I applaud the Tribune’s editorials on literacy. Success in school, employment and life is utterly dependent on the ability to read and write. Ensuring that our state’s children are literate has a profound impact on Illinois’ future workforce, economy and safety.
At Friends of the Children-Chicago, we work with children in communities impacted by poverty and gun violence. We’ve seen how literacy opens a child’s world and buffers the impact of trauma. When a child is literate, school is a welcoming place where they can learn and flourish. When a child struggles to read, school becomes alienating.
There is an alarming correlation between early low literacy skills and children later dropping out of school and/or being incarcerated. Seventy percent of incarcerated adults cannot read at a fourth grade level, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.
It’s exciting to see the recent success of science-based approaches to teaching literacy. At the same time, the illiteracy crisis is about more than curriculum. It’s about helping children who have experienced the traumas of poverty and violence get into a brain state to learn.
Meeting a child’s basic needs and ensuring that they feel safe and calm are vital, yet commonly overlooked, conditions to learning. If a child is hungry or reeling from a violent event, their body and brain are simply not ready to learn. A dysregulated child often acts out in the classroom and struggles to concentrate.
A trauma-informed approach to teaching literacy means that we tend first to a child’s well-being before shifting to reading skills. The educator is attuned to the child and notices if a child becomes overly frustrated, sad or scared and pivots to address the child’s needs.
That level of attunement and flexibility can happen in school only when teachers and aides are adequately resourced.
At Friends of the Children-Chicago, we mobilized the trusting relationship between our kids and their long-term mentors to address low reading scores. After one year of intensive literacy interventions, the number of our kids (K-7) reading at grade level increased by 24%, with an additional 20% progressing by at least one grade level.
As we work to ensure Illinois’ future prosperity, investments in trauma-informed literacy approaches should be a high priority.
— Taal Hasak-Lowy, executive director, Friends of the Children-Chicago
Editorial on reading
As an educational researcher, I knew immediately I had to look at the data the Tribune Editorial Board used for the editorial “On childhood literacy, Illinois could learn a lesson from the Bayou State” (March 26). Below is a different description with links to the data for readers:
- Louisiana is to be congratulated for closing the gap with national trends in fourth grade reading achievement since 2019.
- A decline in achievement nationally, attributed to the pandemic, aided Louisiana in closing the gap.
- Illinois has closely tracked national trends over time, and the state’s achievement decline in 2024 from 2019 is not statistically significant. I raise the latter point since the editorial board favors science.
- The board says that Illinois lagged the national average in 2019 but leaves out that the difference is a single point (218 compared to 219). It says fourth grade readers in Louisiana are now outperforming their Illinois peers, not that the difference is only two points (216 to 214). These differences may not be significant, and my guess is they are not.
The board has exaggerated small differences and declines as failures in Illinois. The first sentence, which states that only 30% of fourth graders in Illinois read at grade level, is misleading by confusing grade level with “proficient.” These are not the same. I am sure that the Illinois State Board of Education can provide the board with grade-level trends. “Proficient” is a high standard. If we are concerned about students not learning how to read, we should be talking about “below basic,” where 41% of students in Illinois perform and 40% in Louisiana.
Misrepresentations and misunderstandings of data are harmful. President Donald Trump is misusing proficiency data to justify the closing of the Department of Education. With abundant educational research expertise in Chicago, the Tribune Editorial Board should do better.
Now that Louisiana has caught up with the nation in reading achievement, it can join states such as Illinois in figuring out how to advance student achievement beyond national trend lines. It is unfortunate that these states will not have assistance in this endeavor from the U.S. Department of Education, which provided grants to enable Louisiana’s progress.
— Lisa Jean Walker, Chicago
Homeschool measure
In her recent commentary (“More Black families are choosing to homeschool. A new bill undermines their choices.,” March 30), Aziza Butler laments the advancement of the Illinois homeschool bill that would provide for the oversight of children educated outside public or private schools. Although the bill would ensure that homeschooled kids are being taught a quality curriculum, protect them from potential predators, as well as offer them services by their local school system that they might otherwise not be able to access, she worries instead that parents would be placed in legal jeopardy if they miss a filing deadline for paperwork or misunderstand guidelines.
If parents are undertaking the arduous task of shepherding their children through their entire education, preparing them for life as an independent adult, and they are unable to grasp how a calendar works or how to read and understand instructions provided for fulfilling the requirements for teaching those kids, maybe they are not the people to be instructing others.
— Christina Miller, Naperville
Crisis for young people
Young people are in dire straits. Forget the lingering problems of unsustainable student debt, the staggering rates of both youth suicide and drug overdose, and the fact that many children of this city will be drinking lead likely until 2077. The problem now is employment.
There’s a very straightforward thought experiment that proves this point. In the middle of the last century, someone could get a job right out of high school and, with that one job, manage to raise a family, buy a house, securely retire and perhaps send a child to college. Now, even with two incomes, not even a single one of those things is necessarily possible to obtain.
Not only have larger economic trends for at least the past five decades forced young people into a worse economic position, but the current actions of the government also are turbocharging the negative outcomes. The federal government is very clearly no longer a feasible career path. Furthermore, all those federal workers whose positions were eliminated are now back in the job market, along with all the young people trying to find their first or second job. Finally, the economic uncertainly generated by the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency and President Donald Trump mean that few firms are in a position to make long-term hiring choices.
None of us is individually at fault for the fact that the future of today’s young people is more insecure and uncertain than that of any other age group. Yet, the truth still remains that our society has wholeheartedly failed to provide the same opportunities to its young people that it systematically provided to its older generations. This is bad economics, and it’s fundamentally immoral.
People with savings will be able to weather Trump’s period of “economic pain,” but an unacceptable share of young people will not be able to do so. It seems to me that a society that so willingly discards its young people’s futures is not a legitimate society.
At least nowadays, I don’t as often hear older people telling younger people to simply “get a job,” as many people now understand the fundamental infeasibility of that proposition. However, I have essentially zero confidence in men such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to identify and remedy this problem.
This issue is a five-alarm fire, but all I seem to hear on it is crickets.
— Ethan Feingold, Chicago
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