Raising A Reader is on a mission—to make sure that every child starts school ready to succeed

Four-year-old Ana peeks out the window and jumps up and down as soon as she sees a special visitor pull up in front of her apartment complex. “Mama, the bags, las bolsas,” she shouts.

Mama has the two bright red bags ready. They’re full of children’s books, the only ones in their home. One holds Spanish-English board books for Ana’s baby brother, Tomás. The other has books for Ana: two picture book classics in English, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (World, 1969) and Martin Waddell’s Owl Babies (Candlewick, 1993), and two bilingual picture books in Spanish and English. As soon as Mama opens the door to welcome nurse Nicole, Ana greets her with a huge smile. “Do you have new books for us?”

Ana already spots the new red bags in Nicole’s traveling kit, so she can barely contain her excitement as she anticipates the upcoming swap. But first Nicole plops down on the couch and asks Ana which books she enjoyed sharing with her family since their last visit. Then she pulls Alexandra Day’s Good Dog, Carl (S & S, 1991) out of the new bags she’s brought, demonstrating how to “read” the virtually wordless book, and inviting Ana to help.

“You can read any book this way,” she casually tells Ana’s mama. “It’s important to read in the language you’re most comfortable with. If you read in Spanish, that will help Ana and Tomás learn English. But sometimes, you won’t have a book with Spanish text. Then you can just read the pictures like we’re doing here. With Tomás’s little books, it’s really all about the pictures, isn’t it? We really aren’t reading with Tomás, we’re talking to him about the pictures. In fact, learning to read is all about talking. Because that’s how children learn language.”

Nicole has just described several of the basic concepts of Raising A Reader (RAR), a national early literacy program that began in the San Francisco Bay Area 12 years ago and has since spread to 30 states, including Oregon, where Nicole and many other nurses work in partnership with our library, Multnomah County Library (MCL).

RAR’s main tool is a bright red canvas book bag with a zippered top and an attractive logo inviting parents to “Read to Me.” Children are given a different bag containing four high-quality picture books each week, or every other week, by nurse home visitors, Head Start teachers, childcare center staffers, and other early care and education providers who maintain a collection of rotating bags in their classrooms, clinics, or car trunks. The idea is that when youngsters excitedly bring their bags home or receive a new delivery they discover the rich world of children’s books—and their parents discover the joy of reading to their kids. It’s all part of RAR’s mission, which is “to engage parents in a routine of daily ‘book cuddling’ with their children from birth to five to foster healthy brain development, parent-child bonding, and early literacy skills critical for school success.”

How it all began

The red book bags have been delighting children since 1999, when members of the Peninsula Community Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in California’s Silicon Valley, founded Raising A Reader to help San Mateo County’s struggling preschoolers. Sterling Speirn, the foundation’s then-president, knew that most children who start behind, stay behind, and never develop the strong reading skills they need to succeed in life. He also knew that a significant percentage of America’s kids—about one in three—enter kindergarten lacking the skills they need to learn to read.

When Speirn and his colleagues started looking at the reading research in the late-’90s, they discovered statistics as dismal as the recent findings of Boston’s Reach Out and Read National Center: only 47 percent of caregivers with children between birth and five years of age read to them at home each day, and that number drops to 36 percent for families living below the federal poverty level. In households where the primary language isn’t English, only 30 percent of children are read to daily, compared to 51 percent in homes where English is the main language.

Troubled by these developments, Speirn challenged his colleagues to come up with an affordable and scalable intervention strategy. To help make that happen, the foundation’s Center for Venture Philanthropy teamed up with the San Mateo County Library and turned to the American Library Association (ALA) for its insight on turning these disturbing trends around. They soon learned from a 1985 landmark report by the Commission on Reading called “Becoming a Nation of Readers” that “the single most significant factor influencing a child’s early educational success is an introduction to books and being read to at home prior to beginning school.”

The latest studies in brain development, including those highlighted in researcher Rima Shore’s Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development (Families and Work Institute, 1997), also played a role in shaping RAR’s evidence-based program. That research emphasized that the years from birth to five are an important “window of opportunity” for brain development in the area of language skills. Not only is the brain primed to learn language during these early years, but serotonin, a chemical produced in the brain when a child feels loved and secure, helps the brain create the synaptic connections that are essential for learning. When a child and parent cuddle up to read, the powerful nurturing emotions generated by that experience make it easier for the brain to retain the concepts, new words, and vicarious experiences that are encountered in the story.

A bag is born

While it’s important for parents to read aloud to their young children every day, starting at birth, it’s equally critical, Speirn and his colleagues realized, to have books in the home. What was needed was an intervention aimed at low-income families and others living with language challenges that put them at risk for low literacy. The simple solution? A bright red book bag. It would be designed to appeal to children and distributed to those in need with the help of early care professionals who worked with them. But the take-home book bag was only the start: those who helped put RAR into practice would be trained to gently encourage parents to read to their children routinely. They’d also learn the best ways to engage parents and children and share those practices with their clients. The goal? As RAR now says, “Children spending hours each week in a parent’s lap, reading their favorite storybooks together, then arriving at kindergarten already in love with the printed page.”

The book bags were introduced in California’s Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in 2001 and were an immediate hit, quickly finding their way into the hands of 16,511 children. Two years later, RAR had spread to 25 communities and reached 41,478 children. And by 2010, RAR had spread to 30 states and territories, and Fast Company had repeatedly named the nonprofit literacy organization one of the top 45 social entrepreneurs, changing the world “one bright red book bag at a time.” The magazine also admired RAR’s budget-friendly cost: an average of less than $35 per child for five years.

