Katherine Crawford-Garrett, a literacy professor at the University of New Mexico,wrote on this blog about how the rating system used by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) affected her own ability to assign readings; her dean warned her that her syllabus might offend them. After her post appeared, it was criticized by Arthur McKee, who directed the NCTQ review of teacher preparation institutions. He ridiculed Crawford-Garrett for ignoring “the science of reading.”
This is Crawford-Garrett’s response to McKee.
Dear Dr. McKee,
I just read your response to the blog entry I posted on Diane Ravitch’s website earlier this week. I interpret your response to mean that you are, perhaps, paying attention to the onslaught of critique your organization is receiving.
I decided to reply in the interest of exposing yet another layer of inaccuracies put forth by NCTQ about the teaching of reading.
I wonder, Dr. McKee, what you are actually referring to when you mention “the science of reading”? I suspect it has something to do with the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, which was released over a decade ago, relied on an extremely limited number of studies to substantiate its claims, has been critiqued widely and led directly to the Reading First debacle during the George W. Bush administration. I have spent countless hours in kindergarten classrooms in urban Philadelphia that rely on the “scientific approach” to reading instruction recommended by the NRP. In most of these classrooms there were no children’s books but plenty of phonics workbooks featuring decodable texts. Are these children learning to decode? Maybe. They were certainly learning to sit still and be quiet and also learning that reading had no relevance to their lives. This is injustice, Mr. McKee. I have never seen a kindergarten class in a wealthy area employ this “scientific approach” to reading instruction. Not once.
I also wonder, Dr. McKee, whether you make it a point to read any of the top journals in the field of reading research including Reading Research Quarterly or the Journal of Literacy Research? Or whether you have read the policy statement issued by the Literacy Research Association that deems NCTQ’s textbook list “damaging to teachers and children”? There is a wealth of peer-reviewed research in my field, Dr. McKee. As an expert in that field, I am quite familiar with it. I suggest if you are going to continue to make pronouncements about the “best ways to teach reading” that you familiarize yourself with it as well.
Before becoming a literacy professor, I taught at an innovative, arts-focused charter school in Washington, DC. We consistently had some of the highest literacy scores in the city, and we did it all without relying on corporate, scripted programs to teach our students to read. Instead, we read real books and wrote real documents that were often sent to public officials or used in other authentic capacities. This is high-stakes accountability in the field of literacy- when reading and writing matters in the world.
Now, I know one of your primary concerns, Dr. McKee is whether I teach phonics in my reading methods class. I assure you that I do (it’s even featured quite prominently on my syllabus). Code-breaking is a fundamental aspect of learning to read. However, these skills mean very little outside a framework of meaning-making. If students don’t have a purpose for decoding a text, then why on earth would they do it?
Contrary to the claim you make on your blog, I do teach vocabulary and fluency in my classes- they just happen not to be listed as headings on my syllabus partly because it feels artificial to separate them out from other parts of the reading process.
This is the fundamental flaw in your organization, Dr. McKee. You make assumptions based on a piece of paper. You have not seen my classroom and you do not know about the opportunities and challenges we face in New Mexico or how literacy operates in a culturally and linguistically diverse community. The primary assignment in my reading class – the class NCTQ deemed “unacceptable” – requires students to study a child’s literacy practices through extensive observation, multifaceted assessments and consultation with their cooperating teachers. They then design an instructional plan to improve that child’s reading abilities. Students have reported to me time and again how helpful and generative this assignment is. But perhaps I should replace it with “quizzes” to increase the “rigor” of my class as your organization suggests.
I may not win this battle, Dr. McKee, but I’m not going to stop fighting it. I will continue to do everything I can to protest my institution’s involvement with your organization. In the meantime, please feel free to visit my classroom. I have a feeling you might learn something.
Sincerely,
Katherine Crawford-Garrett
NCTQ has what authority and what credentials? Perhaps it’s time to let the public know they began with the Fordham Foundation. Should any “rating” by this group have credibility? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-what-is-nctq-and-why-you-should-know/2012/05/23/gJQAg7CrlU_blog.html
I concur with Katherine’s retort, and admire her stick to my guns attitude. Teachers of our young need to have the latitude to be able to reach their audience in the best fashion they perceive to be available. Students need to be entertained during the teaching regimen and made to feel that what they learn is important to them. Keep up your great work!
