The Boomer Solution To Our Intractable Reading And Math Proficiency Problems

The strategy is - put people back to work and teach young children to read well. Below are some tactics to get there, at least in part.

Last week NPR reported that the unemployment rate among the 55-and-older set hit 7.2%, the highest since the end of World War II. And while that may be lower than the overall rate, older workers tend to stay unemployed longer, with the average length of the job search more than 35 weeks.

A Pew survey shows that 1 in 3 unemployed older workers hasn't had a paycheck in more than a year. As a result, in 2009, 3 million older workers have simply given up and declared early retirement and have begun drawing Social Security benefits.

Yet this is the best-educated, most highly-skilled cadre in our society as of this moment and it is being pulled from service.

Meanwhile, disadvantaged students in the first grade have a vocabulary that is approximately half that of the average advantaged student (2,900 and 5,800 words respectively). The first grade! For the underprivileged, the race is essentially lost before the starter's pistol has been sounded.

And, if you can't read well, the chances you will do well in math are next to nil.

The marriage of Boomers and needy preschool children is of urgent importance.

Almost anyone with a few years of college and beyond, or even those with a solid high school education, are capable of reading aloud to and giving basic reading, writing and math instruction to a 4, 5 or 6 year-old.

The Boomers who want to retire because of difficulty in finding new employment should be entered into a new program dedicated to transmitting these basic skills to deprived and neglected youngsters.

The Boomers would receive a stipend that would not be taxable and that would not affect their Social Security payment levels. The reading and math sessions could easily be conducted in schools before or after hours, in community centers, in the halls of religious institutions, libraries, even outdoors. The sessions could be for two hours per day, four days per week.

Let's say there were 1,000,000 of these "into-the-breach" senior tutors. And let's say they received $1,000 per month. That would cost $12 billion per year. The extra money added to the average retiree's $1,170 per month in SS money would help immensely, raising their monthly income to $2,170 per month. One can fairly assune that the extra money, like unemployment benefits, would immediately be recirculated into the economy in the form of consumer spending.

By contrast, we are spending over $100 billion per year on the two wars in southwest Asia, plus another 700 billion on defense in general. Corn subsidies cost us about $10 billion per year. Tax and other incentives to the petroleum industry cost us about $105 billion per year.

The benefits to the children who would be affected by such programs are not immeasurable, although the following statistics would serve to astound even the most skeptical among us.
(Stats are from http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp - there are plenty more at their site.)

It is estimated that the cost of illiteracy to business and the taxpayer is $20 billion per year.

It is estimated that more than $2 billion is spent each year on students who repeat a grade because they have reading problems. 

The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don't read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.

Children who have not developed some basic literacy skills by the time they enter school are 3 - 4 times more likely to drop out in later years.

One-fifth of high school graduates cannot read their own diplomas.

Let's say of the 1,000,000 Boomers employed, they each affect 8 to 12 students per day. That is, obviously, 8 to 12 million students per day.

The children would receive the benefits of all the cumulative applied knowledge of the Boomers. They would stay in the school and learning environment for a longer amount of time each day. They would be sheltered from detrimental home situations, from excessive TV watching and video game playing.

The Boomers - with all their phenomenal skills coming back into play - would find a new sense of purpose plus a reasonable new source of income.

That income would help in a directly stimulative way to reinvigorate our struggling economy.

Volunteerism is all well and good, but the educational crisis is reaching high tide and it needs to be treated with early in a child's life. Volunteers are wonderful, but this is a different kind of predicament.

Maybe this is the new WPA or CCC. Spend money directly on things that are of dire importance to our future. And do something intrinsically good in the bargain.

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Loco Local Friday - In NYC, No More Homemade Baked Goods, EVER!

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our homemade brownies, But in ourselves, that we are couch potatoes.

For some time now, I've been holding off on criticizing the NYC ban on homemade baked goods sold at public school fundraisers. (Click here for the NY Times story) This may not seem an earth shaking controversy, but it is indicative of how often government, even the best-intentioned, seems to suffer myopia when it comes to big picture problem-solving. 

Last week, looking through some old family photographs, I saw pictures of my brother and me, cousins, neighborhood kids and classmates. It is the late 1950s and we are between 7 and maybe 13 years old. Thus open the flood gates of memory and desire.

The remarkable thing about the photos is that no one is obese, and hardly anyone even looks chubby. In fact, we most look rather scrawny, and when in bathing suits we look pretty well muscled, even the kids who I knew not to be "athletic." 

