Dr. Louisa Moats was part of the team that wrote the foundational reading standards for the Common Core. In “Psychology Today,” she strongly criticized the standards.
Among other things, she said:
“I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.
“Our lofty standards are appropriate for the most academically able, but what are we going to do for the huge numbers of kids that are going to “fail” the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test? We need to create a wide range of educational choices and pathways to high school graduation, employment, and citizenship. The Europeans got this right a long time ago.
“If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training. Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved! “
Louisa Moats did voice this sentiment in a webinar she did recently; with the webinar she released materials for her approach ; this recent one was helpful in understanding the struggling secondary reader. Louisa is well known from her work on the national “reading panel”. I don’t know if the webinar is still available but I would recommend the PDF that illustrates her thinking.
reference: Moats et al
Implementing the Common Core State Standards for Students with Learning Disabilities
Margaret J. McLaughlin, Ph.D., Louisa Moats, Ed.D., and George Batsche, Ed.D.
Moats clearly states in the webinar that the high stakes testing is “over the top” and with these authors recommends some sound approaches (Moats’ work with the national reading panel was used as a basis for graduate reading program for teacher preparation in special education at the university near me ).
And at the other end of the spectrum, CCSS Math fails to meet its aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges…
“In 2010, before a Massachusetts state board of education meeting, Jason Zimba, a lead architect and writer of the Common Core math standards, said they prepare students “for the colleges most kids go to, but not for the colleges most parents aspire to” and added that the standards are “not for selective colleges.” Here’s the video so everyone can watch Zimba use his own words to devastate Common Core’s math academic weaknesses and grave deficiencies in STEM preparation:
Also in 2010, William McCallum, another lead architect and writer of Common Core’s math standards, is quoted as saying: “The overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [to] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.”
Apparently you don’t understand the concept of “standard” either. Of course standards aren’t meant for selective colleges because that’s not standard – that’s exceptional. The standards are supposed to be (aspirationally) a list of things that *all* kids should be able to know/do at certain grade levels, not just those going on to college. To use my car metaphor from below (a poor one in many ways, I’ll be the first to admit since children are not cars), it’s the difference between all cars having seat belts vs. all cars having 10-cylinder engines.
When district schools ‘align’ to CCSS and repeat the claim that CCSS is internationally benchmarked and creates critical thinkers, there will be no room for a curriculum that truly prepares students for selective colleges.
Oddly, though, concepts in AP calculus are being taught in regular 9th grade math. My son, who has a learning disability, was tutored last year by some junior students who were taking AP BC calculus at the time. Several times, those tutors told me that what he was doing in his 9th grade math class was the same concept, and at the same time in the year, as what they were doing in BC calculus. My son will probably never take actual calculus, as his learning disability would make that near impossible. So, WHY does he need to do calculus concepts just to graduate from high school?
Jason Zimba and Bill McCallum have repeatedly responded to this misunderstanding by critics of the standards. No district is prevented by the CCSS from offering calculus and more to students who want to go further. In their responses, the issue of students arriving at community colleges and universities without basic math skills is also addressed. The issue of whether the math standards are TOO rigorous or NOT rigorous enough is at the basis of this controversy. My understanding from reading their responses is that the CCSS prepares students to go further.
The criticism also suggests a lack of awareness of the substance of the Math Wars that have led to the efforts to improve math education in this country, leading at this point to the CCSS. This false issue coming up in June 2014 in this blog tells me that writers here have not read the responses of Zimba and McCallum. Here is one from Jason Zimba in August 2013.
http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/common-core-watch/2013/what-i-learned-about-the-common-core-state-standards-when-i-testified-in-indiana.html
Ms. Wood,
You bring up excellent points about schools being able to go above and beyond. The problem is that most will not. Like I said, they will claim they are “aligned” to the CCSS and that is good enough because these standards are supposedly top notch.
It is rare to see a public school district claim that they exceed CCSS standards. They only ‘advertise’ that they align with CCSS standards.
Cynthia Weiss,
I hear you. There’s a lot to read and consider about the Common Core, its implementation, and how districts will design curricula in response. I shouldn’t imply that if everyone hasn’t read exactly what I’ve read they don’t know what’s going on. That’s irresponsible of me. Thanks for your response.
The Common Core mathematics standards do not include Calculus, but most high schools offer Calculus and the number of high school students taking Calculus has been on an upward trend for some time.
While I know there are school systems that take more of the one-size-fits-all approach, in my experience most school districts value offering multiple pathways for students at the secondary level. When the reality doesn’t match the aspiration it is usually due to inadequate funding for capstone electives and high cost career and technical education course.
Thanks, Cynthia, for mentioning this! Very important.
“Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written….”
How could you not have known what you were doing? Do you not understand the word “standard”? Of course it was going to be expected of everyone – that’s what a “standard” is. Vehicle standards, for instance, don’t mean that that at least half of all vehicles are not going to meet those standards, it means that that’s what all vehicles are expected to be like. So you intentionally designed “standards” that you knew at least half of all kids couldn’t meet and now you’re surprised at how they’re being used???
