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Jenny Mackenzie: When I was 14 years old, I was actually diagnosed with dyslexia. And I was that kid who was in the back of the classroom hoping the teacher would not call on me. I really flew under the radar and did well, but I got lucky because I had parents who were able to access the resources and the support that really changed my life. And that’s not true for many, many people in our country and beyond. So reading is personal for me.
Intro: Ideas to Innovation. From Clarivate.
Neville Hobson: There’s an alarming state of literacy among children in America. As many continue to read below grade levels, reading literacy needs to be top of mind for libraries and educational systems as we prepare future generations for the real world. This isn’t just a matter of educational statistics, it’s a pressing social issue with far-reaching consequences. Lack of literacy skills increases the likelihood of incarceration, homelessness and high school dropout rates.
Schools throughout the United States use reading methods known as whole language or balanced literacy. These methods, built on the belief that children will naturally learn to read over time, have students rely on context clues and memorization instead of focusing on individual sounds and letters.
Despite the good intentions, these methods have failed to deliver results, leaving countless children struggling with basic literacy. Critics argue that this is a modern day civil rights crisis requiring systemic change. Now, a thought-provoking documentary film, The Right to Read, highlights the alarming state of literacy in America and showcases the tireless efforts of those fighting for change.
Welcome to Ideas to Innovation, a podcast from Clarivate with conversations that explore how innovation spurs people and organizations to think forward and achieve their full potential in areas such as science, business, academia, technology, sport, and more. I’m Neville Hobson.
The Right to Read is a wake-up call, illustrating that while some progress has been made, much work remains, says the film’s director. It’s a rallying cry for educators, policymakers, parents, and all stakeholders to rethink and reform how reading is taught in America. We’re fortunate to have Jenny McKenzie, the director of The Right to Read, as our guest on this episode of Ideas to Innovation.
Jenny is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Salt Lake City in the United States. Her documentary films, educational videos and public service announcements raise awareness and promote social change on a wide range of issues.
Welcome Jenny, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Jenny Mackenzie: Thank you so much Neville. It’s so nice to be here.
Neville Hobson: So I’ve watched The Right to Read, and I think it’s fair to say that this is a film that’s not only about literacy, but also about empowering future generations with the most foundational tool for success, the ability to read. You’re the filmmaker. I imagine that’s how you see it too, right?
Jenny Mackenzie: Absolutely, and I think, you know, as you did your lovely intro and we think of ideas of innovation, how can you have any idea of innovation if you can’t read? If you can’t read, you don’t have access to anything really in our world. And it’s impossible to consider how people function in a democracy if they really can’t fill out a job application, if they can’t access healthcare and write down what their health issues are. So it’s essential to be able to go to a ballot and be able to vote.
Neville Hobson: Right, right, we’ll explore that. You’ve said that the right to read started in 2018 as a story on pre-literacy, where you were trying to understand why so many children were entering kindergarten without the skills necessary to learn to read. You realized there was a bigger issue, children not learning to read once they got to school.
I’m curious about that. Before we get into the details, though, please tell us how you got involved in this and why you’re so passionate about the right to read.
Jenny Mackenzie: Well, I feel as though most of my films are deeply connected to who I am and my own experience in life or my family’s experience. And when I was 14 years old, I was actually diagnosed with dyslexia. And I was that kid who was in the back of the classroom hoping the teacher would not call on me. I really flew under the radar and did well, but I got lucky because I had parents who were able to access the resources and the support that really changed my life. And that’s not true for many, many people in our country and beyond. So it’s personal, reading is personal for me.
Neville Hobson: So you’ve had quite some years in this sort of area. Tell us a bit more about your background before you started your film business. And that was in I think 2007, right? So you’ve been doing this for quite a quite a lot. But what led up to it? What what were you doing before this? And why did you jump into filmmaking? I mean, I suspect I know the answer to that. But I’m keen to hear what you say about that.
Jenny Mackenzie: Yeah, well, social and racial justice stories have always been near and dear to my heart. And I was raised by parents who I think were really activist and always fought for equality. And for me, I think once my dyslexia was diagnosed, I got very fortunate. I was able to go to an Ivy League university. And, really, social work and psychology was my first career.
