Dr. Peter Leone: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

David Boulton: And we don't see it that way. We don't see that we've got this technology -- it's like saying we're letting this many children have their lives mangled because they can't learn to program a VCR when they're five.

Dr. Peter Leone: Yeah.

David Boulton: And it's every bit as much a technological thing.

Dr. Peter Leone: Uh-huh.

David Boulton: I actually appreciate just stretching out and having this dimension of conversation with you as well.

Dr. Peter Leone: This is pretty interesting stuff, David, kind of exposing me to some new ideas. I certainly don't tread in this whole area of neurobiological work, and some of these concepts of shame.  

The interview you are reading continues after the following message...  (skip message) Share this:   Tweet        Please sign up to receive notices when we post new articles, videos, and updates. Sent by Google's FeedBurner. Easily unsubscribe at any time. Never any spam. Welcome to the Children of the Code Project, a social education project intended to help catalyze and resource a transformation in our society's understanding of 'what is at stake' and 'what is involved' in learning to read. The transcript you are reading is one of over 160 interviews conducted for the Children of the Code documentary series which is being produced for television, DVD, and the web.   EXCERPTS FROM THE 100+ VIDEOS (4+ HOURS) OF VIDEOS AVAILABLE ON OUR DVDS The better your understanding of the challenges involved in learning to read  the better your ability to help children through those challenges. Our allegiance is to the health of our children's learning. 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City Workshop & Last One Picked, First One Picked On Dr.Charles Perfetti Professor, Psychology & Linguistics; Senior Scientist and Associate Director, Learning R&D Center, U. of Pittsburgh, PA Arthur J. Rolnick Senior V.P. & Dir. of Research,  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis;  Co- Author: The Economics of Early Childhood Development   Dr. Richard Venezky  Professor, Educational Studies, Computer and  Information Sciences, and Linguistics, University of Delaware Dr. Keith Rayner  Distinguished  Professor, University of Massachusetts, Author: Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing Dr. Paula Tallal  Professor of Neuroscience, Co-Director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University Dr.John Searle  Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California-Berkeley, Author: Mind, A Brief Introduction Dr.Mark T. 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David Boulton: One of the most interesting things here is that when you talk to the people that spend a lot of time in those spaces, they're saying less than five to six percent of our population has any neurobiological learning disability that's affecting reading... (Wendorf, Lyon, Shaywitz)

Dr. Peter Leone: Uh-huh.

David Boulton: And that ninety-five percent of the kids that do have trouble here, they're having trouble because we didn't meet them the right way. (Doherty)

Dr. Peter Leone: Wow.

David Boulton: Ninety-five percent. This is from the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Reid Lyon, and backed up by our friend, James Wendorf.

Dr. Peter Leone: Yeah.

David Boulton: Right? So we have eighty-eight percent of African-American fourth-grade children who are reading below proficiency, nationally; eighty-four percent in the twelfth grade. Eighty-four percent of the twelfth graders and ninety-five percent of them are in trouble because we didn't meet them right. (NAEP 2000-2003)

Dr. Peter Leone: Wow.

David Boulton: It connects up to everything that you're seeing in your world.

Dr. Peter Leone: Yeah. Well, like the idea that we typically label it their failure, but it's our failure.

David Boulton: Oh, it's absolutely our failure. And the biggest thing that's our failure is that we don't understand the challenge.  Even though some of us get an idea that it is a technology, it's a code, and we invented it, and so forth, there's a kind of default level assumption that, "Well, I did it, and everybody else that I run around with did it, so there must be something wrong with these people that can't."

Dr. Peter Leone: Right, right.

David Boulton: But they're just developmentally, in terms of the environments they were learning in, in a different part of the readiness spectrum and because of that, having their lives mangled.  

Dr. Peter Leone: Absolutely. I think the downside of high stakes testing is that these kids that are not particularly confident are very vulnerable to exclusion from school. Because if your classroom, if your building is evaluated in part on how kids do in the aggregate, you're going to want those kids that are performing at the low end out of your building.

David Boulton: Right. Which is why there's a massive migration going into special ed, so as to keep the general population in schools. The way that they're being measured in relation to the latest legislation...

Dr. Peter Leone: Yeah.

David Boulton: I mean, it's incentive engineering. I can appreciate the Reading First people and the IES people and others who've said, "Look, because there's so much failure and it's our fault, we've got to do something about it. We can't wait until everybody catches up, so we're going to create the kind of institutional incentives and penalties that will drive the machinery of this towards better results relative to what these kids are needing." (Doherty) But it's just such a titanic scale problem.