I’m always glad to see people repent of their mistakes, but this was a pretty major mistake and one that was foreseeable going in. She’s got a lot more atoning to do.
Dienne: I think she was using the “royal we” meaning there are those of us who will stand to be held accountable and pick up the pieces AFTER this tide rolls over the edge. As we know very few professional educators were involved in the standards preparation and S. Stotsky refused to state that they were totally acceptable even to her and she was there but the chief decision makers probably “rolled over”her opinion, too. I think she would be meaning here that we as a profession will stick around to help clean things up.
quoting Dienne: “How could you not have known what you were doing? Do you not understand the word “standard”?
I guess I don’t understand your comment. Are you saying she wasn’t involved in writing the foundational reading standards for the Common Core? Because that’s what Diane said above – is that wrong? If she was involved, then it’s not a “royal we” but a very much personal “we”. She bears direct responsibility for this mess if she was involved in writing the standards and didn’t realize at the time what she was doing.
sorry , Dienne, if I wasn’t clear. I am thinking of a dialogue of 4 former commissioners of education (Texas) saying “where did we go wrong”? and they discuss honestly seeking out the provenance…
“how did we go over the top?” “‘we went too far” with our accountability systems…. “we compounded tests with high stakes”…. etc. and I think they were being open and honest…and taking responsibility by doing the forensics.
Former commissioner Robert Scott said that when the NCLB was being assembled Ted Kennedy insisted on AYP and the inclusion of special education students in the testing (not leaving them out to make your statistics look good)…. so that is where I was coming from in my comment.
I don’t think that Ted Kennedy lived long enough to see the “disaster” and I don’t know if the bureaucrats followed through on Kennedy’s intentions. What eventually happened is that Governor of MA and the Commissioner signed off on goals for RTTP that were totally utopian and could not be achieved in order to get fund$$$ from Washington. I don’t know how it played out in the state where you live.
Dr. Moats’ article should be required reading for every school leader. The widespread misapprehension about what the CCSS mean for literacy Instruction that she so clearly addresses is having a major negative impact in our schools.
“Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved!”
Since these standards have no research to back them up, how does she know that the teachers have not achieved these standards or might not if they had the chance? For some reason we would not be part of the half the is able to meet the standards. I am sure she is highly respected but I am rather tired of non-teachers who sit in ivory towers saying, directly or indirectly, that teachers are dumb. It seems to make the case for Obama’s, Duncan’s and Gates’ ranking of universities.
The reason we are not qualified or prepared to teach using the standards is because it has been shoved down our throats with inadequate training and the curriculum does not reflect the standards. For example, there are poetry standards but the Pearson curriculum has no poetry unit (module) in the second grade. Yet, the very test Pearson makes has questions on poetry. Without the carrot of merit pay dangled in front me, I wrote a poetry unit using the standards.
Perhaps, it is the cynic in me and I admit I have become very cynical but sounds like she is positioning herself to be an integral part of the movement to change teaching preparation programs so she can make money off of it. Otherwise give the money back to the students and their communities. They need it more.
I don’t know Moats’ mind but the “over the top” is when people take your work and , reduce it down to a few paragraphs, write some jazzy headlines and then as they do at Fordham Institute push the bandwagon approach. That is not the intention of someone like Louis Moats … I don’t need to be defending her but if we take a look at everything she is saying, put it into context and see how the work fits into educational goals in a school or a teacher preparation university, that is different from economists and “policy ” gurus at Education Next (P. Peterson, Chet Finn) etc. who have very large microphones and distort the professional work.
@Haverill… I am a teacher and am very prepared to teach my subject. So I take extreme umbrage at most of Moat’s comments. Right before she adds to teacher denigration by saying they are not prepared in their subjects to teach lofty CC she states, ““If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training…” Hollow words really.. action speaks louder than words.
She should be saying, “If I could take it back, I would not be so arrogant as to think that I could be involved with and set national education policy with other “experts” who like me have never taught in a public school classroom at least for 5 years (and I don’t even see she has taught for even one year). And frankly, for those who have been in the classroom longer than I am not so arrogant. I recognize and understand that they just might have some added insight on the profession because they have been in it longer. And yes, there will always be bad teachers just like there will always be bad investment brokers, gas station attendants, lawyers etc… So harping on teachers not knowing their craft is annoying. Any 20 something cutting their teeth on today’s fiasco called “ed reform” may not know their craft BECAUSE OF ED REFORM. Let us just hope there are enough seasoned educators who stay in education long after this common core fiasco is over so that real problems can be addressed and that real reparation and improvement to the profession can be made FOR THE BENEFIT OF OUR STUDENTS.
When I read this author’s last comment, I found it arrogant and uninformed. The author states, “… Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved…” .
