Pamela Good said 67% of students are behind in literacy. Alessia Sandala | Collegian
Sixty-seven percent of Hillsdale County students are falling behind in literacy, according to Pamela Good, the co-founder and CEO of the literacy nonprofit Beyond Basics.
“This is the reason that we are 41st in the world: they pulled the plug on teaching kids how to decode words in the early 1980s,” Good said.
In a lecture April 15, Good said the goal of Beyond Basics is to help students learn how to read at the appropriate grade level through the Gold Star Standard to Reading Proficiency, which involves individualized assessments, daily tutoring, and a phonics-based curriculum.
“During the school day, they give us a room to run our programs, and we send tutors to that school every day to work,” Good said. “The kids are in the school, and we pull them into the room. It’s like a little assembly line. I say our secret sauce is logistics more than it is curriculum.”
For years, schools focused on teaching students using a “whole word method,” a process where students were taught to memorize individual words rather than sounds or letters, which Good said harmed students more than anything else.
“You had new crops of teachers coming into education in those first couple decades — I would say that it was embraced in a very widespread way in the ’90s,” Good said. “We have two decades of kids that have poured out at this point and have not been helped by it.”
While most schools have moved away from the whole word method, Good said students are still struggling, especially after COVID-19.
Federal and state governments, according to Good, have also fueled the problem by giving funds to schools without ensuring students are learning.
“It’s not that handing out money is bad,” Good said. “Handing out money when you don’t know whether or not it’s actually accomplishing the intention is wrong. It just is. It means we’re sending illiterate kids out there.”
Katie Nienstedt, senior director at Beyond Basics, said children often do not learn to read when they should in K-3 but move on to the next grade level anyway.
“In a traditional setting, teachers teach kids to read kindergarten through third grade,” Nienstedt said. “After K–3, the expectation is that you know how to read. We say you are supposed to learn to read K–3 and then read to learn from fourth on.”
Junior Katie Crain said the work of Beyond Basics is important because education has the power to change the lives of students.
“Illiteracy is truly one of the most pressing national crises of our day. With well over half of our nation’s 8th graders below reading level, our education system has been killing the futures of our children for the past two decades,” Crain said.
The key to ensuring students are learning is to make sure states are held accountable for the success of students and to reach students when and where they are most likely to learn, according to Good.
“It’s easier to reach a high school kid online because their school day, between sports and activities, is too full and it’s hard to pull them out for literacy,” Good said. “It’s also private for them, because they’re doing it from home. So we elongate the school day, elongate the year, and get everyone following the same method, and then we have to hold the states accountable.”
Good said the country must begin implementing methods such as the Gold Star Standard to Reading Proficiency if it hopes to prepare the next generation for success.
“We’re all right around 40% proficiency,” Good said. “This is a national crisis.”