And I did an early… you know, in my 30s, I switched careers and it was a natural, I think, career trajectory to go from social work and psychology into social justice filmmaking. Because you are really listening to people’s stories as you bring people into an issue in an intimate way with a camera. And that’s really what social impact filmmaking is about.
It’s about letting people feel compassion by coming as close as you can to walking in someone else’s shoes. And I think that’s what we hope to do with The Right to Read. We had this big issue about the early reading crisis. And then the idea is, how do you bring people into that story in a deep way that resonates and that helps them to follow someone who is inspirational?
Neville Hobson: Right. Okay. Let’s talk about the film in that case. I think this is a good moment to do it. So the right to read is my summary, by the way, from watching it and reading about it. It shares the stories of an NAACP activist, a teacher and two American families who fight to provide children with the most foundational indicator of lifelong success, the ability to read as we said.
For the benefit of our listeners, the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization in the United States.
So with that very concise kind of descriptor summary of what it’s about, lead us through the film, if you would, tell us about the people whose stories you share in this film.
Jenny Mackenzie: Well, I think as I was mentioning Neville, to me, I think about a documentary as truly being a compassion machine. So as you and I talked about, you have this big issue, the early literacy crisis. And when we first started exploring how we would tell this story, we really did think it would be about early educational technology and pre-literacy skills. So how do children learn to talk? How do they learn to pronounce those letters? How do they blend those letters? And then how are they learning those sounds?
And we realized quickly, as we were observing classrooms across the country, that even if parents were doing everything they can to set their children up for success, if there wasn’t explicit science-based, evidence-based reading instruction in classrooms, those children were still floundering and not doing well.
So for us, it was finding the stories, and that narrative thread that could carry the film. We met a really inspirational character who is Mr. Kareem Weaver in 2020. We had been filming for about a year and a half and he is really the lead protagonist who carries this film. And he’s a former teacher, a former principal and really a leader in the early education space. And he basically said, this is it.
He lost his father and I think it was a real sort of awakening moment for him, saying that the time is now and what is my legacy going to be when I leave this planet, seeing his father die and he said, I have to fight for early reading instruction. So the film really follows his path to change in his own community in Oakland, California, and then spreading his remarkable work beyond.
Neville Hobson: That’s because he discovered that literacy was so low in that particular area, right? And so the driver for him was to address that head on based on his life experience so far.
Jenny Mackenzie: Absolutely. Kareem is someone who really is the one who said, this is our greatest civil rights issue. And when we look at reading instruction, all of us, what he says, all of us are on the bus going off the cliff together. He said, it’s just where are you seated on this bus? And the biggest challenge is that really, what has happened for decades and really centuries,
is black and brown children have much lower scores. So they are the ones who are more impacted when you disaggregate the data and look at those numbers.
But it’s bad for everybody. It’s just a resource gap. And what’s happening for families that have resources, for example, mine, when I was diagnosed, is those families can get tutors. They can get support. They can get resources for their children. They can get educational testing, which is very costly.
So… Kareem is really fighting to change those reading scores. And in America, we have two-thirds of our children who are reading below basic, which is a three-alarm fire. That is catastrophic.
Neville Hobson: That does sound pretty extraordinary to me, I have to say. So, Kareem, as you say, the main protagonist here, but there are some other terrific stories here too. The teacher, Sabrina Corsi, first grade teacher, she worked with Kareem, I believe, in incorporating curriculum. That was not the method that’s in common use. This was a newer curriculum based on the science of reading. What can you tell us about that?
Jenny Mackenzie: Well, the beautiful thing is, you know, stories, I believe stories come to you. You know, the universe luckily dropped this film into my lap, I think, because of reasons that are, as I shared with you, very personal. But it was remarkable to see Kareem working with a teacher in one of the lowest-performing schools in our country.
And this teacher, who was a relatively new teacher in her third year, was going home fed up, crying, you know, at the end of her days and really frustrated because the curriculum that she was using was really ineffective and she had to go back to basics. So she worked with Kareem and a remarkable literacy coach and literally went against district policy to bring in different curricula that really was based in the evidence, based in the research, based in the science to teach her children to read, and she found remarkable results within a year.