This made me so irate. The assumption is that the people writing these standards had the necessary understanding of childhood development and knowledge of how teaching and the classroom works to be able to design something developmentally appropriate. WRONG!!! This author has nerve to suggest that teachers are not qualified to teach the “lofty” standards she was involved in creating. Teachers are qualified enough to “understand” that a child’s growing brain in early elementary requires hands on learning. Teachers in upper grades realize that a student must know their math facts cold in order to be able to do math on a higher level. Apparently common core creators did not know this. And frankly, constantly hammering away that teachers are not qualified to teach their subject matter is the default excuse for ignoring a core root problem of what is ailing public education.. overreach by non educators, poverty and denigration of the teaching profession. I agree that teacher education needs to be taken a lot more seriously. I actually have a masters in my subject specialty as well as a masters in education and years of teaching experience… and have a lot of ideas as to how to strengthen teacher education programs. But then again.. who ever asks actual public school teachers with experience? NOBODY! The fact that Arne Duncan is still Education Secretary (with not one real education qualification) attests to just how “important” real teacher input is with respect to national education policy. And I cannot say this enough – can WE PLEASE DUMP DUNCAN!
Here is Louisa Moat’s bio from her own web page:
“Dr. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher,graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientificjournal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling,language, and teacher preparation. After a first job as a neuropsychologytechnician, she became a teacher of students with learning and readingdifficulties, earning her Master’s degree at Peabody College of Vanderbilt.Later, after realizing how little she understood about teaching, she earned adoctorate in Reading and Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School ofEducation. Dr. Moats spent the next fifteen years in private practice as alicensed psychologist in Vermont, specializing in evaluation and consultationwith individuals of all ages and walks of life who experienced reading,writing, and language difficulties. At that time, she trained psychology interns in the Dartmouth MedicalSchool Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Moats spent one year as resident expertfor the California Reading Initiative; four years as site director of the NICHDEarly Interventions Project in Washington, DC; and ten years as researchadvisor and consultant with Sopris Learning.
Dr. Moats was recently a contributing writer of the CommonCore State Standards. In addition to the LETRS professional developmentseries, Dr. Moats’ books include Speech to Print: Language Essentials forTeachers (Brookes Publishing); Spelling: Development, Disability, andInstruction (Pro-Ed); Straight Talk About Reading (with Susan Hall,Contemporary Books), and Basic Facts about Dyslexia. ”
What I do not see is even mention of actual classroom teaching. While our nation needs academics in other fields … these academics do a grave disservice to national public education policy WHEN THEY INVOLVE THEMSELVES IN CREATING PUBLIC POLICY ON EDUCATION WITHOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION EXPERTS. It does not matter how many degrees a person wracks up or how many impressive “projects” hovering around education he/she adds to the resume. Real experience MATTERS! Common core would not be such a disaster, if the committees creating this policy HAD ACTUALLY CONSULTED WITH TEACHERS. They PR’d it to look like public school teachers were involved.. but PR is far different from the reality.
“After a first job as a neuropsychologytechnician, she became a teacher of students with learning and readingdifficulties, earning her Master’s degree at Peabody College of Vanderbilt.”
It is a little difficult to figure out what she actually did at this point. Was she in a program that required some “teaching” to complete? Does that constitute her teaching experience? How many years did she spend in the classroom?
“Later, after realizing how little she understood about teaching, she earned a doctorate in Reading and Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.”
Is this statement an admission that she had no business being in a classroom? 🙂 That’s okay but to speak for those who spend their lives in the classroom is not okay. There should be a partnership between the theorist and the practitioner.
Yeah, I see rather limited K12 classroom teaching experience. You can compare her degree dates on her Education & Bio page with the jobs listed on her “Positions Held” page:
http://louisamoats.com/Positions_Held.php
It looks to me like she got her BA in Music and, while working on her MA in LD/Special Ed, she did the Neuropsyc Tech stint, followed by a few other teaching positions for about a year each, then a few years in Neuropsych again and college teaching while working on her doctorate. Then more college teaching and private practice.
I don’t see anything about teaching reading in classrooms to typically developing children or low income students at-risk. And Neuropsychology didn’t really provide many insights into dyslexia until Sally Shaywitz’s fMRI studies of adult readers in the late 90s.
Those who can teach, those who can’t become “specialists”.
Is this some kind of joke? I’m not qualified to teach the “lofty” LA CCSS? Which ones exactly? The first time I read the CCSS I thought “Not much new here.” I also thought “Where’s the beef?” Since when is my subject area just a set of skills standing in isolation?
The only thing more sickening is the idea that we need (as early as preschool) to determine who’s going to an elite school and who isn’t.
Bob Shepherd has offered some insightful comments on this blog as to where the teaching of reading went astray : i.e., “subject area as just a set of skills standing in isolation.”
It was about 6 months ago if you google his name on this blog.
I did 10 years of classroom teaching before going back for a master’s. My professor had a doctorate in special education with a clinical specialty in working with aphasic children and had taught at the Northwestern U. clinic with Myklebust; when someone has an acknowledged specialty in a clinical setting I have great respect for that and this is the genre that Moats comes from. She has added a language substrate to our teaching of reading that was largely absent .
Where I have a major conflict is when an economist, or a “government” specialist, would bet setting all the goals and making the decisions and this is what comes predominantly from the Fordham Institute and Education Next (Petrilli ,Chet Finn, Peterson) who has office space at Harvard etc. This is totally different from what Louisa Moats represents. I don’t know her, I don’t have any stake in her publications or her conferences; just having followed her work (and accepting her viewpoint as coming from outside the traditional teacher preparation where I worked), I respect her viewpoint.
