Inside the Text Teacher Guide

A democracy depends on a literate society; yet many middle and high school students struggle to make sense of the printed texts they see all around them. Whether they are looking at a textbook, an Internet site, a job application, or even the ingredients on a cereal box, these teens daily face a silent and humiliating secret—they can barely read. How do we, as teachers, reach these adolescents before it is too late, before they join the almost seven thousand students who drop out of high school every day in the United States? And once they drop out, studies show that they will most likely never participate in any civic activities, such as voting or community service. Unable to get a job because of their illiteracy, some then turn to a life of crime. There are those who may ask, “Why is it our problem that teens ruin their lives and end up in jail?” The answer is simple. To quote James Carville from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study of dropouts in 2006, entitled “The Silent Epidemic,” found that the lifetime cost to the nation for EACH American youth who drops out of school and later moves into a life of crime and drugs ranges from 1.7 to 2.3 million dollars. On May 22, 2009, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that the state of California spends about $8,500 a year to educate a high school student. In contrast, the cost per year to incarcerate one inmate in the California youth prison system is about $234,000. In other words, when teens drop out of school and into crime, we adopt them. We pay for their food, their housing, their prisons, their lawyers, their guards, their health care, etc.Teenagers drop out of school for many reasons. They may need to work to support their families. They may not speak English well enough to understand the curriculum or the language of school. They may become pregnant and choose to raise a child. And they may be such poor readers that they cannot decode their texts, whether print or electronic. Any struggling reader is likely to be disengaged from the print-filled world of school and, therefore, a prime candidate to drop out. Many of these students begin to think about dropping out in middle school or even earlier. Inside the Text is designed to help stop the flood of approximately 1.2 million students who drop out of school each year. The program is based on a successful model of reading instruction presently used around the country known as Response to Intervention.