Readers Read: a Tucson School Story

by David Safier

When a Tucson elementary school has 70% minority students and 75% of the kids are on free or reduced lunch, and that school has the highest library checkout rate of any TUSD elementary school, you gotta figure someone’s doing something right.

The school is Drachman Montessori Magnet School. Every year it has a Parade of Reading Champions, and this year every student participated. To walk, the students have to read at least 10 books. I repeat. Every one of the 310 students walked, marched, strolled and/or danced in the parade.

This is from a Daily Star article I banked a few weeks ago, waiting for a time to write about it. Yesterday I wrote about a blog post on The Book Whisperer that sung the praises of getting books into students’ hands, so I figured this was the right time to bring up this success story.

(BTW, the Book Whisperer blogger, a Texas teacher named Donalyn Miller, commented on yesterday’s post. Our electronic interconnectedness never fails to amaze me. I got a comment awhile back from a woman in Argentina thanking me for writing a post pointing out the author of a quote she had been searching for. Unbelievable!)

Back to the story. Drachman has a frequent reader club that encourages students to read and keeps track of how many books they finish. When Gloria Carrington, the teacher-librarian, told students they would “parade” up to the stage to be recognized for their reading, she thought she was speaking figuratively, but the students took her literally and demanded a real parade.

So all 310 students paraded to celebrate their reading, some with signs, some carrying their books, all getting recognized and congratulated, whether they read the minimum 10 books, or 100 books (120 of the 310 students did it) or 1,000 books, a number 11 students reached.

Here’s a non-competitive competition where everyone is a winner. Each student knows exactly what to do to win and be recognized.

These students must have experienced a rush of pride from the celebration of their reading success, not to mention the learning and enjoyment that came from the reading itself. The next time they have the opportunity to read something, the pleasure sensors in their brains will start flashing in anticipation. They’ve been given the gift of the joy of reading. I’m sure it won’t take for all of them — nothing in education ever does. But I’ll give these kids a far better chance of being lifelong readers than a bunch of drill-and-kill Reading Firsters who can sound out a word one letter at a time but haven’t discovered the pleasure of picking out a book on their own, then sitting down and reading it.