Unfortunately, people at NCTQ like Kate Walsh have been promoted and propagandized to the point where the tail wags the dog and I see the places like Fordham Institute and these institutions as doing this “to us”…. We need the clinical specialists to shed light on the needs of special education students; where that can generalize over to the “general” mainstream curriculum i am open for other views. This was a major contrast between the Kennedy/Bush platforms when NCLB was being written.
Moats was involved in the failed Reading First program. Instead of looking at problems with the program, which focused on breaking the code, she and other “reformers” attributed the failure to poor teacher implementation, so her teacher bashing is consistent with the “reform” party line. I worked in Reading First as a teacher coach and I personally saw many teachers working very hard to ensure fidelity to the program. I see no reason to blame teachers for the failure of Reading First.
Moats refuses to acknowledge the many teachers who have had success with a holistic approach to the teaching of reading, as often implemented in higher income communities. I have no respect for her and others who have dug in their heels and continue to insist that a code-based approach is the only strategy supported by scientifically based reading research.
In my doctoral training, I was taught that we are not in a position to say that there is only one approach that works for all children. Moats and her ilk really need to broaden their scope and stop trying to standardize teaching and learning, which is being done at the expense of individual differences.
Having been a Reading First intervention teacher, I wholeheartedly agree with you – anyone that had a hand in that fiasco has my total, unconditional disrespect.
I remember reading several of these reports during that era… only one comes to mind this morning.
quote: ““Reading First is the most effective federal program in history.” So reads the opening line of a report that Alabama superintendent of education Joseph Morton sent to his congressional delegation last June, in which he recounts how the program has raised reading achievement for poor students in his charge. Morton’s view is shared by leaders in many other states, where thousands of Reading First elementary schools have reported unprecedented progress closing the “literacy gap” among the poor.”
If I am not to take his judgment, then would I have to say that “Alabama was cooking the books.”
I don’t want to just rely on Massachusetts data but there were successful examples where the Reading First funds were used wisely. I think it could depend on the bureaucrats in the state and how they allocated funds and then how the districts administered programs that were funded.
quote: “If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – “
we have a woman psychologist/psychiatrist at Boston Children’s Hospital who is also saying this…. I would like to give her a larger microphone.
That quote isn’t really helping her case. She’s still looking at it as an “investment”, which is unsettling enough. But worse, she’s still blaming teachers. I dunno, if I had all the money that is going to testing companies I would probably spend it to alleviate the effects of poverty.
I see her comment about the money (currently going into testing) in this light:quoting Texas Teaching Commission:
quoting Texas Teaching Commission:
The Texas Teaching Commission released a comprehensive report intended to improve the quality of teaching and learning across the state. The Commission was established by Educate Texas, a public-private partnership of Communities Foundation of Texas.
The report, “Recommendations for the Next Generation of Teaching Policy in Texas” addresses seven key areas of the teaching continuum including: recruitment and preparation, hiring, inducting, evaluating, developing and strategic compensation.
“Teachers are the absolute backbone of our society,” said Mike Moses, former Texas Commissioner of Education and chair of the Commission. “The Texas Teaching Commission was assembled to pay homage to the profession through reform efforts impacting the training, supporting, evaluating, and compensating of new and veteran teachers alike.”
this is where I think funds could be dedicated (rather than purchasing computers and buying tests from Pearson/Parcc)
So she’s the one who said that teachers don’t know how to teach children to write a sentence! I wondered where that originated. There’s more:
Based on the Psychology Today article (which is from January), Moats has a major beef with the ELA standards for emergent readers because they don’t place enough emphasis on breaking the code, ie., phonological awareness, phonics etc. And she thinks teachers don’t know how to teach any of that either. She should go and observe in all the early childhood classrooms where young children are being constantly drilled on this, from PreK onward –many of whom are being turned off to reading and writing at the starting gate because that is OVERemphasized.
I found a previous article where Moats blasted Whole Language. She complained that it’s too focused on “comprehension.” She thinks comprehension should come after the basics, i.e., phonics. Clearly, she does not believe in a holistic approach to emergent reading. Sorry, lady, but there is no law of nature that limits kids to try to make sense of their world or what they are reading in a linear progression, specific order or at the time and place of adult convenience. As many successful holistic ELA teachers can attest, phonics, vocabulary development and comprehension can all be addressed at the same time.
I read Appendix A to the ELA CCSS, which she said she wrote, and it looks like she is the one who is responsible for the focus on informational texts.
I don’t trust a word this woman says, including “and” and “the.”
Agree with you, Reteach. Moats is very divisive and disrespectful.
