Lets make everyone feel good and ignore those who need help!

Posted on 16/02/2010 | 0 Comments

I am sitting in the comfort of a rustling train as it bumpingly floats its way through the winter-white Nova Scotia countryside, heading back home after four days of work in a rural part of a neighbouring province.

I am reading yesterday's Globe and Mail. The lead editorial headlines: “Those who read well at 15 succeed”. And, the story is about a Canadian study reported by the OECD that young people who can read well at age 15 tend to do well in life and that young people who can not, do not. It also reports the truly amazing finding (here I am being fascitious) that those youth who study do better than those who do not!

What insights! What revelations! What a surprise! Teenagers who read well and study hard do well? This is news?

Well, the news here is that reading ability is a good proxy measure for many problems. We have known for a long time that the inability to read at grade level in grade three is predicitive of poor educational, social and vocational outcomes. Seems that is also the case at age 15. Reading is a complex skill. Reading difficulties can be the result of psychosocial adversity, mental disorder, learning disability, or combinations of many factors. Whatever the reason, reading ability is a “marker” that can be used to identify young people who may need help in sorting out what the problem is and then they can be given personal assistance in addressing the problem so that they can become successsful.

So why are we not doing this? Why are we not assessing reading levels in grade three and at age 15 in every single school in this country and using that assessment to identify young people and develop personal interventions that can help them be as good as they can be? Why are we wasting large amounts of money on building self-esteem and other similar programs when the issue is not self-esteem? Why are so hesitant to put our money and our efforts into those areas that are likely to bring the best results, particulary for those who need it?

From what I have seen, one reason may be that it is difficult and costly to provide the assessment and intervention services that young people who are having difficulty need. So it is easier and perhaps cheaper to provide programs for the many that do very little, than interventions for the minority that may do a lot.

There is also a highly discriminatory ideology at play – not manifest but latent. We do not want to “label” those who need help so we do not identify them and we do not provide them with what they need for success. You see, “labelling” would hurt their self-esteem and would thus be unfair. Instead we shunt them aside in favour of “helping” everyone (including mostly those who do not need any extra help). This of course is more “fair” to those who need help as it denies them what they really need and sets them solidly on the road to poor outcomes. “Oh well, at least they were not labeled and their self-esteem did not suffer as a result”.

Is this fair? Is this the right thing to do? Not in my book.

--Stan

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