3) Equity and Belonging
The ability to learn to read and read to learn is a civil right. We are committed to ensuring fair, inclusive, and rigorous educational resources and helping all students reach their academic potential. We are committed to creating rigorous and engaging curricula that all students can access successfully, regardless of background, personal characteristics, location, or circumstances. • In the United States, educational inequality and achievement gaps are pervasive. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (U.S. Department of Education, 2022): • The average score for Black students (198) was 28 points lower than White (226) students. • English language learners scored 30 points lower (190) than native English speakers (220). • Students who receive free and reduced-price lunch scored 28 points lower (203) than those who do not. • Children living in poverty are more likely to have gaps in their foundational reading skills, and the hardships they face may also impact cognitive and social-emotional functions that influence their ability to learn (Litwin & Pepin, 2020). • Low literacy rates are linked to not only lower educational attainment but also poorer physical health (Bennett et al., 2009), and lower earnings (Karoly, 2015; Mckinsey, 2009). • Two critical analyses of access to children’s books from Neuman and Celano (2001) and Neuman and Moland (2019) revealed that too many U.S. children— disproportionately children of color, indigenous children, and impoverished children live in book deserts without consistent access to books (Neuman & Moland, 2019; Neuman & Celano, 2006). • Studies have shown that access to print resources—board books, stories, and informational books—early on in a child’s development has an immediate and long- term effect on their vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension skills (Allington et al., 2010). • Students should be offered books that reflect their personal experiences and culture while positively depicting the rich tapestry of cultural and ethnic groups around them (Worthy & Roser, 2010). • As Bishop (1990, p. ix) notes, “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”
SCHOLASTIC LITERACY FRAMEWORK EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 11
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