Neville Hobson: And there are two other protagonists, if you will, in this story, a family in Virginia and another family in Mississippi who during that time moved to Tennessee. So it covers a geographically big part of the southern states, really, I suppose. What can you tell us about those families? What’s their angle, if you will, that’s complementary to the other two. I mean, how were they? Their circumstances were very different, both of them, I think. But what can you tell us about those two?
Jenny Mackenzie: I think those families are really the families that Kareem and Ms. Corsi are fighting for every day in the classroom, in the district, and in the country. And those families represent just beautiful, real families who are working so hard, like all of us who have children and want to create better opportunities for our children than we had ourselves. And we want them to have access to everything in the world.
So these families, I think, are hardworking, deeply devoted to their children, care about success in school, and they are doing everything right. So the way in which these families come into the story is to really show you what it means to be a parent of a young child and fighting for that most foundational literacy right. But even if your child is in a school doing well, you’ve set them up for success, if they aren’t using evidence-based instruction, everything can fall apart very quickly.
Neville Hobson: Right, right. I’m getting that point quite clearly. So it’s essentially two things. It’s not perhaps, as one might think, it’s like your dyslexia, for instance. It’s not just that. It’s the institutions themselves that aren’t doing it right, I think is my way of describing it, which leads to how people have been describing this as a civil rights crisis. If kids are going to school and not learning to read that makes absolutely no sense at all.
And I’m thinking, this is a pretty powerful element to the story, it seems to me, and it reminds me of the challenges facing academic libraries in universities and colleges in the US, so it’s at the other end of the educational scale from the people starting out in school at a very young age. And this was a topic discussed in an episode of this podcast in October of 2023.
The focus there was on the library’s mission to preserve and disseminate knowledge, but that’s absolutely connected with what we’re discussing today. And having a film like yours available in academic libraries for faculty and students allows this important topic to be discussed, explored, and debated in classrooms with the next generation of teachers and citizens.
So I know when The Right to Read came out when you released it in early 2023, it had some pretty positive reviews. I read quite a few of those and responses reactions across the mainstream media. I saw a number of interviews you were in that were that you can get all these on YouTube. There’s quite a collection of these things talking about this. Some of it with Kareem Weaver as well, which is great.
But I’m wondering in light of… I guess the reality that this is about the institutional failure in educating kids and the very basics of this. What’s been the reaction from, I guess, government really at all levels to the criticisms explicit and implicit that the film reveals? What have you had as a result of that?
Jenny Mackenzie: I feel lucky because I think the government reactions have been mostly honest, transparent, and open to taking responsibility for things that haven’t happened the way they should. And I think when we know better, we do better. We now have in our country over 40 states that have passed science of reading legislation, which really means they care about bringing in the correct curriculum that will be used to teach children in a very systematic scaffolded way so that you learn those foundational skills. The same foundational skills that we should be using to teach someone who has dyslexia, right? You really wanna start with that explicit reading instruction not just exposing them to books, right? It’s wonderful that we read to our children but it’s really not the same as teaching reading.
Neville Hobson: No, I agree. In fact, some of the content I’ve seen on your website talks about something which struck me as helping people, perhaps listeners to our conversation today, truly grasp what the issue is. Where if you show children pictures and ask them to identify them after over time, they can do that when they see the picture. But if you write the word, they have no idea what you’re talking about. That seems to me to be a huge gap, right? I mean, is that as big a gap as I think it is, do you think?
Jenny Mackenzie: I mean, you’re bringing up a perfect example from techniques that are used in whole language and balanced literacy. And we certainly want children to enjoy picture books, but they really have to learn those letter sounds, that decoding, that blending in a very specific way where they’re not guessing, which is what those techniques are truly encouraging. So I think when we consider what science of reading legislation means,
it means not using that kind of methodology, where we want them to be exposed to picture books, of course, but we don’t want them to use techniques that are considered picture power. Show that picture so that you can guess what that word is. The difference between pony and horse is huge.
Neville Hobson: Right.
Jenny Mackenzie: So if you’re reading a book and a child is reading a book and says, looks and guesses, that’s a good thing.
