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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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David Boulton:
Dr. Whitehurst thank you for being here. It’s a real honor to get to talk with
you.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Pleased to be here.
David Boulton:
Perhaps we could start with a brief sketch of you. You are the very first
director of the Institute of Education
Sciences; perhaps we could start with a
sketch of yourself and the Institute.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: This Institute has a very, very important function to serve and that is to change the way that education is conducted in this country from a decision making process that is largely based on tradition or professional wisdom to a decision making process that is based on evidence. It’s our role to do two things: One is to collect the evidence that bears on important decisions, and the other is to encourage people to use it. That’s a daunting task, but one that I’m very pleased to take on.
My position prior to coming
here was a researcher, and I spent most of my career trying to do research and
collect evidence that would actually have an impact on how children are
educated. I was often frustrated by the lack of a market for that information,
for that research. So, it’s time for me to take some of the complaints I had
about the way the government operated, both in terms of the research it
conducted and the way it disseminated that research, and to take those
criticisms and bring them to bear on the way we do this and have an organization
that provides a greater type of customer service than was the case in the past.
David Boulton:
So, your job description now answers the complaints that you had before in
creating an opportunity to get some traction on bringing science rather than
mysticism to driving education.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Absolutely.
I was known for making complaints on these dimensions. So, when I raised
questions about why it was rational for me to come here and do this job one of
the very effective retorts was, ‘As you’ve been saying, this is the sort of
thing that needs to be done and now you’ve got the opportunity to do it, how
could you refuse that request?’
David Boulton:
So, you pinned yourself.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: I did.
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The
State of Reading in America’s Schools:
David Boulton:
As you know, our series is about reading. It is our sense that our society as a
whole is missing a sufficiently deep appreciation of the significance of
reading. We’d like to start off with the state of reading in America’s
schools.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: It’s a mixed picture. Students in America’s schools, in public
schools at the top of the dimension in performance read as well or better than
students any place else in the world. But we have a tremendous variation in
student achievement in reading. As you
know,
we have from
thirty-eight to
forty percent of children not reading at the basic level at fourth
grade. That means they are unable to deal with age appropriate written text and
understand the text or make reasonable inferences from what they’ve read in
the text.
We know that children who have that sort of difficulty reading in
fourth grade, without extraordinary help, are going to continue to have real
difficulties down the road…it flows into other subject matters, the ability to
finish school, the likely hood that they will drop out, they’re potential for
life success, getting a good job.
So, while in some sense we’re doing well in reading and some of our students read very well, I think it’s simply intolerable that so many children have not got it by fourth grade and all of the negative consequences that flow from that really are a national crisis, something that has to be addressed by the federal government.
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The
Difference Between Basic and Proficient:
David Boulton:
In addition to the two ‘book end’ categories, basic and advanced, there’s
a middle category called proficiency. While there’s 38-40% in fourth grade
that are below basic, the numbers go to sixty-eight percent that are below
proficient. What is the difference between basic and proficiency?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Someone who can read at the basic level can take age appropriate
text, and the assessments that we use are generally assessments based on natural
texts, the sort of books that children would be assigned in the classroom. Someone who is reading at the basic level can understand the words, can
answer simple questions about the factual information presented in the written
text and can read with enough fluency to get through the material on time and
answer questions. Students who are performing at the proficient level can go
beyond that to make reasonable inferences from the material they read.
So,
if the written material was about a thief and the thief stole something, someone
who is reading proficiently can make inferences about what that must have felt
like for the person whose materials were stolen and what the thief might do
next, or why the thief was engaging in thievery to begin with. They are able
to comprehend a deeper sense of the written material.
David Boulton:
So, instead of a kind of instrumental or more superficial basic level,
proficiency is the level we would at minimum expect or ideally like to have of
kids that can actually translate what they’re reading into some kind of more
vibrant, real experience.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, yes.
The National Assessment for Education
Progress, which is the assessment device
that we’re talking about here, defines proficient in that way. It comes at a
definition of proficiency based on a national process of collecting input from
teachers and reading specialists and others and deciding what should a fourth
grader know to be considered to be proficient.
What you’ve just
described, which is the ability to comprehend in some sense what’s read, to go
beyond that and to use the material, is the underlying definition of what it
means to be proficient.
David Boulton:
So, if we think proficiency is important rather than basic, then the other side
of basic is real trouble.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Real trouble.
David Boulton:
And on the other side of proficiency is advanced.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Advanced, and that’s wonderful.
