White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development
Address by Susan B. Neuman
Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education
U.S. Department of Education
July 27, 2001

Mrs. Bush, thank you for the opportunity to speak at this important conference. Today, I want to take the opportunity to discuss some of my work in early literacy over the past ten years in Philadelphia at Temple University, and then at the University of Michigan.

When I first arrived at Temple University, I had been working on research on television and its effects on reading. But as I walked many of the streets of Philadelphia near where I worked, and where children walk each day to school, it had a transformative effect. I recognized the urgency of the problems in education for many of our low-income children, and how the environments effect learning. My work began to center on environment. I focused on an ecological view. Here are some basic principles:

• Humans demonstrate different behaviors in different settings
• They demonstrate similar behaviors in similar settings
• These behaviors tend to be consistent within settings

Setting jargon aside, what this simply means is that environment has a powerful effect. As Bruner suggested and perhaps said it best, "place people in a library and they act like they're in the library, put people on the ball field, and they play ball." It suggests a somewhat coercive effect of environment and the powerful influence it has on learning.

This perspective became a central focus in my research during the past four years. I received a grant from the William Penn Foundation asking the question: How does the public library influence children's reading achievement, particularly for those children who come from low-income circumstances. This particular question for someone who deals with early literacy might seem an ill-fit. However, there were several reasons for my interest: 1) I had just conducted a large-scale study showing the powerful influence of books and training with childcare workers and library aides, which had positive effect on children's achievement for over 18,000 young 3-4 year olds. 2) I knew that libraries as institutions are in the process of transforming from a book-centric environment, to a more computer-oriented environment. I was very interested in finding out how children might use the library differently as a result of technology. 3) And I also knew how important libraries in large cities are for children and their families. These are the places that children go to after school, the safe places, the places where caring adults provide informal teaching, or "over the shoulder teaching." These are the places where we can see children's voluntary reading.

However, before we could determine the benefits of the library on achievement, we needed to understand the environment in which the local libraries resided -- why and how children might come to the library. To do so, I involved ten urban anthropology students in research, and we intensely studied first eight communities, then four communities within the city. Philadelphia has been described as a city of neighborhoods, and our goal was to define how neighborhoods used print. Two of the neighborhoods I will describe are more or less middle class; two might be defined as low-income (Pseudonyms are used throughout.)

We visited the first neighborhood, and walked each street of the 'catchment' area. Our goal was to examine the neighborhood from the perspective of a young child learning about print. The neighborhood is primarily blue collar, immigrant white population, Russian Polish, and Irish; however it's becoming increasingly gentrified. Our first analysis was to determine where we might go to get books, and how many titles might we find. The catchment area as shown on the graph is surrounded in green. There are almost 7,000 children in the area; we found 13 places to buy a children's book (they might be in places like drugstores, bookstores, and bodegas), and of those areas we counted 2,157 different book titles, or about three titles for every child. The second neighborhood, clearly middle class is well-integrated -- about 1/3 African American, 50% white, and others international. This neighborhood is considered to have 'old money.' Parents engage children in afterschool activities, ballet, gymnastics. There are 1200 children in the catchment area. We counted 11 places to buy books, and over 16,000 titles -- approximately 12 titles to every child -- indicating significant choice of books from which to select.

The next neighborhood, Kensington is low-income. It included about 33% White, 33% Black, and 33% Hispanic but it would hardly be called integrated. Families stick to their own. For a population of about 5,000 children, we found four places to buy books, and a total of 358 titles, indicating about a reverse equation. Here we found one book for every 16 children.

And our final neighborhood, Kingsessing, a low-income neighborhood, which always had a Rockwellian feel to it with children playing double dutch in the street, had approximately 10,000 in the neighborhood. There were four places where we could find books, and only 33 titles, all of which were coloring books. That equaled 353 children to every coloring book title.