P-P-P-Pony is very different than the word, ha-ha, horse, right?
Neville Hobson: Yeah, that makes sense.
So that’s quite a landscape we’ve… a picture we’ve painted, if you will, of a landscape today where adults who struggle to read, and this is, I guess, the, the other bit of the picture that realization dawns where if you’re a young child struggling to read, and that isn’t addressed early on by the time you’ve reached teens getting towards adult, you still having that issue.
So some dreadful statistics being quoted around, and this is from a study from the World Literacy Foundation, which says that adults who struggle to read are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed or in prison. A 2020 study by Gallup found that low levels of adult literacy could be costing the US economy as much as $2.2 trillion a year. Big number, hard to imagine. Think of Apple Computer, they’re worth about that. They get an idea of the value of this.
It’s a pretty bleak outlook, it seems to me. In light of everything that’s going on, this is still what’s being cited in terms of surveys and therefore the analysis of data. If we can’t expect significant change today, and you can challenge me on that if you think, well, we are seeing significant change today, but if we can’t expect it, what might things look like 10 years from now, do you think, in 2034? So a decade away.
Are we still looking at a bleak outlook? What’s your outlook, Jenny? What do you think?
Jenny Mackenzie: Oh boy, if we don’t create change in 10 years, I can’t even begin to imagine things and how bleak it would be, Neville. This is about disrupting the path to homelessness, to incarceration, to teen pregnancy, to high school dropout. When you think about the numbers that you just shared with our economy and the return on our investment and what really true innovative ideas mean, this is something that we have no choice. We must invest in this change because, you know, it is crucial to be able to have those foundational skills. And just imagine if that population is invested in our economy, is working, is participating in our economy. And by really always excluding a certain group from literacy, what we are doing is we are excluding them from participating in our economy, in our innovative ideas, in our democracy. So there’s just, you know, there’s no choice that this has to be number one on our list right now.
Neville Hobson: Got it. That’s quite a call to action, I think. So, linked to that, my final point to ask you would be, what would you like people to do when they’ve watched The Right to Read? What’s the call to action to viewers of the film? What would you say?
Jenny Mackenzie: What a great question. I think the call to action is I want parents, I want teachers, I want school leaders to be open to the implementation of that change. When we raise awareness around an issue and we use the United States as an example with over 40 states that have passed this legislation, so a law is in place. Well, a law is only as good as the accountability and the implementation of that law.
So I want parents to really work in collaboration with their schools, with their school leadership, with their government leadership, to make sure once they pass this kind of law, that there is accountability and there’s implementation. When we really think of what has to happen for a school, for a teacher to be successful, they have to have professional development. They have to have the time to really learn these techniques and this methodology because right now many teachers’ colleges have been teaching with other theories and other curriculum.
So we are working now with a film with teachers colleges so that they can be training teachers appropriately because we want no shame, no blame for teachers. This is teachers are out there heroically doing their very best.
But there’s a lot that’s involved, right? We need coaching, we need assessment, we need materials, and we need to teach those teachers the right way.
Neville Hobson: Quite a task ahead, then.
Jenny Mackenzie: There is!
Neville Hobson: So this has been a great conversation, Jenny. Thank you very much. And you’ve helped, I think, put this on the map a little bit for our listeners. I certainly will get a picture of what this is all about and the value of this film. So thank you very much for joining us today.
Jenny Mackenzie: My pleasure.
Neville Hobson: You’ve been listening to a conversation about an award-winning documentary film aimed to elevate awareness and stimulate debate and action about low child reading proficiency in the United States, with our guest Jenny Mackenzie, filmmaker and director of that award-winning documentary, The Right to Read. You can find more information about the film at The Right to Read film dot org.
You can also find The Right to Read in Academic Video Online, a streaming video collection available to academic libraries from ProQuest, part of Clarivate. Visit video dot alexander street dot com and search for ‘The Right to Read’.
In a few weeks, we’ll release our next episode. Visit clarivate dot com slash podcasts for information about ideas to innovation. And for this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues, rating us on your favorite podcast app or leaving a review. Until next time, thanks for listening.
Outro: Ideas to Innovation. From Clarivate.