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Are
Most of Our Children Struggling?:
David Boulton:
Yes, but that seems to suggest that most of our children to some degree are
struggling learning to read.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Most of our
children are not struggling in terms of being able to break the code. It is the
children below the basic level who, in large part, have not mastered code
breaking. Where a lot of our children are struggling is being able to understand
what they’ve read after they’ve broken the code and been able to sound it
out. What do the words mean? That’s the challenge of proficiency.
But
remember these thirty-eight percent, the children that
represent thirty-eight
percent of those assessed at the fourth grade level who are below the
basic level, haven’t even broken the code.
They haven’t mastered what would be expected at the end of first or
second grade. So they have no chance of understanding; they are simply unable
to read, in the fundamental sense, what they find on the page.
David Boulton:
But without necessarily attributing causal relationship to code, we could still
say that if sixty percent of our children, sixty-eight percent in the fourth grade,
sixty percent in the twelfth
grade, are below proficient that, whether it’s code related or comprehensional
downstream, we’re still saying most of children are at some degree less than
doing well at reading.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: They’re
certainly performing below the level that this national consensus process has
agreed is the definition of what it means to be reading appropriately at grade
level.
David Boulton:
Again, my question is, most of our children…
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst:
Have a
ways to go.
David Boulton:
Are not doing well in reading?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Most of our children could certainly be reading better than they are.
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Code
Processing Inefficiency Drags Comprehension:
David Boulton:
Related to the difference between basic and proficient, as you’ve just
described it, is that below basic is a fundamental inability to process the code
and below proficient is a less than optimal ability to translate that
code processing into comprehension.
So,
‘below proficiency’ represents this less than optimal comprehension of what
has been decoded in processing. There’s a number of pieces of work that I’ve
encountered that suggest that though people may have ‘broken the code’, the
processing efficiency related to how they’ve learned to process the code is
dragging down the cognitive processing resources resulting in this drag on
comprehension.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.
David Boulton:
So, the code, while breaking it we might say is a problem below the basic
level, processing the code as a whole is central to this whole field (below
basic through proficiency).
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Absolutely. Children who
perform at the proficient level not only can understand the words that they’re
reading and the paragraphs that they’re reading, in the sense of bringing to
bear information from their own experience, other classes, reading, home and
background to bear on what they’re reading; but they also read fluently. That
means they’ve broken the code; they can turn letters into sounds at a level
that doesn’t really require conscious processing anymore.
It’s
like the child who has learned to ride a bicycle and really has learned to ride
it. That child is not thinking about where her feet are on the pedals and how
quickly she has to turn the pedals around and whether her hands are on the brake
or not. That part of the process has been over learned and the child doesn’t
even have to think about it anymore, and can now think about where the bicycle
is going and why the trip is going to be taken and whether she should be going
fast or slowly.
Children who have really broken the code have moved to fluency. The whole process of dealing with the code is now occupying a different section of the brain; it doesn’t require a lot of thought and allows them to go on and think about what they are exposed to, what they are reading, what’s written on the page and what it really means.
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Breaking
the Code and Developing Reflexes:
David Boulton:
You say ‘broke the code’ as if there’s this digital state of either
somebody’s broke the code or somebody hasn’t broke the code. But there’s
evidence to suggest that it's actually a large gray continuum. Certainly at
one point there’s this alphabetic principle grasping, but between that and the
automaticity, the transparency of processing we’re talking about, there’s a
kind of ecology of processing efficiency that
needs to develop… unconscious, faster than thought reflexes that make all of
this flow together. Can you speak
to that spectrum a bit, the difference between this and the digital on/off of
whether they’ve broken the code?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, at one end, as you’ve well articulated, are children who
typically are still at the pre-school level or the kindergarten level, and
breaking the code for these children means understanding the underlying
principle that letters represent sounds. They may not know all the letters, they
may not know all the sounds, and they certainly may not know all the links
between letters and sounds, but the idea that these scribbles on a page are
symbols that represent sounds is the beginning of breaking the code.
At
the other end of breaking the code the whole process flows extremely fluently.
The letters are over learned, the sounds are over learned, the connections
between them are over learned and automatic, and it’s no longer necessary to
think about it.
Between those two points requires a lot of practice. I think the distinction
here is very similar to the distinction between the child who is taking his
first piano lesson. The idea is that these piano notes written on the sheet
music represent piano keys to be pushed, and the child eight years later who has
not only taken piano lessons, but has practiced daily or weekly, who can play an
etude and do it
fluently and people actually enjoy listening.
That
long process of practice, of use, of reading, of cracking the code, or in the
case of piano playing, playing a lot of piano, that gets you to the point that
that whole skill portion of it, the underlying skill base is taken care of. The
piano player can think about interpretation and making it sound good, the reader
can think about what it means. It’s a lengthy process; it’s a dimension that
requires a lot of activity, a lot of practice.
