Reggie

This society places a heavy stigma on illiteracy..The illiterate person is considered to be dull, ignorant, backward, narrow, and uneducable..Even worse, the illiterate person often comes to consider himself/herself, to be all of these things and more..The illiterate person will frequently give up all attempts at formal learning because he or she has internalized the stigma attached to illiteracy..The illiterate person in a highly literate, technological, achievement-oriented society is hanging by a thin thread, practically and psychologically..The person’s ego must constantly defend against tremendous feelings and perceptions of inadequacy..A school system’s reading scores serve as indicators of the academic health of the system..Few indictments of a school system are consider more damning than pupil’s low achievement in reading….Yet in this country. the most technologically advanced in the world,the reading problem is of frightening proportions..More than one fifth of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate…Over 44% of adults in the Black community are functionally illiterate! Black non-mainstream students, often referred to as Black inner-city students, represent a problem of even greater magnitude..They come from families that are poorer than the general population and that are considerable lower in formal education attainment.. They possess a culture, language, and set of experiences that are different from the general population ..And to complicate things, they must, for the most part, attend schools that are not prepared and/or willing to use the student’s culture, language, or experience in an educational manner..Their problems are even further complicated by the assumptions made concerning students, which underlie the educational philosophy of schools in this country..It is mistakenly assumed that all students are, or should be, similar to the “idealized White mainstream, normative student”.If Black non-mainstream students differ from the normative students by not responding to the methods of instruction, and materials in a similar manner, their abilities are suspect..They are frequently labeled and stigmatized as “educationally retarded”, “culturally deprived” ,and “linguistically impoverished”..This labeling occurs with little or no regard for the fact that the standard of comparison is schools designed to accommodate the culture,language, learning, and lifestyles of White mainstream students..Today it is not uncommon for seventh and eight-grade Black non-mainstream students to score at the second and third-grade level on standardized reading tests..It is also not uncommon for Black non-mainstream students to finish high school reading below the fifth-grade level(“Between the Rhetoric and Reality” Lauriat Press,2009;Simpkins&Simpkins;Amazon.com, or Kindle)..