Reteach 4 America,
You say Moats believes teachers, “don’t place enough emphasis on breaking the code, ie., phonological awareness, phonics etc. And she thinks teachers don’t know how to teach any of that either. She should go and observe in all the early childhood classrooms where young children are being constantly drilled on this, from PreK onward…”
You’re suggesting that she believes teachers should do more drilling, more constantly. It’s possible she believes teachers who are not teaching phonological awareness should do more, and that those who are constantly drilling should do less, in fact not drill. Your lack of awareness of how it can be done well may illustrate her point.
Nope. Your assumptions are demonstrating your bias. I work with teachers and train them to teach phonological awareness to children the way I taught that to students, which is how the literature suggests, through songs, rhymes, alliterations, games, fingerplays, etc., i.e., in playful and engaging ways.
However, the teachers work at schools where they are now PRESSURED to get kids reading by age five, BECAUSE OF THE STANDARDS THAT MOATS WROTE, which say that Kindergartners should be reading “with purpose and understanding,” so the schools don’t wait to teach phonics. The schools purchased structured phonics materials and phonics lessons are taught through drilling –to children as young as age 3 in some places.
Reteach 4 America,
I agree teachers may be teaching phonics in questionable ways. I respect you for teaching it in a way that you believe in. I’m just saying that Moats’ concern about how it is taught does not necessarily mean she believes young children should be constantly drilled. Constant drilling is not advocated by any educators that i know of. If it’s happening, I believe you are right to question it.
Thanks, Linda.
If you know of a phonics workbook for emergent readers that consists of anything but constant drilling, please tell me what it is because I’ve never seen one.
The district head of reading and literacy where I worked at the time (as a Reading First intervention teacher) actually said that students didn’t need reading comprehension skills until third grade. Must have been a disciple of Moats.
In a way I feel sorry for her, she must be horrified by the results of the project she worked on.
She owes it to the students to speak out loudly and widely, not just in a single magazine article.
I think there were two authors cited (Moats/Adams); Moats doesn’t have that much power in the hierarchy with Coleman.
Marilyn Adams Talks About Teachers and Reading – YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0y0PSxZdYg
by Rick Green – in 147 Google+ circles
Apr 6, 2011 – Marilyn Adams Talks About Teachers and Reading … Dr. Paula Tallal: Neuroscience, Phonology, and Reading – Part 5 by The Children of the …
—————————–
Formerly in teacher preparation we were able to take the work of someone like Adams (the national reading panel ; “What Works” clearinghouse etc.) and juxtapoxe it with the Stotsky “standards” (mostly in MA) and compare and contrast and make selections and choices. From what I read now the faculty are told what to put on the syllabus.
Does anyone remember the reading wars with Jeanne Chall? my professor at BU worked with her and said “jeanne chall could not even take a vacation because they were dusting off her chair ” for her job and the attacks were brutal.
Whenever any group of policy /decision makers tell you that you must use the “catechism” (I know that is the wrong choice of a word) then I am always skeptical. I know I worked in the halcyon days when we had more freedom. But rather than see Moats, Adams, etc as “the enemy” we need to see who is spreading a particular arrangement for the curriculum (or teacher preparation).
Major earthquake in NCATE/CAEP and the accreditation process etc. But that has been going on for eons (I’m reminded of the bitter disputes with the Title I/Chapter I decades over funding).
I am skeptical, cynical, sometimes hopeful but not always optimistic (and this plays out differently as policy gets mediated through the state level; I just consider myself fortunate in Mass. but even there Stotsky became persona non grata at the Department of Ed; and I worry about our grandkids in Seattle, Houston, OK, etc)
jeanhaverhill ,
Reading all that you have posted in this discussion, I have wanted to respond with heartfelt thanks. In this point especially you raise an important issue:
“… rather than see Moats, Adams, etc as “the enemy” we need to see who is spreading a particular arrangement for the curriculum (or teacher preparation).”
It astonishes me that there is current belief that the heydays of whole language and fuzzy math were not corporate sponsored, not enforced from on high, not scripted, not expensive, not profitable to private companies, and that the teachers’ colleges that promoted them were not themselves supported by entities like Bill Gates.
I do remember the reading wars with Jeanne Chall, and from the discussion here, it appears to be ongoing.
Linda, I appreciate your comment. Adams is cited in the national reading panel ; Grover Whitehurst “ran ” with it stating that children were not developing oral language sufficient to conquer reading in school… I think Moats entered in at that point with recommendations for teaching first grade (with implications for struggling readers or special needs students and included a sound language substrate). My beloved professor Blanche Serwer at Boston University conducted some of the cooperative reading studies for first grade and I think back on that experience as her graduate assistant; we also had Durrell and his early lessons and his stress on listening comprehension. Along with Jeanne Chall we were fortunate to have Mrs. Chomsky; and then in the next decade people like Elizabeth Wiig, Naomi Zigmond etc. I owe anything that I learned to these wonderful professors — teachers — dedicated to their profession and a nucleus in the Boston area for which I was very fortunate to meet other colleagues . Wise use of federal funds and outstanding teacher preparation programs were consequential in accomplishing educational goals (it certainly wasn’t Romney although he would have liked to take credit.)
quote: “Moats was involved in the failed Reading First program.”
but my point is it didn’t fail in every state. It
“failed” politically because the next cohort of politicians came along and said “nothing works” that the former administration put in place. And, we had the
“What Works Clearinghouse” that tried to sort through the muddle and
and became politicized as well.
