By: Frank Simpkins

Frank Simpkins — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:41:03 +0000

Over the past three decades the public school system has proven itself to be incapable of addressing the cummulative deficit of Black non-mainstream students in regard to their reading performance. The approach of using these student’s African American Language derived from their social environment in the street provides one such approach that has demonstrated considerable promise. This approach strongly motivates the most difficult of these students, who have suffered many years of failure in learning to read- the hardest-core population to reach. It motivated them to read, got them excited and goal-oriented. They worked at the reading task in focused ways that teachers who had worked with them in the past had not seen them do before. They took responsibility for their reading within the social environment to which they were accustomed-working with their peers. Teachers assumed roles that oriented them to the next task and provided support as they went through the tasks. Given the positive context for the reading, they made a six-month gain in only four months of work, more than triple the gain of the students working in the standard program (Simpkins, G.A., Holt, G, and Simpkins, C., Bridge; A Cross-Cultural Reading Program. Experimental Edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Several factors which are not typical for these students must be emphasized; Their strong motivation and interest in the reading materials, the disappearance of acting -out behavioral problems that invariably characterized these classrooms, and the desire that was ignited to continue reading books the teacher suggested. The dominant atmosphere-very positive, goal-oriented, and motivated–was reflected in the improved scores following the intervention. One can only ignore the students’ response to such programs for ideological reasons, and at peril to these students’ future academic performance. This program is one example of how social science-based research can be mobilized to provide direction for the schools’ intervention plans using proven evaluation methodologies. It is time to apply what was learned from the errors of the sixties so that, truly, ‘NO CHILD WILL BE LEFT BEHIND”. (“Between the Rhetoric and Reality”, Lauriat Press,2009).

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By: Frank Simpkins