“I have a feeling you might learn something.”
in order to learn you must desire to learn
Arthur McKee is on the board of DC Prep Charter schools and his bio from there follows. His doctorate is in Russian history.
Let me know if you see something that even remotely qualifies him to “review” teacher education programs and determine what ELA (or Math) textbooks professors should be using in their courses, because I don’t see anything:
“Arthur McKee | Board Secretary, DC Prep; Managing Director, Teacher Preparation Studies, National Council on Teacher Quality
Arthur McKee joined NCTQ in January 2011 to lead its national review of education schools. From 2000 to 2010, Arthur worked at CityBridge Foundation, a family foundation dedicated to creating and sustaining great public schools in Washington, DC. While there, he oversaw the foundation’s Early Years Education Initiative, an $8M, five-year effort to expand high-quality early childhood education services in the nation’s capital. Arthur received his AB in history from Princeton, and a PhD in Russian history from the University of California, Berkeley.”
A Bachelor’s degree in history and a PhD in Russian history. Rather succinct, but I see nothing there that qualifies McKee to have done ANYthing listed on his bio.
It looks like Dr. Crawford-Garrett is contending with a charlatan who thinks he knows it all, but is waaaay out of his depth.
San Juan College’s reading program (Farmington, NM), is a remediation for the majority of students who cannot analyze text or attend to text well enough to earn degrees. The director of that department is a speech-language pathologist who likes to teach reading. I am a reading specialist with an advanced degree in cognitive linguistics, and licensure in the teaching of reading. If I wanted to practice speech language pathology, I would not be allowed to do so without a license. But since reading is such a ubiquitous act, the director doesn’t need special licensure to be in charge of thousands of students’ reading support services. He wrote the text we had to use for classes at San Juan College. Nothing about how to read, all about how to decide if the reader needs help with alcoholism or laziness – lots of moralizing and no real help with how to read and comprehend dense, difficult text. Ah life.
Ah cronyism and nepotism. The meritocracy is an illusion. Nothing beats friends and relatives in high places, especially for someone willing to sell their soul to the highest bidders to become their puppet.
Gender helps, too. Men still dominate, even in professions where females are by far the majority, such as mine. Whenever I’ve come up for top positions in my field, like this guys’ job overseeing an Early Childhood Education (ECE) initiative, for which he has no education and experience, I have always been beat out by male contenders, whether they had the credentials like I do or not.
Bravo, Katherine Crawford-Garrett!
Yes, kudos to Katherine Crawford-Garrett!
Here is a critique of NCTQ teacher ed evaluation system:
http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/NCTQanalysis
Dear Educators,
we must get one thing straight, True Corporated EdReformers MUST have credentials, preferably, limited credentials in fields unrelated to children, learning, instruction or curriculum. The most sought after degrees are in PolicSci, economics, public policy, and Arne’s highest degree – Sociology with a minor in 🏀.
We continue to look for the knowledge that any of them may bring to the table, and run into the same Fluff Results…there is no there there! They do not speak our language, do not plan to speak it, and DO NOT CARE! They are in power and we need to follow their command or will be punished severely. Even more than up to this point.
The Reformers must be getting very tired of our constant scrounging for credentials, knowledge, research and experience. When will we get with their agenda & when we too, can be bought?
For real, Dr. Crawford-Garrett is to be admired and we need more just like her. Crawling under our desks, afraid to speak up, freaking out about our jobs, rolling over and playing dead will speed up the Reformer’s mission & $M profit. But, our children, parents & professionals and decent folks depend on our ethics and backbone to speak up, stand between shooters and kids, drape our bodies over children & defend our profession.
No wimps needed! The seriousness of dismantling public education and special education is unbelievably frightening. We must speak up, and often!
Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964 Freedom Summer, and many like her…we need you once more!
“If students don’t have a purpose for decoding a text, then why on earth would they do it?”
