Can an electronic device actually improve literacy skills?
Schools with high percentages of low-income students are seeing promising gains in reading ability and enthusiasm since they’ve introduced tablet reading programs in about 30 schools in Brevard County, Fla.
Mackenzie Ryan of Florida Today writes about Christopher Jamian-Fleck, a student at Emma Jewel Charter Academy, who earned his own tablet computer last year and became an ebookworm with the help of a reading program called MyON.
While home sick, Jamian-Fleck began exploring the program’s library of 20,000 books and learned to read with the help of a program that highlights each word as it is read. (Other features that can assist kids with dyslexia or those that simply need extra help include the ability to increase font size or listen to the book read aloud.) The eight-year-old zoomed ahead from struggling with literacy to reading above grade level.
His grandmother Marcy Fleck says, “He wasn’t a reader before this, and now he’s enjoying it so much. He finds out things he never knew he was interested in. And he can go at his own pace.”
In fact, Christopher wouldn’t be able to check out books from his school without the tablet program because it doesn’t have a library. The charter school couldn’t afford to build one, so it used funding from the United Way to pay for MyON and Kindle e-readers for kids. Many of the families in the school don’t have Internet access or computers, so the e-readers make it possible for them to read e-books.
The program appears to be working even at schools with well-stocked libraries; Ryan writes that one principal noticed check outs of old-fashioned books at the school library increased once the digital program sparked the kids’ interest in reading.
Teresa Wright, who directs Brevard’s Early Childhood and Title I programs is working to secure funding to allow more low-income schools to get the program and the tablets it requires. “We’re hoping that students will have access before the holidays,” she says. “Reading is like a sport, the more you practice the better you get.”
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Tag: Low-Income Education
For Those Most in Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Free Solar Energy
Normally, the families that can afford solar panels are the ones who are least in need of the energy savings that accompany the green technology. But now, a new program in Denver is giving some low-income households free access to solar energy.
The charter elementary school Academy 360 (80 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch) in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood focuses on health and wellness in its curriculum and provides wholesome breakfasts and lunches to all its students and encourages plenty of exercise. And now, the new solar program, which was announced by Denver Mayor Michael Hancock last month, should bring more overall wellness (not to mention budget savings) to the families of each of the 125 students enrolled in the school.
Last year, Colorado became the first state to give people the option of accessing solar energy by subscribing to a solar garden connected to their houses via an energy grid, rather than purchasing and installing their own solar panels. This type of thing isn’t legal in every state, but four years ago Colorado legislators passed the Community Solar Act, allowing for partnerships between solar and electrical companies.
The first two solar gardens were located in Colorado Springs, and now a company called SunShare is bringing this option to Denver. The first subscribers will receive six-tenths of a kilowatt of solar energy and should see their home energy bills reduced by twenty percent, according to Anthony Cotton of the Denver Post.
“When I was your age, I used to see these magical solar panels on houses, and I wondered what they did,” Mayor Hancock said as he spoke to the Academy 360 community. “They were very expensive to have then, and they still are. But because of this project, we’ll all be able to share in affordable energy.”
SunShare CEO David Amster-Olszewski tells the Post that he thinks the program will bring a variety of benefits for the Academy 360 families: “It means they’ll be able to put healthier foods on the table or buy more sports equipment for their kids’ health.”
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More Diversity Doesn’t Have to Mean Decreased Social Mobility
Not only can Salt Lake City boast of its beautiful scenery, but it can also tout that it’s one of the best places in America for a low-income child to have a chance at becoming an economically-secure adult.
The Utah city (along with San Jose, California) has a social mobility rate comparable to Denmark, a country with one of the highest rates of relative mobility in the world. Poor kids in Salt Lake City have a 10.8 percent chance of zooming from the bottom fifth in income to the top fifth. (In contrast, Atlanta and Milwaukee have lower social mobility rates than “any developed country for which data are currently available,” according to the 2013 study by economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.)
Salt Lake City’s secret, writes Nancy Cook for the National Journal, was “less economic segregation, a good public school system, strong family stability, a reliable social safety net, and less income inequality. Areas with less urban sprawl and less racial segregation also performed better in the rankings.”
But Salt Lake City has become a different place than the one captured in the aforementioned study, Cook notes. The majority of people in Utah’s capital city used to be Mormon, but according to the Salt Lake City Tribune, the religious group is no longer the majority. This matters because the Church of Latter-day Saints makes a point of providing a wealth of services for its members and encourages families to stay together.
