Will The City’s Pre-K Be Another Losing Game?

What will they do differently to make it a win for the kids?

They used to think I’d be a sports writer. I still follow a lot of the games. No fantasy

leagues for me. But I keep up. I use sports to explain things sometimes. Here’s what the old Giants coach Bill Parcells said when he was asked if his team wasn’t better than its won-lost record. He said, ‘You are what your record says you are’. I wouldn’t want to live in the same building as Bill Parcells, but I’ll tip my hat to him for that quote.

This city’s public schools have a terrible record when it comes to teaching kids to read. Especially the poor kids. Maybe one out of five of the poor kids can read at their grade level. They don’t improve on their grade-level performance as they go up (are passed-on) in grades. If they stay in school long enough to graduate, and you wonder why they would if they can’t really read, there are still only 20% of them who are capable of reading (maybe) like a senior in high school is supposed to be able to.

Parcells would make the mayors and the chancellors who oversaw these losing seasons, run laps, do push-ups. In front of the kids. He’d tell ‘em, ‘You are what your record says you are’. He’d be mad, like only he could be.

If a team was doing that bad, a 1-4 record, they almost surely wouldn’t be favored in their next game. Well, their next game is the Pre-K Bowl. That’s their big game. That’s the one the coach has pinned up on the bulletin board. What are they going to do different this time? What new wrinkles are they going to add to their game plan? Are they going to scrap what they’ve been doing poorly and try something new? Are they going to have longer practices? Are they going to call old coaching buddies who have winning records in these kinds of games? What are they going to do different? What they do now isn’t working. They’re 1-4. They are what their record says they are.

As a young kid, I’d get up early on school days and pad out to the kitchen in my pajamas where my mother was drinking coffee and doing the crossword puzzle. I gingerly did this. I knew she liked her private time in the early morning stillness, before she had to fix breakfast for her husband and her kids, when it was dark out the shiny window in front of her, the window that reflected her there with the yellow light above her that lit up the fresh paper and her sharp yellow pencil just so. There was no radio on. The dark TV was in another room with its little doors closed. She’d look over at me and smile and feign excitement that I was there. But I knew she wanted to be alone. And I wanted to be alone too. I just wanted to get the sports page that was next to her. I didn’t need her smile. I certainly didn’t need a hug. I didn’t want any questions about breakfast yet. I just wanted my part of the paper. I wanted to read about the Celtics or Willie Mays or Notre Dame.

My mother’s been dead for 40 years. I get to read my morning paper all by myself now, under my own yellow light. She’d be sad that I’m long-divorced, but she’d understand. I could tell she was a loner like me. I knew it early on, when I’d come out to the kitchen and intrude upon her solitude those mornings when I was itching for the sports page and my own privacy.

When I got older and moved away and had kids of my own, I started my own newspaper. It was a free weekly, inspired by The Village Voice. We had sports in it. Of course.

Now I have my cityReader. This issue #48 makes it four years. My mother would like it.

I was just out in Jackson Wyoming, where my youngest daughter lives. She was born the very night we learned my mother had cancer that wasn’t going to be cured. My mother got to hold her just once. The daughter, named after my mother, has three daughters of her own. She reads three books to them every night at bedtime. Without fail. If they’re screwing around too much at dinner, a big threat is that if they don’t stop, they won’t get their books read to them that night. The oldest granddaughter is in first grade at the public school out there and can read now. I try not to make too big a deal of it to her, but it’s a big deal.

My two grandchildren here are in pre-K at a private school. One of those Notting Hill-type places where even a kid with an Irish last name’s first name is Winston. They can’t read yet. They’re twins, boy and girl. They don’t settle down quickly at bedtime in the room they share. But they have all sorts of flashlights and light-up toys that they use to look at books until they fall asleep. Next year they’ll go to the public school near them. It’s supposed to be a good one. J.D. Salinger went there. But it’s a New York City Public School and you keep your fingers crossed. If my daughter could afford it, they’d go to a private school like the one Winston will probably go to.

