A Healthy Economy Starts In The Classroom

n top of global financial uncertainty, Texas faces a further threat: schools that fail their students. They will continue to damage the state’s economy unless school districts have the leadership to institute change in the way children are taught, says G. Reid Lyon, an expert on how children learn.
“If you don’t make it in school, you do not make it in life, and that is a fact,” Lyon declared at the groundbreaking of the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development in December. “Here’s what we’ve learned through research conducted at SMU and elsewhere: We actually know a great deal about how kids learn. We know a lot about why kids do not learn, and we know a lot about what to do about it.
“Unfortunately, a huge gap exists between what we know and what we
do in schools.”

G. Reid Lyon shares a joke with second-grade students at Williams Preparatory School in Dallas. A former elementary school teacher, Lyon says most reading difficulties can be prevented through early identification of problems and effective instruction.

Three decades of research show that most reading difficulties actually can be prevented if children are identified early, in kindergarten and first grade, and provided with effective instruction, says Lyon, one of the authors of the federal Reading First legislation – a component of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Even the mathematics skills that need to be learned and applied require proficient reading and comprehension capabilities. Too often, help is withheld until third grade or later, when the struggling learner is so far behind it takes hours of daily intervention to catch up, he says.
“What’s needed now, in addition to expert teachers, is outstanding education leaders to create a school environment that fosters success,” he says.
Lyon joined the faculty of the Annette Caldwell Simmons School in September as Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and Leadership. A neuropsychologist and former third-grade teacher, he helped create the school’s new Master of Education degree in educational leadership, which will be launched this fall.
He describes the new Master’s degree as a rigorous, evidence-based graduate program that stresses the immediate application of theory and leadership concepts in the school setting. Students in the program will intern at schools in the Dallas area and will be assessed on their ability to apply what they learn.
SMU plans to partner in the assessments with the Dallas Independent School District’s research department, an office that has led the nation in developing computer-based systems to track student achievement. The district recently received a $3.77 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to strengthen efforts to track student performance and improve college readiness.
A nationally recognized leader in the field of evidence-based education, Lyon served as a research scientist in the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1992 to 2000 and was chief of that branch from 2000 to 2005. In addition, he was an adviser to the Bush administration on child development and reading research.
At the NIH, Lyon directed research that led to improvements in math and reading scores. “What we found was that even at Blue Ribbon schools recognized for their excellence, there were substantial numbers of students who had not learned to read,” he says. “Because those schools had more students at high levels of proficiency, the underachievers were hidden.”
Armed with those results, he championed the requirement that all racial, ethnic and economic student subgroups show similar success for a school to be highly rated. That policy change forced schools to concentrate efforts on low-achievers. In addition, breaking out that data made it possible to conduct research demonstrating that the underlying problem is poverty – not race or ethnicity, he says.
Texas’ graduation rate of 69 percent lags behind the national average of 71 percent, according to statistics from the Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), a national policy and advocacy organization that promotes high school reform. AEE figures show that 118,100 students did not graduate from Texas high schools in 2008. The estimated lost lifetime earnings for those dropouts are more than $30.7 billion, according to AEE statistics.

Lacking adequate reading skills, students are destined for low-paying jobs, Lyon says. “In addition to the negative effect illiteracy has on health outcomes, they likely will drain public resources because of reduced tax revenue and increased expenditures for services like [government-funded] health care and prisons, two areas where those with low literacy are over-represented.”
Lyon notes that the SMU educational leadership program seeks to produce graduates who can help prepare the future North Texas workforce to obtain the well-paying jobs of tomorrow that will require solid literacy skills.
“The number of opportunities for meaningful employment for non-readers has shrunk to minimal levels because all world economies are now based upon the ability to process print.”
– Deborah Wormser