I will re-read today what you are saying; I remember reading the Abt report at the time and writing to them about their report on Reading First…
I don’t understand what you’re saying, because the efficacy study on Reading First came out when Bush was still president, in May 2008, and Obama and Duncan have supported and expanded virtually every other education policy of the Bush administration. (And the “What Works Clearinghouse” is still in place.)
I guess in my mind I sorted the Reading First (which did have some good results for wise use of federal funds in SOME states) and I differentiate that from the years of SIG funding which is something that I would call “failed” because it came up with horrendous punishments for schools and the turn around models. So I had a clear demarcation in my mind when I made the comment. Perhaps my timeline was wrong but I separate these funding programs…. as different revenue streams. It is true as you say that Duncan doubled down on the fiercest parts of the NCLB (which some people lay at the feet of Ted Kennedy but I would want further clarification of that.) Sorry I wasn’t clear in my comment this morning as I appreciate everything you write here, Reteach , and the dialogue here.
Thanks for the clarification, Jean!
I have had numerous discussions with my husband about the Common Core. He thinks that we need a Common Core of some sorts …a benchmark or goal to seek. He thinks that too many people who are against the CC are simply those same people who are fearing it as some “socialist plot” and that people shouldn’t bind together with just anyone to “upend it”.
I try to explain that it is THIS Common Core that is the problem. I don’t know how to convey to him the manner in which the CC was developed and by whom.
My objections are to the lack of developmentally appropriate standards for elementary students. Also, i object to the manner in which this curriculum has been shoved down into lower and lower grade levels prior to the opportunity for students to have foundational skills and vocabulary necessary for success.
To use such standards for the design of a test that is used nationwide prior to teacher training and upgrades in technology is unfair at best. For success at the elementary level, teachers need to be Renaissance Teachers. That just is NOT going to happen (and TFA teachers may be ” smart” but lack natural abilities to understand lower learners and lack of interest in dedicating their lives to the profession).
TFA teachers might be good at delivering content to secondary students. And they might enhance the learning for upper ability students. I can see that. But this deliberate undermining of people’s careers and, furthermore, the dismissal of college level teacher education programs is completely out of line.
I see no “reality” in the application of these standards and these tests. I see no heart, no decency, no comprehension of human development or psychology. I am not surprised when hard data driven alpha-male business types insert themselves into a profession that has been driven by understanding and compassion this is a culture shock.
The America I love is dissolving. But, I don’t object to the CCSS because I am afraid of some government conspiracy to take over the US and brainwash the students. I object because it needs vetted, needs teacher input, needs time to determine what is appropriate and what is not, and because it is tied to a test! And, to top it off, the test is punitive.
As a person who supports the standards, I want you to know I respect and value everything you’re saying here. I hope you will lead discussions about each of the topics you raise.
Linda, perhaps you have been given the freedom to adapt the CCSS to your individual teaching style. What do you think of the given reading list for your grade level?
Unfortunately, other teachers are not happy with the way the common core is being implemented in their schools. They feel their autonomy has been compromised. They lament that they must teach to a test that the majority of their students will fail and that these forgone failures will reflect badly on them. Many are fearful that they will lose their jobs due to an assessment over which they have little or no control.
Linda, please share your secrets so the rest of us can achieve your level of contentment.
Ellen T Klock ,
The entire state of California has refused to agree to the abuses you describe. Where testing mania, bad tests, corruption, VAM, and bad teaching methods destroy the possibility of good implementation, I agree with you. Teachers, children, parents and taxpayers are fed up.
But in states and in classrooms where teachers and administrators see the new standards as an improvement over previous decades of air-headed cults, and where teachers see the new standards as an opportunity to clarify and focus on what is taught and to work together to build children’s knowledge through a coherent sequence, there is positive energy and excitement.
In this blog, Dr. Ravitch features Bill Honig, former California superintendent of schools, explaining the approach in his state:
If the CCSS is an improvement, then I feel sorry for the teachers in your state or district.
Please know that there is a better way. Ultimately, each child should be treated as a precious human being and not a commodity. The test score, unless used to assist instruction, is worthless.
Nevertheless, I wish you and your students well.
“I object because it needs vetted, needs teacher input, needs time to determine what is appropriate and what is not, and because it is tied to a test! And, to top it off, the test is punitive.”
Deb,
Agree.
May I add…
I object because it …
Needs a mechanism for alterations/changes over time.
Needs to be phased in over time, grade levels.
Needs to be agreed upon not forced upon or bribed into.
Needs to be throughly researched prior to implementation.
Needs to be an agreement of what the outcome/point/purpose of adopting is intended to be (admission to an elite college? ready to work as a mechanic? able to receive a special ed diploma? competent to discuss Chaucer?)
