Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction.

Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction

Under the impact of No Child Left Behind, district and building-level leadership teams are more intently focused on reading improvement goals than ever. Acknowledging a need for a broader curricular background in reading, busy administrators will find Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction a useful source of ideas, theories and discussion starters.

The editors, Pamela Mason, elementary principal at Tucker School in Milton, Mass., and Jeanne Shay Schumm, chair of the teaching and learning department at the University of Miami, integrated a wide range of information-rich chapters, relevant topics and significant discussion starters into an easy-to-read, yet theory-supported text. The book covers topics from the role of an efficient reading specialist to an overview of best practices with strong chapters on diversity issues related to reading.

The book is structured around the International Reading Association's position statement identifying 10 principles that are the right of every child. For example, under IRA Right 4, "Children have a right to access a wide variety of books and other reading material in the classroom, school and community," the book discusses a study by Nell K. Duke, an associate professor of learning, technology and culture at Michigan State University, about the scarcity of informational texts in 1st grade and gives strategies for addressing the issue.

One could take issue with the limited perception of the title: Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction. While no one can question that leadership issues are unique for the urban school administrator, many issues addressed here--community poverty, increasing diversity, inadequate facilities, inadequate school funding and shifting populations--are increasingly faced by all administrators.

(Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction edited by Pamela A. Mason and Jeanne Shay Schumm, International Reading Association, Newark, Del., 2003, 551 pp., $39.95 softcover)

Donna S. McCaw

Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Ill.