Facing a Critical Moment for Students’ Literacy, (Response) Pt. I by Sage Salvo
I’m irked!
Yet another conversation with a Principal who says he can’t afford our High Impact Literacy Tutoring program. With all of my B-school experience telling me to hurry up and ‘down sell’ him to get at least some-sort of Sale out of this engagement, I pause. I’m speechless for an awkward second because this is where my business aims and vocation collide. Thank God it was my humanity that leaped forward.
I reminded myself that I started this series of conversations with this Principal because “we” both knew in our core that his students were underperforming in literacy because they needed culturally affirming, engaging, and rigorous materials like what we offer at Words Liive.
I didn’t down-sell him that day. I simply replied, “I understand” and offered to circle back during the budget season to see if we could rally his board for next school year.
But I’m irked! I’ve had these types of conversations too often recently with black and brown school districts across the country. As a solution provider, I KNOW there has to be a funding source for the pervasive and pernicious problem that is our literacy crisis in this country!
There should be a federal and state budget pool that Principals and other school leaders can tap for High Impact Literacy Tutoring.
We are a nation in Crisis. Our current literacy crisis is a Civil Rights Issue AND a National Security Issue! Senator Bill Cassidy, Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pension recently released a report entitled, “Preventing a Lost Generation: Facing a Critical Moment for Students’ Literacy”. By now, most audiences are familiar with the 20+ year freefall drop in our nation’s literacy scores. But another statistic that Senator Cassidy highlighted was that in 2022, The Armed Forces Qualification Test scores also dropped 13% from the years preceding the pandemic.
Insert National Security Threat.
One of the reasons that our military has sustained peak operational performance is because of our country’s education system. Starting with Massachusetts in the mid 1800’s and ending with Mississippi in 1918, our Compulsory education system (mandating that each child gets a primary education through a certain age) has become one of our nation’s most brilliant legal inventions. But through myopic federal budgeting in education (STEM everything), we are rapidly abrading the brilliance of the socio-legal establishment that we call public schools.
It is far past time for a national movement to combat illiteracy. We need a federal budget for High Impact Literacy Tutoring. Schools need federal and state funds to tap to bring in High Impact Tutoring. Likewise, microschooling communities and parents need to be reimbursed for hiring high-impact literacy tutors.
Where there’s political will, there’s a way.
Preventing a Lost Generation: Facing a Critical Moment for Students' Literacy