David Boulton:
So, that meta cognitive freedom from the drain of having to volitionally
participate. One of the distinctions between piano playing and reading is that
as I’m reading the note to cue my fingers, I don’t have to read seven more
notes to figure out the note I just read.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, I
don’t agree. Being a terrible, but persistent pianist, I would not agree with
what you’ve just asserted. Somebody who is a competent musician is, in fact,
looking quite far ahead on the page.
David Boulton:
Far ahead in advance of what they’re actually playing?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: In advance
of the particular note that their finger is playing if it’s a piano. They are
a measure or two ahead, just in terms of the time it takes to translate the
notes on the page and the motoric action, they’ve got to be ahead.
David Boulton:
Does it change the note?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. To the
fluent musician how a particular note is played is very much a function of what
came before and what’s coming next. Crescendo makes sense only in the context
of how loud it’s ultimately going to be played and where you start it. So, there is a contextual nature for performing music that may not be identical to
the contextual nature for reading but bears similarities.
David Boulton: Okay, good. I actually took this opportunity in our conversation to explore that and of course what I’m pointing to is the fact that the letters do not have distinct sound relationships, they are actually the center of a potential field of possible sounds. They are only resolved in context which requires this never-before-in-the-nature-of-the-human brain processing to disambiguate, rather than just “decode."
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David Boulton:
Why is reading so important to our children? We touched on this a moment
ago, but I’d like to elaborate on this. There’s the developmental, both
cognitive and emotional. What do we know from an education science point of view
about the correspondence between how well children learn to read, and the
infrastructure of their cognitive abilities and their emotional development?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: The functions of reading are many. At the fundamental level, the level I think everybody understands, reading is a critical academic task. It’s critical not only in the sense that Language Arts is a core component of the curriculum for elementary school children, but also in the sense that every area of the curriculum starting in elementary school depends on fluent reading.
Math
is not simply a matter of doing addition or subtraction, but understanding word
problems. You can’t understand word problems unless one can read. So,
the skill components of reading, both in terms of being able to do the task of
reading as it’s required by schools and doing all of the other subject matter
that depends on reading, I think is obvious and straight forward.
In
some sense some of the more interesting aspects of the functions of reading go
beyond the obvious and have to do with the ability of children to think
differently in a way that derives uniquely from written text.
Writing is different in many cases from oral communication.
Oral communication depends
very much on a shared understanding and background between the people having a
conversation. You and I are having a conversation that shares certain
assumptions about my part about what you know and don’t know, and your part
about what I know and what I don’t know, much is communicated non-verbally.
Writing
has a unique function of incorporating within the written text everything that
one needs to know in order to understand the text and it generates a different
way of thinking. Preliterate societies, even adults in those societies, don’t think
in the way that people do in societies that are literate. And
so the process of education, being an educated person in the Western tradition,
I think, depends very much on being able to read and read fluently.
Another
aspect is simply knowledge itself. So much of what children come to know cannot
be learned directly. At the pre-school level there are children who are very
familiar with what an elephant is, what an elephant does, who have never been
around an elephant. They get that information from books.
I can tell you something about atomic fission and atomic bombs and I’ve
never been around one that I know about, but I picked up that information from
books.
So,
the frequency with which children read and the information they collect from
that experience becomes very much a part of who they are in terms of the way
they understand the world, their base of knowledge and the ability to think
well. It's all of those aspects of reading that are important.
Finally, there’s the aspect of reading for pleasure. To be able to be lost in a book, to enjoy that activity, to be able to engage in the empathy that comes out of literature and fiction is an experience that those of us who have been involved in it think of as one of the core aspects of living well. Individuals who are prevented from having that sort of experience because of lack of reading skills or reading fluency, I think, are missing out on a significant portion of what it means to enjoy life.
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Reading
and Cognitive Health and Development:
David Boulton:
In support of some of the cognitive science pieces of this, reading is also this
implicate cognitive exercise environment that, in addition to the possession of
knowledge, is exercising the capacity for linguistic distinctions that are
pretty much at the core of extending verbal intelligence. Would you agree with
that or is there something you could say that would go into the cognitive
ecology or cognitive health that comes from or gets exercised by reading?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: In some sense, reading and
thought become the same thing. To think deeply about something in a way that
is culturally valued often means to be able to articulate one’s thoughts in a
structured, logical way. The experience of reading well, as well as
reading widely, allows a person to do that.