Dr. Peter Leone: And for the kids that are in it right now -- I mean, for their brothers and sisters five, ten years down the road there may be some real significant differences, but for the kids that are caught up in it right now, they're the ones that are getting pushed out of school. They're getting pushed into special education, but they're also getting pushed out.

An interesting study came out of New York City a couple of years ago that showed where the cohort of the class of 2001 high school kids went, kind of looking over four years. More of them were administratively discharged from the system than officially dropped out and the number that graduated was a small -- I don't recall the exact number -- but a small percentage of those that initially started in the ninth grade. In a number of the high schools there were more discharges than dropouts.

Talking about research, one of the things that we've been doing is we've been working with a group called Advocates For Children in New York, which have case file material on forty-two kids. These are kids who, after they got in trouble, were put in community-based placements. They applied to get back in school. The school said, "You can't come back in." They said, "Why not?" They said, "Well, you've been signed out. You've been discharged, you're sixteen, and besides, you don't have to if you don't want to." Or they would say, "You've got to go to school in another borough that might be an hour away or forty-five minutes away by subway.

David Boulton: In other words, "You're not our problem anymore."

Dr. Peter Leone: Exactly. Then the subtext probably is something like, "Hey, you weren't a high performer when you were here. It's better for us if you're not here, because we won't look as bad."

David Boulton: "We had to take you the first time, we didn't have a choice. But now that we know who you are and what you're likely to do, we don't want to dilute our efforts."

Dr. Peter Leone: Exactly.

David Boulton: It’s tragic. All of this continuing to reinforce in the child -- I mean, when we've interviewed little five and six year-old girls in the Oakland area and other places, it's very clear that once they start to feel this way about their performance, they immediately start to develop some kind of self-rationalization, some story that they tell themselves like, "I'm stupid…”

Dr. Peter Leone: Right.

David Boulton: "I'm not smart. I'm not a good reader." Or the other side of the thing is: "Who needs reading anyway? It's not that important."

Dr. Peter Leone: Right, right.

David Boulton: But these are all different strategies for getting out of the feeling of staying inside of, "This is important, and I'm not good at it."

Dr. Peter Leone: Absolutely. And for some kids it's kind of a sports rationale, for other kids it's, "Who needs it?" Or kids talk about, in kind of quasi kind of professional terms, they'll say, "Well, I have dyslexia," or "I have yadda, yadda, yadda," and this is my way of telling you “Don't hold me accountable.'"

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Peter Leone: I think this is an exciting project, David. My understanding is that one of the things you're trying to do is kind of ramp up the level of awareness pretty broadly.

David Boulton: We want to bring a major thump that says we're thinking about this whole thing wrong. Not just a little bit of us -- generally, our society, as a society, is not seeing what's going on when children are struggling to learn to read. We're not seeing what it's doing to their general capacity for learning, we're not seeing what it's doing to their emotional development, we're not seeing all of these various correspondences that resolve down to a technology interface issue that's radically confusing these children.

We’re trying to bring a big thump, and connect it so that parents, as well as teachers, realize what's at stake in every second of their interaction with a child during the struggling to read process. We want to connect the history of the alphabet and the English written language, and why it's so confusing, and the stories of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt -- I mean, it's a fantastic story -- to what happens in less than twenty milliseconds between the time the eyes hit the orthography and the phonology pops in the center of our brain, that difference. The twenty or thirty milliseconds of difference in processing between the orthography and the sound system is what's killing these kids. (Rayner),

Dr. Peter Leone: Wow.

David Boulton: It's what's wiping out these kids.  So bringing all these different dimensions to play with credible force, and at the same time, we're wanting to network. We want to be something that not only is helping get attention for each of the dimensions, such as yours, but that's folding back, so that we're cross-pollinating the learning in all of these different zones.  

David Boulton: Whether we're concerned about the well being of the individual child, which, thankfully most of us are, or coming from another level which doesn't seem so concerned with that, but is concerned with the cost of social pathologies. It doesn't matter which side you come in, we end up in the same place here.

Dr. Peter Leone: Right. I think in creating, in essence, self-interest arguments, whether we're concerned about the massive costs to all of us as taxpayers, or whether we're concerned about kids that might look like our own children, or our nieces or nephews or our grandchildren, it doesn't matter. The issue is that this is a really significant problem, and in helping people understand how it affects them, either as taxpayers, or as people who care about children, or as employers who want to hire people that are literate and capable, whatever the motivation is, we need to help people understand the self-interest argument in doing things differently for kids.

David Boulton: Exactly. Well said. We are working on translations so we can talk to people in adult literacy, ultimately to people in the juvenile world, to people that are in the neuroscience world; in other words, a different stairway into here from many different themes that relates to here.

Dr. Peter Leone: Right.