I agree with those things, too, Ang. There are too many assumptions made by whoever wrote this bunch of standards. I am sure they would work for someone. Anyone with a small modicum of common sense knows that not every person should, could, or wants to go to college. Everyone who has taught for a few years knows that some kids require more repetitions of a concept than other kids require. I always told my students that for some people a particular topic takes only a few practices, but that for others, many more tries may be required. I don’t know who would think that ALL kids can do everything with the same number of reps. It is ridiculous!
I once had to write a “Credo” for teaching. My first statement was “All children can learn, but not at the same pace and not all things equally.”
I still stand by that. I wrote it in 2002. Also, there is a quote from Einstein that refers to learning by saying that if screensavers required to climb a tree a fish would be considered a failure. I don’t mean this to be a direct quote. I had the actual quote on my wall in my 4th grade class. I also had a poster which stated that “Respect is not a given. It has to be earned.” That was for the benefit of my principal. She never earned respect. Thankfully, she has been shown the door.
How about treat people with respect. They have to earn your trust.
I guess it depends on how you define respect. There are many ways to look at it. When a sham of a leader expects respect, it is difficult to comply. It isn’t a given that a person deserves professional respect or trust. One can have blind trust, but that will usually create problems. Following someone into the abyss isn’t wise. We tried to respect her, but because we could not trust her, it wasn’t possible. She needed to earn professional trust.
I think you just made my point.
Deb, the proof is in the pudding. Unfortunately, this pudding has bad ingredients. The general public doesn’t understand, but the way to evaluate these standards is by the reaction of teachers and administrators. Since they overwhelmingly reject CCSS and since many of them are a part of the opt out movement with their own children, it is safe to say that the Common Core is not up to snuff.
Personal anecdotal, but the CCSS theory in reading is great, but the masters in linguistics I earned costs the Stae of New Mexico too much, so they aren’t funding my license, my district couldn’t pay, so they called me a lot of ugly names and fired me claiming no court in the state will even hear these cases. I have been a probationary teacher in three districts here, over the last seven years. Being able to teache CCSS made me a pariah among those who can’t and a liability to those who pay for my work.
Thank you, Reteach 4 America! I applaud your posts that provide some important background information about Dr. Moats. There is nothing wrong with her approach to reading in the early grades. However, her mindset to use ONLY this approach severely limits teaching and learning, and does not promote a comprehensive approach to literacy. Teachers who employ only this approach are doing a disservice to our students.
I see Dr. Moats’ methods slowly creeping into our school and district. We have a few intervention specialists who quietly and politely befriend new and younger teachers, and somehow they convince them to use instructional approaches (for most of the language arts block of time, daily) that focuses on breaking the code; and not just for struggling readers, but for the entire class. These approaches lack any differentiation, and follow a prescribed format. There is very little “following the students”, if any.
I use instructional approaches that include some isolated skills work. So, I’m not against her approach. I’m just more open to using a variety of methods and techniques that are based on valid research, and keeping in mind my students’ emotional and social learning, as well as their academic learning.
I find it impossible to understand how comprehension should be delayed in early learning until the foundational skills are in place (as Dr. Moats believes). As human beings, young and old, we are always trying to make sense and meaning of the world around us. How can we put this on “pause” until a later time?
My pleasure, PearlEssence. Thank YOU!
Years ago, when I was first teaching, I joined the NCTE and started receiving The English Journal, and whenever my new issue arrived in the mail, I was like a kid at Christmas. What excited me about receiving those issues was that they were full of articles by scholars, researchers, and classroom practitioners that put forward pedagogical and curricular approaches. I was then and have always been interested in news I could use–ideas that would inform my practice as an English teacher–ideas that I could add to my toolkit–sentence combining, the Socratic seminar, word webs, key ideas of the American transcendentalists, the theme of local governance from the Puritans to the present day, means-ends analysis for organizing work on a project, and so on.
For an example of that kind of thing, of “news you can use” for English teachers, see this:
It’s extremely important that whatever we do when we issue standard, frameworks, or learning progressions, we not create prior restraints on innovation in these areas, that we not treat whatever was done as the IMMUTABLE LAW.
In 1905, Lord Kelvin addressed a meeting of the Royal Society and told the assembled scientists that the future of physics was a matter of pushing out current understanding to an ever-increasing number of decimal places. Well, if you know something of the history of science, you will know that 1905 was the annus mirabilis in which the young Albert Einstein published the astonishing series of papers that completely upended physics. These included
a paper introducing the special theory of relativity,
a paper explaining black body radiation in terms of quanta that provided one of the foundations of quantum mechanics,
a paper on Brownian motion that solidified the still controversial atomic theory
a brief paper that established the equivalence of matter and energy
NOTHING IN PHYSICS WOULD BE THE SAME AFTER THIS. So, Lord Kelvin, as justly famed as he was, was simply WRONG. Utterly, completely WRONG.
Again, as the negative example of Lord Kelvin’s summary of the state of physics illustrates, it is extraordinarily important that we have continuous, vigorous, ongoing discussion and debate about our current practice and understandings.
