Though the audience was small, the moviegoers who gathered in Cronin Auditorium last week to watch “The Right to Read” came away with a broader understanding of the importance of reading for all children. The 2023 film follows NAACP reading activist Kareem Weaver as he visits schools from California to Virginia, emphasizing that reading is a civil right. “Illiteracy,” Weaver says, “is the pipeline to prison, the pipeline to homelessness, to unemployment, to depression.”
At the Dec. 11 School Committee meeting, Superintendent Linda Dwight had already described the formation of a literacy task force for the Harvard district. The 13-member task force includes administrators, classroom teachers from grades 1 through 4, specialists in language arts and speech, and an outside consultant. Among the key questions for the task force, Dwight said, is how the literacy curriculum can reflect current research on best practices and meet the needs of all students.
Introducing the Dec. 14 showing of the film, Dwight noted that 80% of Harvard students in grades 3 to 8 meet or exceed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standards in reading and language arts. School leaders and teachers “spend sleepless nights,” she said, thinking about how to help the other 20%.
Nationally, only 32% of fourth-graders scored as proficient readers, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation’s report card. Massachusetts had the highest scores in the nation for reading proficiency; yet even here, only 43% of fourth-graders can read proficiently.
In “The Right to Read,” Weaver and the teachers he works with call for explicit, sequential steps for students to become proficient readers. As an example of a successful program, he cites “The Electric Company,” a 1970s television show with a strongly phonetic approach, and also “Sesame Street.” (In another television connection, the film’s executive producer was LeVar Burton, formerly of “Reading Rainbow” and “Star Trek.”)
According to the film, remote schooling during the COVID-19 epidemic revealed to many parents that their children were struggling to read. And parents also saw reading being taught in ways that did not seem to help their children improve. While much of “The Right to Read” was devoted to emphasizing the seriousness of the literacy problem, Weaver also focused on weaknesses in the programs known as “whole language” or “balanced literacy,” which have been in wide use for decades.
Well-off families, Weaver says in the film, can afford individual tutoring for their children. But poorer families—often minorities—cannot pay for the extra help. That divide, he and the NAACP conclude, makes literacy a civil rights issue as well as an educational one for the whole nation.
After the movie, Dwight, Principal Rebecca Katsh-Singer of Hildreth Elementary School, Director of Pupil Services Michelle DellaValle, and English language arts specialist Beth Robinson collaborated in answering questions from the audience. Although fewer than a dozen people besides the educators attended, discussion was brisk.
Dwight said phonics was already part of the reading program in Harvard when she came to the district as principal in 2011. A recently adopted program, she said, makes phonics a larger part of the instruction from kindergarten to third grade.
One audience member asked how much time teachers spent on phonetic decoding skills in the early grades. Robinson said students in kindergarten and first grade have a half-hour block each day specifically on phonemic awareness (identifying individual sounds in spoken words) and phonics (relating those sounds to letters). Research shows a half-hour is the best length for such a focused session, she said. Students also have a 90-minute literacy block each day when they read aloud, read with a buddy, or write.
Other questions touched on the use of “invented spelling” by beginning writers, screening tests to identify children with reading problems, whether parts of the current curriculum should be eliminated, and more.
The film presentation was sponsored by the Harvard schools and the Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC).
