Declaration of the Right to Literacy

This appeared in the October 2010 Excelsior.

On Thursday, September 2, 2010, leaders from the greater Kalamazoo community gathered to express their support for literacy. More specifically, they came together to sign a scroll associated with the Declaration of the Right to Literacy, a national movement to underscore the importance of, and to advocate for, literacy. Below please find my paraphrased opening remarks at this event.

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be at the Kalamazoo Public Library, the original drumbeater for literacy in the Kalamazoo community, to celebrate literacy today.

It’s also a pleasure to see longstanding allies in the fight for literacy, like Lyda Stillwell of the Kalamazoo Literacy Council and Ann Rohrbaugh of the Kalamazoo Public Library.

It’s a pleasure to see members of the Kalamazoo Public Schools Board of Education: Board President Carol McGlinn and Board Trustees Dr. Martha Warfield and Mr. Ervin Armstrong. KPS is working hard to raise literacy levels in the community. Last year, all seven grades that took state MEAP reading tests raised their scores in KPS, with an average increase of 7.1 percent. That’s a tremendous increase in a year, a testament to the commitment of the Kalamazoo community to become a literacy community.

Today, we celebrate the signing of a Declaration of the Right to Literacy scroll. We celebrate being part of a growing national movement, begun at a June national conference in Buffalo, N.Y., where this declaration was drafted and approved. We also celebrate the increasing cohesion of our community’s commitment to literacy.

Today, we appreciate the fact that people representing so many different sectors have gathered here to express support for literacy as a critical element to the establishment of a college-going culture in this community. This is perhaps the story today, the “man biting dog” part of the story: that representatives not simply from the field of education, but those representing the private sector are here to join in and support the call for universal literacy.

Today, Dr. Juan Olivarez, president and CEO of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation; Dr. Janice Brown, executive director of The Kalamazoo Promise; Dr. Charles Warfield, president of the Metropolitan Kalamazoo NAACP; Dr. Randy Eberts, president and CEO of the Upjohn Institute; and Ms. Sheri Welsh, immediate past president of the Kalamazoo Chamber of Commerce will talk about various aspects of literacy and its importance. Mayor Bobby Hopewell will lead us in a call to action and through questions and answers.

From the perspective of education, literacy is clearly the most important skill for success. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of my county superintendent colleagues are here today to support this literacy effort and to sign the literacy scroll:

• Mr. Ron Fuller, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency
• Mr. Doug Knobloch, Schoolcraft superintendent
• Mr. Matt Miller, Parchment superintendent
• Dr. Sandy Standish, Comstock superintendent
• Ms. Marsha Wells, Portage superintendent

The issue of literacy is not just about reading, but about early language development, reading, and writing. It’s not just about young children but about older children and adults. And it’s not just an urban problem, not just about communities of color, not just a problem of poverty.

We know that literacy is not situational, as poverty can be … As a rule, illiteracy doesn’t reappear
in families once eliminated … Cure illiteracy in a family in one generation, and you’ve cured it in perpetuity in that family. Do it throughout the community, and you transform the community.

We know that 9th and 10th grade dropouts are so frequently the product of inadequate literacy in earlier grades, that the seeds of functional illiteracy bear dropout fruit later in life. We also know that the seeds of literacy bear the fruit of higher education, that literacy is the most important component in the establishment of a college-going culture.

We are working hard to become a literacy community, one in which everyone reads and writes well. It’s easy to take this important element of a college-going culture for granted if you are a member of the middle class, the product of college-educated parents, in a community with a high percentage of college-educated adults, one in which homes are full of print material.

Our reality across Kalamazoo County, however, is more mixed. Certainly, we have many highly educated families in the county, with a strong commitment to literacy in their children. But we also have other families in which functional illiteracy has crossed generations along with poverty, in which children have no books, no magazines, no newspapers, and parents with little to no commitment to literacy.

We need to create a school community that is fully literate, and we are moving strongly in that direction. But we have a long way to go before we are a community that has fully eradicated illiteracy, a community in which our expectation is that every child is capable of extracting substantial meaning from text. For that is what is necessary in a 21st century economy.

That is also what is necessary in The Promise Community, one in which we expect every child to be able to grow to his or her Promise, both lower- and upper-case. In signing this literacy scroll today, in being the last community to do so before the scroll heads to Washington, we send the scroll from the community of promise to the nation of promise.

Thank you.

Michael F. Rice, Ph.D.
Superintendent
Kalamazoo Public Schools