They’ll learn to read well, no matter the school. But all the kids won’t. That’s why I’ll keep putting out cityReader as long as I can. If I had more money, I’d put one out every week. It means more to me than the sports page now. I want every school kid to read well. It’s the mother of everything.

In the library in Jackson, Wyoming, I picked a thin book from the shelf. It was by Annie Dillard and I’d read it before, owned it at one time. It doesn’t exactly apply to what I’m talking about. But I think it’s important to share with you a few lines from it, one reader to another:

Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

Ol’ Satch Is Still Around

His arm is still warm at the library

If you take your kids to the library, and take your coat

off and put your phone away, you’ll find treats. The

kids will look at so many books, you’ll worry that they’re taking too many off the shelf. They’ll squeal in excitement over some and you’ll think you should shush them. But the ceilings are usually high in libraries and their enthusiasm won’t bother a soul.

There are story hours at all the branches. Don’t miss them. Get the kids a library card. Do you have one yourself? 

You and I Didn’t Discover Polar Bears, or ‘Green’

Our parents were way ahead of us

I thought my parents were dull and old, and annoying, 

because of the way they instinctively turned the lights 

out in rooms they weren’t in. They scolded us if we didn’t. And they kept the shades drawn to keep the house cool in summer. And they hardly ever turned the TV on. And they got National Geographic every month. It was always around.

We now think we’re discovering the North and South Poles and polar bears. After decades of thinking Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger were the coolest guys, we’re suddenly walking around in hiking shoes with dark socks on and being the gentle people.

As long as we’ve become our parents, we ought to read their magazine. 

Don’t miss the documentary,  Finding Vivian Maier. It’s at IFC and Lincoln Plaza.

What Would I Do?

Here’s the answer I gave when a friend asked me last week over

coffee.

What would you do about it? Someone I hadn’t seen in a few years asked me that the other day. We were having coffee, not far from Times Square.

I never have the same ready answer. Reading Academies was what came out of my mouth this time. I said I’d call all the schools here Reading Academies. People look at me when I say that. He looked at me. I assume they want to know what I mean. It’s such a phony-sounding thing: Reading Academies. I think they’re surprised I’d be for that.

So then I say that the schools should make certain that all the kids they have can read easily. That should be the goal, before anything else. Going to college should not be the goal. Learning to read well should be. College will take care of itself if they can read well. The way it too often is now is that many kids who can’t read well at all are going to college. Of course they aren’t really going to college. They’re taking remedial classes. Three quarters of the New York City public school kids who enter the city college system here, need remedial work. Who’s been letting this go on? Someone (almost everyone apparently) must think it justifies the public school system by having a lot of kids going to college, even if they aren’t prepared, by them, to go to college. Even if they can’t read well enough to read the text books or the literature books.

That’s preposterous, don’t you think? You don’t have to answer. Of course you think it is.

So, I’d stop running the schools the way they’re run now. They haven’t been working for poor kids for a very long time. Way before No Child Left Behind and ‘testing’. Way before charter schools and Common Core. That’s, of course, why those programs sprang up. 75% of the public school kids here aren’t reading well at all when their high school days are completed. And that’s after 10 or 12 years of going to school here in New York City. You wouldn’t think that. You wouldn’t think that here, where Random House is, and Scholastic is, and the New Yorker is, and the Times Book Review is, that such failure at reading would go on; would be allowed to go on.

I believe that if the schools were transformed into Reading Academies, things would be much better. For everyone. Reading Academies would, by their very nature, place reading at the center of their mission, and their curriculum. They would set the standard by which pre-K’s and kindergartens were structured and measured. Everyone would know that beginning with first grade, the school system was going to require reasonable but strict standards in reading for promotion. There would be no exceptions. Parents would have to know this clearly, of course. Eventually everyone would know it, like everyone in Green Bay knows when football season starts. It’d be in the air here. Like it should have always been in New York City. Why isn’t it? Why does New York, the media/cultural/publishing capital of the world, do no better than other big cities at teaching its most-crucially-in-need-of-knowing-how-to-read students how to read?