To describe our diets as anything but rich would be a lie. We devoured milk, ice cream, butter, and red meat until we practically mooed; desserts for lunch and dinner; no such thing as diet soda; nickel candy bars; the constant temptations of soda fountains; and serving sizes that would choke triathlon competitors. 

Yet, there we were looking as lean as Spartans.

We spent enormous amounts of time walking, running, playing, jumping, hanging by our feet, chasing, tagging, pushing, shoving, building, destroying, hiding, seeking, batting, shooting, passing, and generally a rollin' and a tumblin'. 

By age 10 I was walking, running or biking about 3/4 of a mile each way to school. I had a full 45 minutes of recess. (It had to be pouring rain or below 15 degrees before recess was canceled.) I had an hour's worth of gym 3 days a week. At 3 o'clock when I was dismissed, I ran or furiously pedaled home on my heavy, clunky bike (passed on to me by an older cousin through my older brother) that was more suited for U-boat ramming than land transportation.

From roughly 3:30 until it was either dark or suppertime, dozens of kids would play outdoors like "wild Indians," as the expression went or, even more exotically, "like wild Armenians." Indoors, we were "wild banshees." 

We would then tumble to the kitchen table cornucopia and gorge until sated. An hour, maybe an hour and a half, of homework ensued and we were done. Bathed. An hour of TV, maybe, but I think less - that was saved for Saturday and Sunday. Exhausted, almost comatose. Full. Happy. And, as it turns out, pretty learned. (In 5th grade I remember a geography test asking us to give the twenty principal rivers of the United States!)

Long story short, it's not the diet or desserts that have really changed. It's the exercise, stupid. (Not that I am recommending the animal fat and sugar rich diet of the 50s.)

Kids in New York City schools currently receive 24 minutes per day on average of phys ed. They average 15 minutes of recess. Many, especially as they move up the grades, have no recess at all. 

Because conditions have changed, kids don't walk, if ever, very far to school. Biking is not in the equation generally. Homework has grown to outlandish proportions. In middle school, they can have 2 to 3 hours of homework if they're working mach schnell. By high school, it's up to 3 to 4 hours and even more at crunch time.

No wonder they're craving sugar. I'd be craving a month in the Caribbean on a sugar cane plantation.

Toss in a couple of hours of media time and a midnight bedtime and you have all the keys to the obesity epidemic you need.

Insisting that parents stop baking goodies is weird, mean, and counterproductive. Asking PTAs to buy wholesale lots of chemical-laden Doritos or Pop-Tarts to resell at retail prices adds absurdity on top of impracticality. It further demolishes a fragile sense of community. New microscope for the bio lab? We didn't do it - Doritos did!

What to actually do? 

One strong possibility is to lengthen the school day and work both phys ed and the fine arts back into the curriculum. Mind, Body, Soul. However, given that the academic requirements of preparing for the modern world are more strenuous than in yesteryear, perhaps it is even a better idea to add a full year between 7th and 12th grade, making the primary/secondary schedule 13 years as opposed to the traditional 12.

The Cost of War(s) and New School Construction

Just a quick update... since I last posted below on January 27, less than five days ago, (see High Speed Trains), showing the Cost of Our Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, another $1 billion has been spent (click).

Another perspective is this: in the ten years between 1999 and 2008, we spent about $298 billion on new construction and renovation of older schools. Many school construction statistics can be found here at the National Institute of Building Sciences. In the 8 years we have been in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we've spent about $1 TRILLION there.

Because of budgetary and many other considerations, here in New York, city government is planning to close 19 "under-performing" schools. Meanwhile, the Federation of Catholic Teachers says they've been informed of a plan to close Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral School in Little Italy, the oldest parochial school in town.

This is not to say that education is solely the province of schools, public, private or parochial. Indeed, the main burden rests on the shoulders of parents. A simple calculation of time available for individual instruction in a classroom of 20 children, even if teachers could undertake such a mission, would show that perhaps - big perhaps - that a single child might receive 5 minutes of individualized attention on a given day. And I think that is being generous.

More schools and more teachers, smaller classes, longer days and longer school years, the reintroduction of phys ed, art, music, dance and so forth all take money. Good lunches (and breakfasts) for kids who need them take money.

We may win or lose the wars in the East, but we certainly are not winning the war on ignorance and poor educational attainment, or physical and cultural well-being.