David Boulton:
So,
the capacity for meta-cognitive analysis of what you’re thinking is
enriched and exercised by the process of learning to read more richly and
diversely.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Absolutely.
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Reading
Skill Predicts Academic Success:
David Boulton:
Relative to academic success, and you can speak to this however you feel
comfortable with, we’ve heard some people like Anne Cunningham with the
Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and others speak to the
predictability of overall academic success being determined by reading efficacy
in the first and second grade. That how fast somebody comes up into reading is a
pretty accurate predictor of their entire academic success.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: It is. Knowledge of letters
of the alphabet on entry into kindergarten is a very powerful predictor of
reading success at the end of tenth grade. The predictive relationship is an
unusually strong one for a span of eleven years in a child’s life.
Of course, knowledge of reading of letters of the alphabet is simply one measure
of a child’s entry into the world of reading. If you look at the other end of
the age dimension in terms of predictability, SAT scores, the verbal portion
of the SAT which carries the greatest degree of prediction in terms of college
success, the verbal portion of the SAT is a reading test. The
SAT scores can be predicted from earlier measures of reading.
So it is, in addition to socio-economic status which largely is connected to the reading ability and cultural proficiency of one’s parents, probably the single strongest predictor of a child’s academic success.
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Children’s
Futures all but Fated by Reading:
David Boulton:
What we’re getting as we start to explore the facets of this is that it seems
as if our children’s futures are all but fated, not fated, but all but
fated by how well they learn to read.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes,
that’s true. Particularly if we go back to the bookend analogy. Those
children who are the caboose on the train, at the bookend on the left side of
the books, are children who are at substantial academic risk.
Children who are failing
at reading at the end of the first grade are extremely likely to be failing at
reading at the end of fourth grade. And failure in reading strongly predicts
failure in all other academic subjects. So, a child who is not breaking the code
well, who has not figured it out, who is falling behind, is a child whose
academic life course is at risk and because of that whose life is at risk
because the economic opportunities of life.
Again, at the lower end of the dimension are ones that have profound effects on not only obvious things: quality of life dimensions, how much money one earns, or the neighborhood one lives in, but actually have effects on longevity, on how long you will live.
So, reading again, is absolutely fundamental. It’s almost trite to say that. But in our society, as it is structured, the inability to be fluent is to consign children to failure in school and to consign adults to the lowest strata of job and life opportunities.
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Prison
Cells and Reading Scores:
David Boulton:
We were interviewing Lesley
Morrow, the Past-President of the International
Reading Association, and she made a
statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some
states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.
Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you
look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who
are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the
law and the need for jails down the line.
Literacy for societies,
literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of
success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign
of failure.
People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.
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The
Cost of Our Nation’s Reading Difficulties:
David Boulton:
Going on a broader, macro level - what does our population’s reading
difficulties cost our nation? I’m not looking for precision, I’m looking for
magnitudes of order. Economically, in terms of our global economic competition
and in terms of the intelligence of our population and what that means about the
security of our nation over the longer view.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: It is
impossible to quantify the cost associated with reading failure or the
advantages that flow to societies whose citizens are highly literate, who read
well and read deeply and widely. It is clear, however, particularly in the
context of a global economy, that increasingly the competitors of the United
States, economic competitors, competitors in terms of ideas and philosophies,
are competing in a way that undermines the ability of citizens in the United
States to perform well based on the types of skills that involve lifting and
pushing and using muscles. They are skills that depend increasingly on high
levels of education. And even within high levels of education, the effects of
global markets are that its only value added by special types of education,
including high levels of literacy, that ultimately are going to allow us to
compete well.
Software jobs that pay sixty
dollars an hour in the United States are now done for six dollars an hour in India. For our
citizens to compete, they have to bring to the software business a higher level
of value. That value comes from the ability to conceptualize problems, to
come up with novel solutions, to be creative, to think about how to market,
speak to the world, speak to citizens of the United States, and all of those
abilities flow from the understanding of a culture and oneself and other people
that depends on reading.
David Boulton:
So, as we said, reading is profoundly connected to this meta-linguistic verbal
intelligence, and what makes us competitive is this innovative intelligence.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, absolutely. Innovative intelligence is a type of verbal intelligence. Verbal intelligence flows, depends on, and has a foundation in reading.
