Literacy Wars

A vast majority of the participants in the war of literacy agree that individual tutoring by a trained teacher for struggling students is very effective alongside regular school instruction. However financial problems arise for the cost of tutoring because the schools that can least afford it are the schools where it is most needed. It has been known that many schools provide tutoring by people that are not teachers. The tutoring is typically from parent volunteers and sometimes by paraprofessionals. This nonprofessional tutoring program is not very effective because it is usually single-schooled and the teachers do not practice the most effective tools. As Robert Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education and the creator of a school wide reform technique Success for All, states “having an adult sit with a kid and read back and forth may be successful... but not [for] improving reading performance for a kid who's running into a lot of trouble learning to read” (qtd. Rosenberg, Tina). The children have a need for organization, special attention and a step-by-step curriculum which is shown in the article An Untapped Force in the Fight for Literacy by Tina Rosenberg.

Many schools use task-shifting because it is beneficial where resources are short. They can teach the students well at an affordable rate because of the movement of jobs to the lowest paid and lowest-trained people. This is more beneficial because it saves money and there are no worries about having to pay teachers overtime. A well respected group MDRC founded an organization called Reading Partners, and another organization called AmeriCorps that helps with the improvement of literacy, and can help with the financial problems.

The volunteers of AmeriCorps, which started in 2003, are used by the Minnesota Reading Corps organization. This program is capable of working with any curriculum. They receive money from the federal government either as a full-time or half-time tutor. Full-time tutors teach about 15-20 students at once training for only 3 days. The children are tutored five out of every seven days for 20 minutes each. They are taught ten different lessons that the schools’ reading specialist chooses at every gathering. Spreading in 2012, within 2 years, the AmeriCorps program has reached 7 other states. In Minnesota 30,600 ( 85%) students out of 36,000 students are in the program. It is believed that the resources needed for effective tutoring are in every state due to literacy experts living there. Some people have opposing views on the resources because the program costs about 800 dollars a student; a cost that is too expensive for some states. Michael Lombardo said “If California were to replicate the program on the same scale as Minnesota, it would take the entire AmeriCorps budget”(Michael Lombardo); this shows an example of how the program is too expensive for some states.Because of this reason, it makes it difficult to scale the AmeriCorps program nationally.

If a school decides to join Reading Partners they must accommodate a room and some money that can range between $10,000-$25,000. AmeriCorps members are interlinked with this program so they are hired to supervise the volunteers and arrange tutoring so that it is in the daily reading instructions. The site coordinators train for a couple of weeks before the school year begins and then constantly coaches throughout the year. Parents or community members volunteer and work about one hour each week with as many children as the program allows. The students get two forty-five minute tutoring sessions a week. As the site coordinator watches and coaches the tutors, the tutors are sitting at different stations with normally 8 tutor/student pairs in a room. Detailed lesson plans and scripts are used to direct the tutors what to do in each lesson. To keep the program efficient, the tutors are recommended to take notes. Note taking is important when it comes to absences because it provides the fill in tutor with an understanding of what the child needs help on and they can pick up where the student left off last. The student to teacher relationship matters because typically students feel more confident in asking questions to someone that they are already use to. The principal, Kristina Beecher, believes that the program should be based on increasing the childrens’ confidence, understanding of the material , and the resulting test scores.

A common problem is that individual tutoring is sometimes too expensive for some families so family members and community members volunteer to help the students who are not reading at their grade level. Finding organizations that can help train the volunteers at a low cost is very useful for this matter.

The researchers of the MDRC discovered that Reading Partners is efficient for a variety of schools and students and it is not very expensive. Reading Partners does not vary by grade level and it benefits the students with low literacy skills the most. The key component to the results are loyalty and faithfulness because it guarantees that the tutors can perform the lessons correctly which makes the struggling students more successful.

I believe that a child who works with a tutor in person, one-on-one, is more capable of overcoming his/her literacy challenges alongside with normal teaching while also making tutoring affordable. It is most common for people to open themselves up and be comfortable with one person, than it is to have to be comfortable with multiple people. Individual tutoring gives the students a chance to ask questions and make mistakes more openly. If the tutors are teaching correctly and by the students needs, then the students will learn more quickly than trying to learn in a group that has too many students and not enough one-on-one time. This can be related to everyday life because most people feel more confident in a smaller group of people than in a bigger group of people. Imagine how you would feel in a position like this. An example may be performing a song or dance in front of a crowd, or speaking in front of a lot of people. A person will typically feel more comfortable if it was in front of 10 to 20 people compared to 50-100 people.With volunteers teaching these struggling kids, it makes the programs less expensive. If there are more volunteers, the percentage of students overcoming their illiteracy is sure to increase.The fight for literacy is ongoing, but children will soon defeat this fight.