My point in providing this background is to share the disparate background for those children who come from middle-income circumstances and those from low-income neighborhoods. In the same city. Our analysis took us to the next level. Here again, thinking like a child, we examined the logographic signs in these neighborhoods. Once again, we walked each street of the neighborhood, and marked where we saw a logo and words to symbolize the meaning. As many of you may know, we call this environmental print, and it is a key way that children develop the insight that symbols have meaning. Many of you have experienced this when children look at the sign of the golden arches, and say "McDonalds."

We found that in the middle-income neighborhoods, signs were in good condition, along with clear, definitional logos which would help children understand their environment. In low-income neighborhoods there was graffiti, symbolizing do not go here.

Our analysis went further, we examined the child care centers in these neighborhoods. Again, we found poor classroom libraries in the low-income neighborhood, and tattered or limited print and signage. (And if you think this is always a factor of budget, you'd be wrong, since this classroom has the highest quality furniture, but no books.) Children can't learn literacy without books. Our analysis continued. We looked at public school libraries, and there were vast differences for elementary children in the same city -- 12 books per child in the middle-income; closed school libraries in the low-income neighborhoods. Librarians with masters degrees in the middle; no librarians in the low. We finally went to public places to watch reading in laundromats, at bus stops, in fast food diners, etc. In the middle-income areas, the seating was plush, and good lighting. In the low-income areas, the seating was hard; there was poor lighting proprietors were brusque, and encouraged us to leave. In sum, there were vast and stark, and triangulated differences in access to print, and in observations of others engaged in print across these neighborhoods.

We sent this work which took 1 ½ years to the highest quality journal in the field, Reading Research Quarterly. The editors asked us to explain the ramifications for children beginning early literacy.

The first ramification has been made famous by Keith Stanovich and is called the environmental opportunity hypothesis. Here, limited exposure to print is considered a major factor since children will not likely hear the phonology of print -- the sounds of words. For Keith Stanovich, phonological coding or phonemic awareness is at the heart of learning to read. When children are not exposed to the sounds of our language, they have difficulty learning to connect sounds and symbols. With this difficulty, they are likely to have difficulty identifying words, then reading words with fluency. With slow decoding of words, they are easily frustrated, and thus begins a cycle of discouraging efforts, with children shying away from print. On the other hand, those children who have had lots of experiencing hearing similarities and differences in sounds are likely to grasp the alphabetic principle, start identifying words rather easily, enjoy it and thus begins a cycle of motivation and reading. This has been called the "Matthew Effect," after the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and affectionately called, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

The second, is what Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner in their work with the Vai in Africa. This is the familiarity hypothesis. Those children who are familiar with activities develop cognitive routines associated with them. They know how stories work and are likely to predict what comes next. They develop the mental models that go with different types of texts; and familiarity breeds contentment, and comfort.

The third hypothesis, however, is less well known, and one in which my research has emphasized. That is the knowledge gap. How do all of us learn? What is the single most powerful medium for learning? Print. When there is a crisis in our country, we often go to the television to hear about it. But if we really want to know -- and learn more details -- we go to print. And so the knowledge gap hypothesis argues:

Knowledge acquisition is related to access to information (print) and knowledgeable others. Differential access is likely to influence the speed of acquisition -- with "haves" acquiring knowledge at a faster rate than "have-nots." Interestingly, we now have over 100 studies substantiating these findings. Even more interesting, it is predicted that the newer technologies will only exacerbate differences, since the speed of acquisition will become faster than before.

What are the implications:

• Limited access to books will unfortunately lead to limited vocabulary (since vocabulary development and rare word acquisition is related to print experiences) and limited information.
• Less information will mean slower schema developing. (We know, for example, that knowledge leads to more knowledge, since we have organization schema on which to connect new ideas).
• Limited information networks. Slower access to new information, leading finally to avoidance -- and general reliance on others for information and over reliance on opinion leaders. There is much research in adult literacy that indicates adult illiterates relying on other media sources, like television, or friends for information.

Here are some instantiations of this theory in my research, which suggests its serious implications for early reading development.

