At-risk kids need early help for reading skills, Fayetteville Observer

February 2014

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By David T. Tayloe Jr. | Posted: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 5:30 pm

Last week, the advocacy group N.C. Child released a report showing that 65 percent of children entering the fourth grade are not reading proficiently. This is troubling news for a state that needs a strong workforce to support a modern economy.

Our state leaders understand that children who are not reading well by fourth grade are at high risk for dropping out of school and struggling later in life, but demonstrate too narrow a focus on the public schools. Unfortunately, the public schools are “too little, too late” for most children who are not reading proficiently in the third and fourth grades.

In Wayne County, our pediatric practice met with the administration of our public schools to discuss ways to improve the reading proficiency of our third-graders. The data from Wayne County indicate that about the same number of children who enter kindergarten without the skills necessary to learn to read are unable to read proficiently in the third grade.

Not coincidentally, approximately the same number of children are dropping out of school prior to high school graduation. Local school officials point out that they’ve been working hard to address the K-3 reading problems of at-risk children for many years, but have met little success.

The public school administration encouraged us, the pediatricians who operate the only pediatric practice in our rather large eastern county, to try to empower parents to improve the school readiness of their preschool children before they enter kindergarten.

Our practice has been engaged in a program called Reach Out and Read for the past 10 years. Through this program, our providers give age-appropriate and culturally appropriate books to babies and preschool children at all 10 well-child checkups between 6 months and 5 years of age. Reach Out and Read has an evidence base consisting of 15 peer-reviewed research studies going back to the early ’90s and is grounded in the fact that a child’s language skills are shaped in his or her earliest years.

According to research from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Reach Out and Read, the language skills of kindergarten children are strong predictors of their reading skills in the third grade, and the language skills of kindergarten children are directly proportional to the number of words the children hear their mothers say in the first two years of life. There is additional research to show that when the television is on, adults stop talking.

All of our community providers are being encouraged to do more to empower parents to spend as many waking minutes as possible engaged in face-to-face talking with their babies and young children, and to turn off their media technology whenever their young children are awake. While I’m proud of our community-wide effort, we need more support from the state, particularly in the area of high-quality child care and pre-kindergarten.

Over the past three years, the state has cut 20percent of funding for N.C. Smart Start and eliminated thousands of N.C. Pre-K slots. Furthermore, state government leaders must make sure funding is available so all primary-care providers of health services for young children are implementing Reach Out and Read in their practices.

By beginning Reach Out and Read efforts at birth, providers can impress upon parents the importance of increasing face-to-face talking with babies and young children and decreasing the time that children are exposed to television and other media technology.

We must begin early and use proven strategies to improve third-grade reading proficiency, graduate our children from high school and watch them flourish as adults in our workforce and communities.

David T. Tayloe Jr., MD, is a senior fellow at N.C. Child and a pediatrician practicing in Goldsboro.