It's not the schools; it's a failure to read

The implicit message behind the recent school bashing in your pages is there exists some magic bullet for "curing" our schools' problems, if only the administrators and teachers worked harder to find it.

But schools alone cannot magically transform our children into a collection of brilliant test-takers. This task is enormous. It will take decades to achieve -- and a grassroots change in the core values of our country.

Look around you. What does America value? Celebrity, sports, material goods. When was the last time books were at the top of your child's Christmas or Hanukkah list?

How many families spend their evenings sitting and reading together? How many adults even do this? Each year when I ask my high schoolers how many were read to regularly as small children, fewer and fewer hands go up.

In my current classes, the average number of students whose families take a daily newspaper is six. This is in a fairly well-to-do community.

The ACT is basically a reading test. Educators know this. Yet when classrooms are filled with students who hate reading, who were not read to as children, whose parents and friends do not read, there is only so much we as educators can do to help these students master the ACT.

We cannot instill a curiosity about the written word or a love of reading when the culture around them is working hard to do the opposite.

Students who live in homes that contain fewer than 10 books consistently score much lower on both math and reading tests than students who live in homes that contain more than 100 books. It was a revelation to me that homes even exist in this country that contain fewer than 10 books.

The key to success in education is literacy, and the key to literacy is reading. Period.

It doesn't matter what we read, but it matters that we do read, and read consistently, every day.

For children who have been reading a variety of texts every day since they were small, who have learned to appreciate and value the way reading can transform and empower them, the ACT is not an insurmountable challenge.

And for those who want a "real-world" connection: Better reading skills correlate to higher incomes among adults.

There is no quick fix, no magic bullet. Our nation needs to make a collective and unified effort to turn off the TVs, endorse a Library-Card-for-Every-Family campaign and help our children find the joy in reading.

Schools alone cannot solve this crisis. It's not about the money, and let's be honest, it's not about the ACT. It's about literacy.

Kate Hutchinson

Palatine