"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" Matthew 25:29. Researchers speak of this syndrome as the "Matthew Effect"—which is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
First coined in 1983, by Walberg and Tsai, the "Matthew Effect" states that without intervention, students who start out with some literacy advantages tend to thrive and grow academically, while their less fortunate peers tend to get left behind.
This is what respected author and psychologist, Margaret J. Kay, Ed.D. had to say about the matter:
“The past five years have brought major breakthroughs in our knowledge of how children learn to read and why so many fail. These new insights have been translated into techniques for teaching reading to beginning readers, including the many students who would otherwise encounter difficulties in mastering this fundamental skill.
Students who do not ‘learn to read’ during the first three years of school experience enormous difficulty when they are subsequently asked to ‘read to learn.’ Teaching students to read by the end of third grade is the single most important task assigned to elementary schools. During the first three years of schooling, students ‘learn to read.’
That is, they develop the capacity to interpret the written symbols for the oral language that they have been hearing since birth. Starting in fourth grade, schooling takes on a very different purpose, one that in many ways is more complex and demanding of higher-order thinking skills. If efficient reading skills are not developed by this time, the English language, history, mathematics, current events, and the rich tapestries of literature and science become inaccessible.
More students fail to learn to read by the end of the third grade than many people imagine. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that all schools encounter students who fall into this category and that all schools should have plans for addressing the special needs of these students.
In its 1994 Reading Assessment, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a federally supported program that tracks the performance of American students in core academic subjects, reported that more than four out of 10 fourth-graders (42 percent) in American schools were reading at a ‘below basic’ level. This means that they could not understand ‘uncomplicated narratives and high-interest informative texts.’
NAEP also reported that such illiteracy persists in the higher grades. The report found that nearly one-third (31 percent) of eighth-graders and nearly one-third (30 percent) of twelfth-graders are also reading at a ‘below basic’ level. The latter figures probably understate the problem, because many poor readers drop out of school before twelfth grade.
In contrast to popular belief, reading failure is not concentrated among particular types of schools or among specific groups of students. To the contrary, students who have difficulty reading represent a virtual cross-section of American children. They include rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban, and public and private school children in all sections of the country. According to the NAEP assessment, for example, nearly one-third (32 percent) of fourth graders whose parents graduated from college are reading at the ‘below basic’ level.”
Thank you Dr. Kay! So, it looks like the “Matthew Effect” doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to struggling readers. Could it be that we haven’t given teachers the reading skills, tools, and strategies they need to actually teach students how to decode words?
I say, that's a fact.
What do you say?