If all the schools here focused on reading for all 12 years (and not just in schools where poor kids go; all schools), the teaching staff would need to be different. The Reading Academies would need to be staffed with many teachers who were English majors in college. English majors love to read and write. They’re who you’d want in the academies. People who liked to work with books and who like to work with sentences. People who would not accept their students reading poorly and who would read themselves when the kids had quiet time to read.

English majors have a tough time finding jobs that have to do with their love of language. Teaching in New York City would be a dream job for many of them. Especially in these Reading Academies where reading and language would be at the core of the school day.

If these academies, with their staffs of English majors (of course, there’d be science majors and math majors, too; no more education majors though) are going to run efficiently and joyfully (and why shouldn’t they run joyfully?), there would have to be reasonable quiet in the school. You can’t read and write in noise. The principal and his or her staff would have to maintain order. It’s not a job for English majors or science majors or history majors or math majors. The principal would have to see to that. But it would be easier to keep order in a Reading Academy than in an old school. Reading Academies have right in their name what they’re about. And reading requires quiet. Kids in the hall would know why they have to keep it down. Those in charge of keeping order would have a real reason to tell noisemakers to be quiet; not ‘just because I said so’.

On another day, over coffee, maybe something else would have come out of my mouth, when I was asked what I would do.  There are certainly other things to do, but the schools where the kids go every day must be different than they are now, and changing them to Reading Academies would be a way to make them different, and better.

All I really remember of my early years in school, besides my friends up and down the aisles, has to do with books and pages. All the pages had words on them, even the math books. Before school, there was the morning paper’s sports page to read. After school, there was an afternoon paper with scores from the late night games in California. When the mail came there was always a magazine like Life or Look or the Saturday Evening Post or Collier's or Time or National Geographic or Sports Illustrated. My father read four newspapers, before and after running a big company, every day. He could seldom be coaxed to come in the living room and watch TV with us. He had so much interesting stuff to read.

I’ve got interesting stuff to read too. Books and magazines and newspapers. I am reading four books right now. Two novels and two histories. Actually I’ve got five going. I forgot about the book I have in my bag that I’m reading on the subway every weekday on my way to hold my sign. It’s Jane Jacobs’ famous book about cities. The other night I couldn’t sleep. I tried sports talk on the radio to put me back to sleep, but the commercials are so loud at that time of night that I almost screamed back at them. So, I turned the little clock-radio off and I turned the light on and I got up and grabbed a mass market paperback off the shelf, because it jumped out at me as books do when you need them. It was Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I went right to Zooey, and in the wonderfully funny bathroom exchange between a son and his mother, I got what I needed to get right enough with the world to go back to sleep. Thank God for books.

My father built a new public library in my little hometown before he died. He’d be shocked if he knew how the schools here in the big city he loved to come visit and do business in failed at teaching so many of its school kids to read well. We should all be shocked.

Take Your Kid

Or take the kid in you there

The aisles are nice and wide so you can easily bend down or kneel to see the books on the lower shelves.

There’s room to sit and look at books in the big aisles too. There’s room for strollers.

I don’t go in there enough. When I do, I say I should come once a week. There’s good coffee and sweets and a few sandwiches in a little café area. Some arty high schoolers were sitting in there when I was there. That was cool, too. There are books for kids like them in the store.  There are first editions and famous illustrations for sale in back.

It’s Books of Wonder, like the bag says, on 18^th Street between 5^th and 6^th, south side of the street. See you there maybe.

The ‘X’ Factor

If you can’t read well, you can’t read this book

If kids read poorly, they have no chance of understanding books like this. They’re left with the movie, which is never the same. It never is. You want a book like this to be a bible for you, if Malcolm’s your guy. You don’t just want a movie.

A book is the only entertainment that can be just yours. You can find and read a book on your own, at your pace. Everybody’s seeing the same movies, and TV shows. How radical is that?