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Hundreds
of Billions of Dollars:
David Boulton:
Back to being more specific on the economic implications. I’ve heard ninety million adults are not reading above the
fifth grade level and are losing a couple hundred
billion dollars a year in potential income, as it’s projected by literacy
organizations, because they can’t read. I’ve heard there’s ten to fifteen billion
dollars in research and federal spending and literacy program expenses. As you
said before, it’s hard to get a handle on. But even in the roughest possible
terms, what could we say the economic drag of this reading problem is in some
kind of numbers?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: At the federal level, the
U.S. Department of Education, a substantial portion of the Department’s
discretionary budget, which is roughly fifty-three
billion dollars a year, is spent on
problems that are related to reading.
Title
I, which is our single largest grant program, which is a grant program for
schools that serve children from low income backgrounds, is a grant program that
is focused primarily on the problems of low academic achievement, and reading is
at the core of academic achievement.
One could look into other
areas of the department’s budget such as drop-out prevention or safe and
drug-free schools, and find that these problems are correlated in the current
circumstances in which there are large populations of kids who are not being
served well by the schools, who are not doing well academically.
So,
simply at the federal level, the cost of supporting academic achievement and
reading is substantial. The federal budget is only about eight
percent of the national
expenditure on K-12 education. And so, if one imagines that simply in terms of
elementary and secondary education, states and localities are spending in like
kind for issues related to reading, then the cost just in terms of primary
education becomes substantial.
What
goes into law enforcement issues and jails, all the rest, under-employment,
unemployment insurance, the need to support women and children who are not
employed - all of these issues are connected to literacy and education.
Presumably the cost for these programs would go down substantially in concert
with increasing levels of literacy and education attainment.
David Boulton:
So, just in terms of magnitudes of order, not even counting the lost opportunity
cost dimensions of adults who are not reading well, we’re talking about
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, absolutely.
No question that the price tag is
hundreds of billions of dollars; both to support the normal acquisition of
reading and certainly to deal with the consequences of reading failure.
We
know that the earning potential of a college graduate is over twice that of a
high school graduate - connected to reading ability. We know that students who
finish high school and have only a high school degree, but get the high school
degree as a regular degree rather than an equivalency degree, earn at
substantially higher levels. And so again, that’s connected often with
reading: reading success and reading failure.
So,
it’s hard to find a problem that’s not connected to reading.
Certainly under employment and employment at low levels of wages is very
frequently a reading problem.
I
had a conversation with an individual within the last year who runs a business,
a large chain of garages, and who now, in recruiting mechanics, checks their
reading scores and their math scores before employing an entry level mechanic. Even in trades that have traditionally been manual trades or trades that
are craft trades, the requirements of literacy, both numeric literacy and
reading literacy, have increased to a level where the inability to perform or
the ability to perform depends on literacy levels that weren’t previously
required and places new demands on our education system.
One thing I think worth considering is that it’s a moving target. The literacy requirements for proficiency, cultural proficiency, fifty years ago were substantially lower than the literacy requirements for proficiency in the twenty-firstt century. And we’re going to find because of global competition that we’re going to have to read better at higher levels, and the overall efficiency and efficacy of our education system for reading is going to have to continue to improve. We can’t rest on success defined in 1950 terms, it won’t get the job done.
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David Boulton:
There’s another consequence to all of this. We’ve been talking about
dollars, we’ve been talking about academic success, we’ve been talking about
economics, jobs, national intelligence and so forth. But reading, if it works
great, we can say is this fundamental, necessary, but insufficient thereafter,
instrumental skill. We’ve got to do it. But for those who don’t, the
consequences go far beyond just the economic and academic difficulties, as
powerful as they are. There are psychological-emotional-developmental issues.
What can you say to that?
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: The ability to be self-aware
and self-reflective is a double-edged sword. The ability to think about what
you’re doing and think about what other people are doing and conceptualize
what that means for you personally or for your family members is very much a
product of literacy and the ability to read. The capacity to manage oneself, to
deal with personal problems, to think in terms of long term consequences of
one’s actions rather than in terms of short term consequences. Rather than
doing this thing today that’s a lot of fun, I will do this other thing because
a week from now I’ll be better off. The ability to delay gratification, work
hard, depends on thinking abilities, cognitive abilities that are connected with
literacy.
So,
there’s much here that is outside of the formal understanding of print that
has to do with the ability to act in ways that are self-fulfilling and that
manage one’s own resources successfully, both in the positive end in terms of
planning, as well as dealing with stresses and vicissitudes of life.
If you can think it through, if you can read a book and find out that somebody else has gone through these problems and think about how to apply these experiences at a distance from one’s own circumstance, you can handle things better. I think that is important to the psychological development of children and for the ability of our nation in terms of its citizenry to think about what it’s doing and makes decisions at a ballot box, for example, that are based on reasonable projections of long term self-interest rather than the emotional vicissitudes at the moment.