Raising A Reader currently operates through a diverse national network of affiliates, including public libraries and agencies such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, Catholic Charities, and regional early childhood initiatives, like Napa Valley’s Child Start, Inc.

Our library became a RAR affiliate site seven years ago. Ellen Fader, MCL’s youth services director, and the Library Foundation, which helps us develop innovative literacy programs, realized that Raising A Reader could help us extend our services to low-income families. These families represent much of Multnomah County’s current population growth, and they’re not traditional library users. Many of these parents lack transportation, work two or three jobs, have limited English skills, and may come from a culture or background in which books and libraries aren’t important. Many of these families don’t even have a book in their homes.

How our program works

At MCL, two early childhood librarians coordinate Raising A Reader. We build relationships with community partners, such as the county health department’s nurse home visitors, Head Start teachers, and others whose target clientele is children at risk for low literacy. These partners implement RAR, building on librarian-led training in brain development, basic early literacy, and interactive book-sharing techniques. Partners share that information with their clients during home visits, parent conferences, and other appropriate occasions. We librarians also seek out opportunities to reach parents directly, speaking regularly at Head Start family programs and other events where we stress the importance of parent involvement and teach interactive book-sharing practices, often including materials from the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) and Public Library Association’s (PLA) “Every Child Ready to Read @your library” initiative, an early learning program that aims to educate parents and other caregivers.

RAR affiliate sites purchase all books, bags, and program materials from RAR’s national headquarters, which describes the materials as “turnkey,” or ready to go. They are carefully selected to be age appropriate and culturally diverse. There are materials for three age groups: birth to two, three to four, and four to six. There’s a wide selection of English and Spanish books available, and RAR hopes to soon add titles in other languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Somali. Besides the books, there’s also a DVD on effective ways to share books with young children, which has been produced in 14 languages and is given to each family to keep. Extensive background information on brain development, early literacy, parent engagement, and interactive reading is provided, as well as tools for managing the book bags.

Our librarians say their favorite part of RAR is the special blue canvas bag given to children after they’ve enjoyed the red book bags for three to six months. The blue bag looks just like the red one, except it’s labeled “My Library Book Bag” and has a tag on which children can write their names. Children are given these bags to keep, with the hope that they’ll use their local libraries to sustain their newfound interest in books and reading. Library staffers distribute most of the blue bags in May, stuffing them with applications for library cards and information about the library’s summer reading program. Thanks to the Library Foundation, the bags include a coupon redeemable at our library for a free paperback or board book. Our staff reports that the blue bags have been a great way to connect children with their local branch libraries and to expand MCL’s summer reading program to low-income families.

What we’ve learned

After six years of growing Raising A Reader from 50 community partners to more than 400, we’ve seen that RAR’s seemingly simple approach is powerful. Our partners rave about the program and its effect on children. As nurse Nicole says, “The book bags literally open doors for me.” One Head Start teacher wrote on a recent program evaluation, “I see the change in my children. They are excited about reading at home and school, they care for books better in the classroom, they participate more in storytime.” A Head Start administrator praised the way RAR complements the Head Start curriculum: “We are committed to a classroom curriculum that exposes children to a wealth of good literature, yet the time we have with them is limited. The key to achieving literacy is creating families that read. That is what Raising A Reader does.” And parents are also delighted with RAR. Every year they fill the program evaluation forms with comments like this recent one: “Our child used to come home and watch TV. Now she would prefer us to read to her.”

Many of our partners and parents stress that, in addition to falling in love with books, their children develop a sense of responsibility through RAR. Children learn to take care of the bags and books, remember to bring the bags back to their classrooms, and help their teachers check that there are four books in each bag. Library staffers savor these words, knowing that responsibility is as important to kindergarten readiness as knowing the alphabet, having phonological awareness, and being motivated to read.

Six years of outcome-based evaluations of our RAR program have shown huge increases in the number of parents who share books with their children three or more times a week, and the number of children who spend more time looking at books and ask someone to read to them. Even more exciting are the changes parents have made in their reading practices. For example, in 2010–2011, there was a 124 percent increase in the number of parents who pointed out pictures and talked about them, and a 136 percent spike in those parents who talked about new words during book-sharing time. There was also a 113 percent hike in the number of parents practicing dialogic reading, a technique that stimulates conversation with a child by asking him questions. We librarians have been known to swoon over these numbers. We’re well aware that these are the practices that lead to early literacy skill proficiency and kindergarten readiness.

Perhaps most importantly, our evaluations consistently show that Raising A Reader makes the biggest difference with lower income families, as well as those that don’t speak English at home and have lower levels of education and younger children. When Vailey Oehlke became MCL’s director two years ago, she established seven service priorities for our library, one of which is that “children from birth to age five will have programs and services designed to ensure that they will enter school ready to learn to read, write, and listen.” Each year, our evaluations show that RAR extends our library’s ability to ensure this vision for families who face more hurdles than most.

We’d like to see more libraries become Raising A Reader affiliates, as we know no other organization whose mission and vision align so well with public library youth service goals. RAR’s emphasis on parent engagement and early literacy skill development is right in line with ALSC and PLA’s “Every Child Ready to Read” initiative, which has just been revised with newly designed materials. We believe that RAR and “Every Child Ready to Read” work well together to help communities everywhere recognize the valuable role youth librarians play in “helping children arrive at kindergarten already in love with the printed page.”