Educational Leadership

How Elena Learned to Love Reading

Students who live in poverty lose three months of reading achievement each summer.

Let’s change that.

Kathy King-Dickman

One evening last summer, I meandered to the mailbox thinking about how much I missed my middle school students. I had recently retired from 32 years of teaching. As I sorted the mail, a letter from Elena fell out.

Mrs. D., At the beginning of summer I made a goal to read at least three books. I just completed my ninth book and have already started the tenth.;.;.;. Many people tell me the main character in your favorite books is who you want to act like, so you change your personality to be more like that character. I believe them. For example, because Katniss in The Hunger Games was brave, I started acting as brave as I could. Books have helped change the way I act toward people and look at problems. I guess in my own way I can say you have taught me to walk two moons. 1 Thank you for teaching me to write and read.

I taught Elena language arts from 4th to 7th grade. I’d received dozens of text messages from her that summer, each sharing some discovery she’d made in her reading or her plan for what she wanted to write. By reading throughout the summer, Elena—who comes from a family with no steady income and who attends school in one of Colorado’s poorest districts2—was beating the odds.

Research shows that, on average, students who come from poverty achieve less academically and drop out of school at a higher rate than their wealthier peers (Krashen, 2011). According to an interview with Anne McGill-Franzen (2010) in Reading Today, a meta-analysis of 39 studies found that poor students lose an average of three or more months of reading achievement every summer, whereas economically advantaged students gain a couple of months.

Students from poor homes usually
spend their summers with fewer
education or enrichment opportu-
nities—and fewer available books. This
effect has been termed the summer
slide—which, of course, doesn’t mean
a wild ride that ends in a refreshing
splash. This slide can result in a poor
student being as much as four years
behind a wealthier one in terms of lit-
eracy skills by the time both students
graduate from high school.

Getting to Engagement

How can we motivate students who live in poverty to read and write from June to September? The broader question is, How can we make them excited about reading all year? Richard Allington (2007) says that to keep students reading in summer, we must place books in their hands that “they can and want to read”—but it isn’t just a lack of books that leads to the summer slide. It’s a lack of motivation.