When poor kids grow up in book-rich households

“Children’s interest in reading has more impact on their academic performance than their socio-economic group, research suggests. Young people from even the most deprived backgrounds could outshine their more affluent peers if they regularly read books, newspapers and comics outside school, the report Reading for Change says. While socio-economic background plays a role, it is not a dominant factor in predicting involvement in diversified reading. The report authors say the findings are highly significant and suggest that encouraging reading for pleasure could be one of the most effective ways of bringing about social change.” – BBC, November 20, via ASCD SmartBrief.

The TeleRead take: TeleRead territory, of course. No, we didn’t pay the report’s writers to conclude: “While socio-economic background is weakly related to the profiles of reading, access to books at home seems to play a more important role”–the document’s exact words, as reported by BBC. Notice, too, that Reading for Change alludes to the glories of reading for fun? That’s a core premise of TeleRead. It isn’t enough to put educational and technical books on the Net. If nothing else, with thousands of contemporary books of all varieties online for free, more parents would be tempted to read and serve as positive role models, regardless of their economic statuses. Let’s not duplicate on the Web the old “savage inequalities” about which I wrote some years ago in a paper commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education.

Frustratingly, while the BBC was forward-thinking enough to write up the Reading for Change report, I don’t see a link to it–or even detailed contact information for the document’s authors. The BBC does say: “The study analysed the results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Pisa survey which examined the knowledge of 15 year olds.” Anyone have more specifics?

Update, Nov. 27: Yes, Dr. John H.A.L. de Jong, at Language Testing Services in the Netherlands, does. He’s the second listed authors of the report in e-book format–the title page credits Irwin Kirsch, John de Jong. Dominique LaFontaine, Joy McQueen. Juliette Mendelovits, and Christian Monseur–and he says you can download it at http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/9602071E.PDF. I’ve just done so and look forward to reading it. The full title is Reading for Change: Performance and Engagement Across Countries: Results from PISA 2000. PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. Fittingly, the book is free. So is access to a wonderful collection of performance-related news clips about students in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

I’m not sure if Dr. de Jong heard about the TeleRead item through the BBC or other means, after I asked the network for more details, but what makes this fun is that he himself is the author who wrote the sentence about reading as leverage for social change. Bravo, Doctor!

Additional thoughts: A large number of books in the household won’t just help directly. Obviously it will also serve as an indicator of a family’s general interest in learning. Still, without the easy availability of books, including those read for pleasure, learning won’t be so easy. Hence the need for TeleRead and other measures as ways to promote leaning for the nonrich.

Coincidentally, here in the States, the Nov. 18 issue of BusinessWeek says: “While the U.S. prides itself on being the land of opportunity, economists have grown less optimistic about the ability of American children to leap ahead of their parents’ station in life. A six-figure income remains beyond the grasp of all but 14% of American households…. And recent research has found a higher-than-expected correlation between people’s position on the income ladder and the rung their parents once occupied.

“In the 1980s,” says BusinessWeek, “studies concluded that, on average, only about 20% of the earnings gap between any two people would persist a generation later as an earnings gap between their children. That would have indicated a society with lots of mobility. However, estimates were later raised to around 40%. Now, research by Bhash Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concludes that fully 60% of the income gap in one generation persists into the next generation, on average. That would mean that children of poor families would tend to be poor as well.”

The article quotes the Fed economist as saying that educational loans would help. Of course. But so would a well-stocked national digital library system and better funding of existing libraries, if we extrapolate from the research of John de Jong and colleagues. If you’re a policymaker or educator or other person interested in reaching Dr. de Jong, just email me and I’ll pass on your note.

Meanwhile we’ve posted a Net-related excerpt from his authoritative book.