It’s wonderful to see someone hit the nail on the head. Fabulous post Professor Crawford-Garrett. Children and young adults are not little machines that must be programmed. They are individuals with diverse interests, needs, and aspirations. What some deformers overlook or try to ignore is that students must be motivated; they must, at some point, encounter a book that hooks them, a book they can’t put down.
From Jerry Haar, a professor of business at Florida International University and a senior research fellow at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, and of course he quotes Bill Gates!Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/10/4170203/why-we-need-common-core-standards.html#storylink=cpy http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/10/4170203/why-we-need-common-core-standards.html
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 12:02:28 +0000 To: nicholas_marcantonio@msn.com
Katherine C-G, what a great response you sent out to the world! Of course, you will continue to be a target precisely because YOU KNOW. That makes you extremely dangerous to the likes of McKee. Big Hugs, Lots of Light, Holy Smudge Smoke – we send it all your way with a huge THANKS for your knowledge, wisdom and courage.
By coincidence, at 5 AM, Valerie Strauss just published this magnificent deconstruction of “scientific” literacy testing in the early grades. Connecticut has passed another LAW which MANDATES more vendor-driven child abuse, in the name of science. Little children are sentenced to hours of dreary drill, in both group punishment and in lonely, “individualized” computer-delivered torment.
“Because DIBELS measures awareness of letter sounds by asking kids to read nonsense words, students who change nonsense words into real words in an effort to make them make sense are often categorized as in need of “intensive” remediation.”
“Because DIBELS measures progress by the number of words students can read in 60 seconds, students who self-monitor for meaning by slowing down, or those who reread to ensure understanding, are often categorized as in need of “intensive” remediation.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/25/is-this-really-how-we-should-test-reading-development-in-kids/
Amen! I have NEVER understood DIBELS’ fascination with nonsense words. As a child, I would have failed miserably with these tests, because I was very passionate (and still am) about MEANING in what I read. I have always read well above grade level, but I would have been seen as needing interventions with this garbage.
I worked in a school where every child was Dibbled and ReDibbled a couple of times per school year, before they could even find their cubby or bathroom at age 4-5. Many children, especially children in poverty, were immediately color coded yellow or red as ‘At Risk’ and the rest of their elementary school career was predicted.
Young unschooled assistants were on Dibble patrol and tallied their data, plugged into charts, teachers were given spreadsheets and kids were pulled during the day for remediation. I was a professional with years of experience, credentials in multiple areas related to disabilities, diagnostics & psychological testing, but my input and caution were totally ignored. What did I know? The corporate influence with data crunching and $K earned by identifying large numbers of ‘At Risk’ kids was in full force. The data was a source of profit, publications for grants, outside ‘specialists’ were on their payroll and making huge salaries for consulting, and the 4-5 year olds were drilled in isolated settings with emphasis on increasing fluency. It is hard to put into words the pressure cooker these children were in and the segmented education kids were drilled in. All isolated skills, drills and testing. If some children were not making the Dibbled progress, then the push was making them eligible for SpEd. Once over identification of SpEd occurred, claim them for FTE, then they were pushed back into the public schools. After all, charters are not set up for ‘those’ kids.
I could not stay there and watch this assembly line abuse of children. Did I tell you that this was at one of the ‘most successful’ charter schools in my city?
Yup! Not about kids, I tell you.
Anyone can teach a parrot to speak, but I doubt you would be able to carry on a conversation with it. The same goes for reading. Decoding without meaning, to me, is not reading. I have spent years evaluating students with reading disorders as part of a multidisciplinary team. Either you would have a child who was a fluent decoder with little comprehension due to a significant language disability or you would have a child that had problems with decoding, but had high level comprehension skills. Which child is easiest to remediate? Obviously, the second. Using a well developed Orton-Gillingham-based instructional method, such children can overcome their reading disability On the other hand, when one has a significant language disorder, it takes years of speech therapy as well as different types of reading comprehension strategies (thinking maps, structured questioning, etc.) to get such children to reach grade level.
Dr. McKee’s focus on decoding does nothing to help such children. It is just a rehash of the simplistic back-to-basics movement that existed a long time ago. In many schools, teachers are using (or should I say misusing), such programs as Fundations, which is a fine multi-sensory phonetic approach to instruction. However, if you go on the Wilson sight and read their literature, it clearly says that Fundation and the Wilson Language System are for students who have strong reading comprehension skills, but have difficulty breaking the code.
