ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis NAACP is asking the federal government to help mitigate the “literacy crisis” Black students are facing in the classroom.
The organization filed a federal civil rights complaint against 34 public school districts and charter networks earlier this month over the low literacy rates in Missouri schools. The complaint, aimed at schools in St. Louis city and county, follows years of troubling data showing stark disparities between Black and white students’ reading scores.
Forty percent of Missouri’s fourth graders tested in reading were below a basic level of skill in 2022, according to the NAEP.
A 2022 report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows white students scoring 34 points higher in reading than Black students. That performance gap is largely unchanged from more than 20 years ago, amounting to 33 points in 1998.
This data is unacceptable to Adolphus M. Pruitt, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP. He wants the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to take a close look at the longstanding problem, which the NAACP calls a civil rights issue.
“We want them to mediate between us and all those school districts to say, ‘Hey, we need to look at how we’re educating children in the St Louis region, especially Black children,’” he said.
The St. Louis NAACP has not yet made its complaint regarding literacy rates public, as all 34 school districts are still being notified. Pruitt said this is a crisis that cannot be taken lightly.
Difficulty in reading can have lifelong consequences. Research has shown connections between low literacy rates and poverty, lower wage potential and poorer health outcomes. One study from Gallup in 2020 estimated that low adult literacy levels could cost the economy as much as $2.2 trillion a year.
“We cannot afford to have Black children come out of school and have poor literacy rates,” he said.
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Pruitt also said disparities in reading have a long history.
Between 1740 and 1867, several southern U.S. states, including Missouri, had anti-literacy laws in the books that barred enslaved Black, and sometimes free, Americans from learning to read or write. The law would not acknowledge that Black people were entitled an equal education until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case. The NAACP represented the Brown family in that landmark case, which ended legalized racial segregation in schools. Still, inequities remain in the quality of education offered to Black students.
“From my perspective, by the time kids get to grade three, I need to make sure that they’re able to read if I want to provide them with a reasonable opportunity to take advantage of an American dream,” Pruitt said.
For too many, that’s not happening.
‘This mission chose me’
Four members of Black Men Read STL, including President Keyon Watkins (second from left), stand with images of themselves reading. Photo courtesy of Black Men read STL
Though the low literacy rates are concerning, Keyon Watkins said there are groups on the ground in the St. Louis metro region who are passionate about bringing those numbers up. Watkins is the president of Black Men Read in St. Louis, which started as a book club in 2020.
Two years after the book club launched, something happened that would change the direction of his work. His older brother, who was illiterate, was murdered on Mother’s Day.
“So I’m just thinking [at the time] about the opportunities that he didn’t take advantage of and missed out on because of him being illiterate,” he said.
Months after his brother’s death, he filed for Black Men Read to become a 501(c)3 charitable organization. It was approved weeks later.
Today the organization, which now has 17 volunteers, provides tutoring for kids in kindergarten to fifth grade, offering one to three hour-long sessions per week for each kid.
Though Watkins went to school for computer science, he believes he was meant to do this work.
“The mission chose me.”
The St. Louis City and County NAACP chapters also launched a reading campaign called “Right to Read” in December, an effort to partner with school districts in hopes of getting children, and especially Black children, reading proficiently by the year 2030. The hope was for school districts in both St. Louis City and County, to adopt a resolution to put that commitment in motion.
For Watkins, literacy is a “national crisis” that affects both children and adults.
“We want to break those generational curses, specifically if the parents can’t read, the kids can’t read, that becomes a cycle,” he said.
About 130 million adults in the nation, or 54 percent between 16 and 74 years old, have low literacy skills, according to a 2020 Gallup analysis of Education Department data. This means people are reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
Despite higher high school graduation rates, 23 percent of adults still struggle to read, ProPublica reported in 2022, and access to adult literacy programs “is limited, increasingly insufficient and — much like the nation’s school systems — highly dependent on geography and the political will of elected officials.”
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One day, Watkins hopes to pay the Black Men Read tutors; they currently work for free. This will require more funding. Something he said can be hard to find and frustrating.
“Everything that we’re doing is out of pocket,” he said. “This is strictly a labor of love and knowing that there is a problem, we need to figure out the solutions.”.
Literacy is an issue across the country
Diana Greene, CEO of the Children’s Literacy Initiative, said this is something states are seeing across the country.
“This is a national issue. This is not just isolated to this one location,” she said .
Greene’s organization was founded in 1988 by a Philadelphia librarian who wanted to ensure that Black and brown children receive high-quality literacy instruction. Today, the anti-racist nonprofit’s work includes partnering with school districts across the country and coaching them as they seek to address literacy learning.
“We are believers in the science of reading, but there is no silver bullet,” Greene, a former superintendent, said. “It requires a very comprehensive lens, looking at the diverse learners in your classrooms, ensuring that your teachers have training in culturally relevant pedagogy, ensuring that they see children as through their assets instead of their deficits.”
Based on 2022 data from the NAEP, 17 percent of Black students scored at or above proficiency in reading, while 21 percent of Hispanic/Latinx students scored at or above proficiency, compared to 42 percent of white students.
Greene said we can’t ignore the effects of the pandemic, which caused education disruptions for more than 888 million children worldwide as a result of full and partial school closures.
“It reminded us that we were never at a good space but not only did it remind us, it also blew it up and now it’s even a larger gap than it was pre-pandemic,” she said.
These gaps, she notes, are unacceptable, and students not only deserve to know how to read, but also see themselves in what they’re reading.
“It’s like seeing in a mirror. But they also need to see windows,” she said. “They need to see other cultures. They need to see diverse types of texts that are presented before them and help them see where they fit in this world.”