City officials are working to maintain their social mobility rate even as the population becomes more diverse and income inequality rises. Rosemarie Hunter, the director of The University of Utah’s University Neighborhood Partners, says, “Thirteen years ago, the university looked at its data and realized that two ZIP codes in the city had virtually no students coming to the university. That was a huge red flag.” So Neighborhood Partners began to visit the west-side neighborhoods that weren’t sending kids to college, forging partnerships with businesses and community leaders to help get these kids on the right track toward higher education.
Additionally, the Salt Lake City School District has opened community centers serving the poor and offering dental services, medical care, and education.
Natalie Gouchnour of the University of Utah told Cook, “This state has a good network of taking care of people in need. Part of that comes from the Mormon culture, but part of it is just the ethos of the state.” Pamela Perlich of the Salt Lake Bureau of Economic and Business Research agreed with her, saying that her city has “the tradition and wherewithal to do something” to stop social mobility from decreasing.
With Utah setting an example with its housing-first program to end homelessness and its progressive attitude about immigration reform, it has a good chance of maintaining its status as a great place for people of all income levels to live.
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One Little School on the Prairie Has Big Achievements
Money can’t buy you brains. And it can’t purchase you good grades, either. But just because you’re lacking financial resources doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve academic success.
The rural community of Grand Island, Nebraska is populated with many families that live below the poverty line; they make their living packing meat, processing potatoes into French fries, and working at fast-food restaurants. At the town’s Wasmer Elementary School, there are twice as many Latino students as white, and 86 percent of the kids live in poverty. Based upon this, statistics would normally suggest that the school’s standardized test scores wouldn’t be so hot.
But astonishingly, Wasmer Elementary K-5 students score as high as children enrolled at the most affluent schools in the state, with 91 percent of kids achieving math proficiency and 87 percent reading proficiently — thanks to the concerted effort of their teachers, principal, and staff.
Principal Betty Desaire told Joe Dejka of the Omaha World Herald that there isn’t any magic formula to the school’s achievements, which come from a combination of high expectations, focusing on each child’s needs, and emphasizing the importance of testing and learning math facts. Additionally, the school holds students accountable for completing homework, and itinvolves everyone in the school — including the lunchroom staff and the janitors — in making sure the kids succeed. Wasmer is so in tune with her students’ needs that at the school carnival last year, the most popular prize the PTA offered was a new bed, because some kids don’t have a proper place to sleep.
“Betty Desaire and the school staff, they just get it, so much,” Wasmer PTA member Tracy Overstreet Gartner told Dejka, “And they are focusing on each kid individually. It’s incredible. They make it a team effort. … I get emotional about this because it’s so great.” For its achievements, in 2013 Wasmer Elementary School was named a Title I Distinguished School along with 45 other high-poverty schools across the United States.
Principal Desaire is due to retire at the end of the year, but everyone believes that the system she put in place will continue to help Wasmer’s students beat expectations for years to come.
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What’s the Answer to Keeping Low-Income Tweens Interested in the Arts?
Without a doubt, the buzziest buzz word in education is STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But some argue that, since children derive such great benefits from the arts, that acronym should be changed to STEAM, to highlight the importance of creative endeavors.
According to Lisa Phillips’ book The Artistic Edge: 7 Skills Children Need to Succeed in an Increasingly Right-Brained World, kids learn skills such as confidence, creativity, problem-solving, perseverance, accountability, focus, and non-verbal communication from the arts. Studies have shown that the benefits of an arts education for low-income children are even greater. But many kids drop out of after-school arts programs when they hit the tricky tween years (ages 10 to 13).
To curb the rate of abandonment, Peter Rogovin and Denise Montgomery conducted a survey for the Wallace Foundation. They interviewed 250 tweens in seven different cities across the country and spoke to directors of successful arts programs. The tweens said that they desire accomplished teachers who are practicing artists, and they want their arts programs to culminate in a public event at which they can show off what they learned to an audience. (Turns out, kids don’t mind preparing for that piano recital after all.)
Not surprisingly, tweens also want to use current technology to engage with the arts, and they want to get right down to making art, music, or videos, rather than hearing a lecture about it first. (This infographic, provided by the Wallace Foundation, illustrates some of their findings.)
This study demonstrates why programs like The Harmony Project in Los Angeles, which provides music instruction to kids in poverty, are particularly important. Not only does their work enhance children’s cognitive development, but it also helps prevent them from joining gangs. And that, is music to our ears.
MORE: Music Can Change A Troubled Kids’ Life. Here’s the Proof.