoolhouse,” Washington said. “They aligned from the top, all the way down, everybody got on board. It’s starting in Sacramento, as it started there in Jackson. Everybody had to agree that it was important.”