This gives you an overview of our research methods. We visited libraries in our eight neighborhoods, four low-income and four middle-income, over a two year period. This picture is a representation of what we would do when we visited. We defined activity settings. Here, for example, is the preschool activity setting; the children's section where elementary children are likely to go; the new computer sections that are being installed in the library; and finally the adult section. And we would conduct what we called "frozen time checks." Every hour on the hour we would sweep through the library and note what every person was engaged in -- whether he or she was reading, browsing, working on the computer. We did this for each activity setting over a thousand hours of observation.

The Results: The good news, children in low-income neighborhoods and middle-income neighborhood used approximately the same number of materials and spent about the same number of hours at the library each week.

But now the news that is more concerning. Children in high-print areas, where they have been nourished with print from the very beginning, are likely to read at their instructional level, whereas low-income children are likely to read below their level. We referred to it simply as "reading up" -- or challenging material; and "reading down" -- reading low level materials.

Before technology came into the library, what we note is a gap. Children in high-print communities spend more time reading and engaged in literacy related activity. They spend less time milling around. In contrast, kids in low-print environments spend less time reading, less time in literacy related activity, and more time milling around.

The bigger concern is that with new technologies, the gap dramatically increases. Reading increases more for high-print communities than low-print, and milling around and not much (using the space at the library but not for its original purpose) is dramatically increasing. Examining computer activities in particular, we find that children from high-print communities read more lines of print, spend more minutes on applications, and more time on the computer. Further, they spend more time on challenging materials than those from low-print areas. Thus the 'digital divide' is really a literacy 'divide.' Children who feel efficacious in reading read more, read challenging materials, and read for higher level purposes than low-print. Some communications researchers have referred to this as the more the more, the less the less.

Now the good news. The good news is that there are solutions -- instructional solutions. Let me just highlight the key issues that need to be revisited.

The instructional environment. Children who come from low-income areas need a carefully constructed environment rich in print.

Children need books in view. Notice the young child taking a book off the book case -- must be about 1 ½. There is nothing developmentally inappropriate about young children looking at books at this age. We included Spanish and English language books. In fact the research is quite compelling. We placed books in childcare settings and provided ten hours of training to childcare workers. We stayed on message, suggesting the importance of reading to children of using books of multiple genre. And the gains were dramatic, and the effects on skills six months later were still evident.

Change the quality of instruction. Too many of our children, instruction fails to 'engage their minds.' Children's minds atrophy with limited stimuli.

Here is an example of quality instruction. Teachers prepared a unit detailing the knowledge that is expected. Knowledge builds from facts to concepts. The materials are specified, and the guidelines are high quality. Preschool teachers need to develop a sound foundation of curriculum, goals, objectives, and strategies to attain them. There is nothing developmentally inappropriate about planned, direct instruction.

Here is a graph of a recent study we've conducted. We've been looking at precocious early readers -- those children who can read at four years of age. We contrasted them with nonprecocious children -- average, normal lovely children, all from seriously distressed neighborhoods.

Note an important fact that is clear from this graph. We examined receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, concepts of print upper and low case letter knowledge phonemic awareness of initial and ending sounds, and rhyming, all skills associated with literacy achievement, as well as IQ. What is striking here is that there is no difference in the intelligence level of these children. What is striking is the difference in the skill level. The precocious children have more skills, or learned abilities than the non-precocious children. Reading is a learned skill, not a biological awakening.

Change our relationships with families. Most often there is more than a healthy skepticism between teachers, administrators and families. Yet, there is no way that we can be successful without parent involvement and parent education. In Philadelphia we were able to use a grant from the Barbara Bush Foundation to develop a highly successful family literacy project. We established book clubs and helped parents understand how books are used for literacy development in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. We then encouraged parents to read with their child (using the language they felt most comfortable with) at school using a variety of genre from predictable books to narratives. Language and literacy skills within three months significantly enhanced far more what the teacher alone could do. We were so successful that parents continued the bookclubs after we were gone. This particular parent in the slide actually became an aide to a librarian.

Thus it is critical at this exciting time that we begin to recognize that enhancing children's cognitive development can work together with enhancing their social emotional development -- that we in education must work together to move away from ideological stances to what works for children. If we do so, as we would say in Philadelphia: Together we can make a difference.

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