Book Club Chapter 1

Tracy, Ryan and I met to discuss Chapter 1 of Dr. Allington's book, What Really matters for Struggling Readers". We discussed three main questions:
1. What must we do to combat the research that shows parent educational levels and family income are closely related to achievement? Isn't this out of our control?
Research shows if mom and dad don't have high school education, child will more than likely struggle in school.  Also, children from poor families are more likely to struggle, but on the other hand research shows that a child from a single parent home where that parent is educated, does not struggle.

2. What should schools do to create more students who "do" read instead of who "can" read?  This was one of the 3 challenges that Dr. Allington discusses as being issues facing U.S. education. We must find ways to capture the interest of students in what they are reading.

3. How do we give struggling students everything they need in the regular classroom and then pull them for 30 minutes extra instruction? Do we pull them from math? Science? Social Studies? etc.... "Pulling" a student from instruction during the school day fragments the day and causes instructional time to be lost.
Dr. Allington states that there is reasonably clear evidence that we can teach virtually every child to read and have most of them reading on grade level by the end of first grade.  We found it interesting that Dr. Allington stated in a paper that he read (Scharlach, 2008) "reported that two-thirds of the teachers studies did not believe they could teach all children to read", so therefore they set lower expectations for their students and came up with excuses as to why those students could not learn to read.  We all agreed that many different programs can be bought and implemented, but a particular program will not work for every student and every school.  The success greatly depends on the effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom.