Borsuk’s essay and all colleague reactions are available at this link.
For two years, Boston educators dismissed parent Roxann Harvey’s concerns that her son was not learning how to read. They reassured the mother that some kids take longer than others and that she should simply read more with him at home. By the time he was in second grade, however, they suddenly grew concerned. “We’ll all be lucky if one day he’s able to read an article in the newspaper,” one teacher told her.
I wrote about Harvey’s journey to get her son appropriate help with reading in a 2022 article for the Washington Post and Hechinger Report. Many issues could have been at play in the family’s struggles: A weak early-reading curriculum. Insufficient support for struggling readers across many Boston public schools. And race. In Harvey’s view, it wasn’t a coincidence that it was the only Black teacher at her son’s school who finally stepped in to help her son.
In his provocative and thoughtful essay outlining the dismal history of (mostly) failed top-down national school reforms, Alan Borsuk underscores several reasons that initiatives such as No Child Left Behind have floundered: insufficient support for teachers, deep-rooted poverty, poor thinking.
We need to add race and racism to the list.
Borsuk describes in depth the reading reforms sweeping most states across the nation, including a renewed emphasis on phonics to teach young children how to read. Key supporters acknowledge that the new laws are not a silver bullet, given the challenges of implementation and the deep effects of poverty on children. This is true, but more supporters and policymakers need to acknowledge the centrality of race—especially the pervasive and pernicious lower expectations for Black children when it comes to reading.
While an alarming 30 percent of all 12th graders score below the basic level in reading nationally, 50 percent of Black students are in this category. Wisconsin consistently posts the largest racial gaps in reading performance in the country.
Controlling for income mitigates these gaps but hardly eliminates them. “Focusing on lower-[income] groups alone won’t be enough to narrow racial/ethnic excellence gaps,” concluded the authors of a 2023 report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The report found that racial gaps in reading achievement were particularly large in the highest-income group. “Policymakers and practitioners need to wrestle with the fact that fewer high-[income] Black and Hispanic students . . . are achieving at advanced levels than we would expect given their [income].”
I have reported for the last four years on disparities in access to reading interventions and supports, interviewing more than 20 parents who cited race as a complicating factor in getting their children help with reading. Their stories are supported by data. In Boston, where Harvey lives, my reporting found that public schools with larger populations of white students tended to employ significantly more teachers trained in programs designed specifically for students having difficulty learning to read.
Nationally, Black students are notably overrepresented in special-education categories, including intellectual disability and emotional disturbance—categories that rarely, if ever, qualify them for additional help with reading.
A growing number of leading proponents of reading reform speak explicitly about these disparities. This group includes Resha Conroy, founder of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, who was motivated by her own experience raising a Black child with dyslexia in New York’s Westchester County. “I saw low education expectations for my son,” she said during a 2022 national conference focused on literacy, “and I heard loaded language suggesting that it was okay for him not to read.”
Nationally, teacher diversity has not budged significantly over the years, with about 80 percent of the workforce remaining white. Research shows that our schools and children suffer from racial bias in teacher expectations. One 2016 report, for instance, found that white teachers were less likely than their Black counterparts to believe that their Black students would finish school and go on to college. Teacher expectations could become their own form of self-fulfilling prophecies, the study showed.
Across the country, state lawmakers are talking about reading instruction more than ever before. And they are investing millions in reeducating elementary school teachers, the overwhelming majority of them white, in the science of reading. We need to take this opportunity to embed education about race and unconscious bias in this unprecedented mass professional-development effort so that no family gets the message that their child’s capacity to learn to read is determined by the color of his or her skin.
Illustrations by Robert Neubecker
Sarah Carr has written widely on education issues. She is currently director of the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University. Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children, Carr’s book on New Orleans, was published in 2013.