The best type of reading instruction has always been eclectic and obviously this has been backed up by countless research studies. I hate to use anecdotes to make generalizations, but I will break my own rule in this case. Both my children (now adults) went to kindergartens that focused completely on play and the teacher reading to them and discussing different types of children’s literature. Both graduated from college in the top 5% of their classes. Yes, they were “college and career ready.” And as for the remainder of their reading instruction, my sons were lucky enough to read real literature that helped them view the world through another’s eyes. To me Mc
On the topic of “getting a parrot to speak,
you GOTTA see THIS…
Corporate reformers don’t only do this
to kids in charter schools; they’re now
doing it to teachers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/28/a-video-that-shows-why-teachers-are-going-out-of-their-minds/?tid=pm_pop
If that Nashville Prep video the other day
wasn’t bad enough, this is the professional
development that Chicago Public Schools—
in the mayoral (corporate reform-driven)
control-of-education city of Chicago—and the
“corporate reform”management put their
teachers through.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
I know this much, if this program had been around when I was a kid, who was born to poverty and grew up in poverty as a child, I’d probably hate reading, and today I’m an avid reader because there were books that I enjoyed reading offered in the public schools that I attended.
Beautiful reply, Lloyd. Just beautiful. (-: It’s about books and reading and opening worlds, isn’t it? It’s not about the short vowel sounds and how to divide a word into syllables.
Kee is more interested in training parrots than creating truly educated individuals (sorry the split).
And this is the same organization that, well, from the blog of Aaron Pallas after NCTQ’s ratings were set free in the wild last year:
[start quote]
To be sure, few of us relish being put under the microscope. But it’s another matter entirely to be seen via a funhouse mirror. My institution, Teachers College at Columbia University, didn’t receive a summary rating of zero to four stars in the report, but the NCTQ website does rate some features of our teacher-prep programs. I was very gratified to see that our undergraduate elementary and secondary teacher-education programs received four out of four stars for student selectivity. Those programs are really tough to get into—nobody gets admitted. And that’s not hyperbole; the programs don’t exist.
That’s one of the dangers of rating academic programs based solely on documents such as websites and course syllabi. You might miss something important—like “Does this program exist?”
[end quote]
Link: http://eyeoned.org/content/the-trouble-with-nctqs-ratings-of-teacher-prep-programs_478/
I long ago became immune to the “appeal to authority” argument dressed up in fine sounding “word salad” verbiage. Someone may have good formal and/or experiential qualifications, but relevance is crucial—does expertise in Russian history = expertise in reading and cognitive development? In addition, they need to be used in a way that is logical, factual, [hopefully] verifiable, and ethical.
I am not saying this in jest: has anyone ever mentioned to Dr. McKee that among professionals you have no standing if you just sneer, jeer and smear?
😎
P.S. Anyone else notice the casual use of “30 percent” and “10 percent or less” tossed around without any links or references? This precision gives his assertions the appearance of being accurate & trustworthy—but precision is not identical with accuracy & trustworthiness.
McKee will be feeling that i the morning…
Nicely articulated response to the shallowness of NTCQ. Thank you for helping to fight this fight Professor Crawford-Garret.
Where’s the National Council on National Council Quality? NCTQ could be a grossly ineffective rating council or they could be proficient. How would we know? An organization without a score? This is madness. Break out the rubrics and the grades, the raters need to be rated.
And yet, the media treat all of the NCTQ’s “studies” as if they came from Mount Sinai. I’ve never understood that, either.
The popular media is skewed because corporate “reformers” own the media.
Yes, Katy! Brave, eloquent (as always), and urgent. Thank you!
Wow – now, Ms Crawford-Garrett, would you mind writing something in response to the “press” Diane gave to Louisa Moats who has been a champion of the NCLB/NRP kind of reading instruction you are concerned about. Moats is still profiting heavily from the sale of PD and “programs” based on the reading pedagogy she championed during the NCLB/Reading First days.