Today’s Literacy Headlines

In 2015, when the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), advocates hoped it would help states focus on improving academic achievement for kids with learning and attention issues. But a new report shows that states aren’t stepping up. The report was created by the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), Understood’s managing founding partner. It’s the first-ever look at students with disabilities under ESSA, the nation’s K–12 general education law. Many students with disabilities have learning and attention issues, like dyslexia and ADHD.

Digital citizenship skills are an important part of today’s teaching and learning culture. Our students are growing up in a fast-paced, technologically advanced world, where the integration of digital safety needs to be a priority. As an educator with a background in elementary education who works with future teachers, I love starting every class with a read-aloud. Each course I teach has its own unique collection of read-alouds that integrate class topics. Following are some favorites from my course, “Technology for the Elementary Classroom.”

Our assumption coming in to this study was that attendance impacted students’ opportunities to learn by reducing their time in the classroom. If this were true, we reasoned, the association between days missed and learning would 1) be about the same for excused and unexcused absences and 2) increase as the number of absences grew (and it got harder and harder for kids to catch up to their classmates). Instead, we found that unexcused absences had a much stronger association with achievement growth than excused absences. In fact, having even one unexcused absence was much more predictive of negative academic and socioemotional outcomes than having 18 excused absences. And that first absence was a killer—absences above three days had much more modest associations with learning than those first critical days. Students from low-income families, African American students, Latinx students, and students with parents whose education stopped at high school were more likely to have unexcused absences than other students.

Jobs in the stem fields are among the fastest-growing occupations in America, according to the Pew Research Center. But as with girls and people of color, students from rural areas have been mostly left out of the push to prioritize stem, and many, like veteran teacher Deborah Cornelison—a proud third-generation Oklahoman—don’t want to leave their hometown for a job at a big company like Google or General Electric. That’s why Cornelison’s approach to science education sought to orient her stem teaching around students’ ability to take what they learn and improve their communities—regardless of what discipline they choose as a career. Science in Cornelison’s classrooms was just as much about the future of innovation as it was about values such as self-sufficiency, work ethic, and collaboration.

October is National Dyslexia Month. Dyslexia is a neurological disorder, not an intellectual one, and it may be more common than you think! Assistant Professor of Social Work at Southern Connecticut State University, Carmela Smith, says students with dyslexia tend to score higher on standard IQ tests, on average, than students without the disorder. Those with dyslexia score particularly high on tests measuring critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving ability. Professor Smith says many students with dyslexia are never diagnosed, or are diagnosed years after challenges come up.

From picture books and early chapter books in which cases are solved by clever animal detectives to novels involving the sleuthing (and even spying) of young people, the well-crafted “whodunits” highlighted in this week’s column will have readers using their own powers of detection as mysteries are solved.

The popular author-illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka has explored a lot of terrain in his inventive stories for young readers. There’s “Punk Farm” where the livestock has hidden musical talents and the school where the “Lunch Lady” serves sloppy joe’s and justice. But with his latest book, a graphic memoir, Mr. Krosoczka, 40, has mined his childhood to tell a story that is very much relevant today amid the opioid epidemic plaguing the country. “Hey, Kiddo” is about being raised by his grandparents in Worcester, Mass., because Mr. Krosoczka (pronounced crow-sauce-KAH) did not know his father, and his mother was battling a heroin addiction that eventually claimed her life. It is a story that the author has seen resonate with audiences at schools around the country. “There are so many kids out there whose parents do terrible things,” he said during a telephone interview while on a family vacation away from their home in western Massachusetts. “It’s important for kids to know that it doesn’t make them a bad person.”

A new study on children across the U.S., published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, finds that when they spend more than two hours on screens every day, they tend to perform more poorly on tests of cognition. The may not come as a total shock, given the research in recent years—and much anecdotal evidence—but it is nice to have more confirmation in the form of research findings. The study, by researchers at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, looked at data from 4,500 children aged 8-11 from 20 locations across the U.S. Their parents answered questions about their usual screen use, their sleep, and time spent in physical activity. The children also completed a cognitive test, which measured executive function, attention, working memory, episodic memory, language, and processing speed.

Ron Ferguson, an economist at Harvard, has made a career out of studying the achievement gap — the well-documented learning gap that exists between kids of different races and socioeconomic statuses. But even he was surprised to discover that gap visible with “stark differences” by just age 2, meaning “kids aren’t halfway to kindergarten and they’re already well behind their peers.” And yet, there’s a whole body of research on how caregivers can encourage brain development before a child starts any formal learning. It’s another example, Ferguson says, of the disconnect between research and practice. So he set out to translate the research into five simple and free ways adults can help their little ones. “Things that we need to do with infants and toddlers are not things that cost a lot of money,” he explains. “It’s really about interacting with them, being responsive to them.”