Consider, for example, Reading First, referenced above. This program brought together leading experts on Reading from around the country. It made some important strides. In particular, these experts recognized that while we have innate machinery for constructing internalized models of the grammar of a language, no such machinery dedicated to learning sound-grapheme correspondences exists in the mind (though we have dedicated pattern recognition machinery), and so, for most people, early reading programs, if they are to be successful, must include both components that would motivate kids to read (e.g., whole, authentic experiences with literature) AND direct, explicit instruction in phonics. The profession has benefited ENORMOUSLY from the “Balanced Literary” approach taken by the Reading First scholars, including Dr. Moats.
However, Reading First, as successful as the program was in many ways, was not–AND NO PROGRAM SHOULD BE–the last word on the subject. As you will remember, Reading First concentrated on the following five elements of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. However, there were, I believe, some glaring lacunae in the program–things that our “best and brightest” got terribly, terribly wrong:
1. Overemphasis on Explicit Instruction in Skills and Strategies. Approaches to comprehension under Reading First placed too much emphasis on reading skills and strategies and too little on texts themselves and on the key role of knowledge in comprehension. Let me explain.
1.1. Overemphasis on abstract skills and strategies. One of the things that happened under Reading First is that people started creating lessons that treated texts as nothing more than interchangeable occasions for the exercise of reading strategies. In other words, texts were, ironically, relegated to secondary status. In actual curricula produced by publishers in response to Reading First, the point of a lesson became not the understanding of this text or of this body of connected texts but, rather, practice of a reading strategy. Ironically, such an approach undercuts the primary purpose of reading!!! A child wants to read about snakes in order to learn about snakes, not in order to discover what method of exposition the author was using in Paragraph 13. Ironically, all this focus on comprehension skills and strategies per se often led, in actual curricula, to de-emphasis on the text and to erection of barriers of abstraction between texts and readers. Students read the article about pythons in the Everglades not to find out about pythons in the Everglades but to practice their “finding the main idea” or “inferencing” skills, and much of the discourse around the text dealt not with the text but with these abstractions, and often that abstract discourse was nearly worthless. Millions of lessons on “inferencing skills” were produced by people who had themselves never learned anything about the sciences and arts of inferences (of which there are a great many–formal and informal logic, classcial and nonclassical logic, set theory, probability, the cognitive sciences of problem solving and decision making, and much else). Often, these “inferencing lessons” got the most elementary stuff wrong. Even to this day, the leading basal lit series in the country defines induction and deduction incorrectly!!!! Equally often, lessons would take this detour into abstraction from the text to an absurd level, focusing on so-called “metacognitive strategies”–thinking about one’s thinking about the abstract strategy. BIG MISTAKE. Now, what such an approach failed to take into account is that much of that strategic stuff is AUTOMATIC. As you will discover if you read developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s wonderful books, the brains of babies and toddlers and young children are magnificently well-tuned machines for inductive and abductive reasoning, but these are, primarily, automatic processes. The neural machinery for abstract, conscious reflection on these processes develops, for the most part, MUCH LATER. Putting abstract discussion of these mental processes–of skills and strategies–up front too early ironically erects barriers to understanding. Let me make this clear with an analogy: Having the child think about her thinking about the main idea of the selection is a lot like trying to teach a child to walk by teaching to think about conscious operation of her muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems. We would do well to spend a lot less time asking young kids to identify the main idea and a lot more time asking them, “How come there are so many snakes, and what can we do about that?” WE MUST NOT FORGET THAT THE PURPOSE OF READING IS COMMUNICATION, and WHAT IS COMMUNICATED IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT. HOW IT IS COMMUNICATED SHOULD BE WAY, WAY DOWN THE LIST OF CONSIDERATIONS–AN AFTERTHOUGHT. Texts first!!!! Otherwise, we run the very real risk of doing literature instruction that skips over the literature, instruction in the reading of informative texts that skips over the content of those texts. In other words, we undermine the whole PURPOSE of reading.
1.2. The key role of knowledge. Often, one of the enormous barriers to comprehension is the reader’s lack of background knowledge assumed by the writer. Suppose that a given piece of writing starts like this:
“Today, we’re used to instantaneous communication. Want to send a message? You can text, email, IM, post a blog entry, and “voila!” your message arrives at its destination. Things weren’t always like that. The last battle of the Civil War took place a month and a half after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.”
Now, how much do you have to know in order to understand that passage? We have an enormous digital divide in this country. Many students will be intimately familiar with texting, email, and IM. Some will have no notion what an IM or a blog entry is. What do the words instantaneous, entry, voila, and destination mean? What was the Civil War? Who were Lee and Grant? What is Appomattox?
Years ago, AI researcher Roger Shank set to work with his students building a program for ordering a meal in a fast food restaurant. The functional stuff–creating the capacity to choose among items, associating prices with those, making change, and so on–proved simple. What turned out to be incredibly complex–far, far more complex than anyone realized at the start–was how much world knowledge–literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of information–such simple interchanges involved. Ketchup is a condiment. It comes in little packets. Ketchup is sometimes put on sandwiches. It goes between the bun and above or below some central stuff that is the core component of the sandwich. And so on. It turned out that the functional stuff–the how–was simple. The complexities all lay in the world knowledge–the what.
Comprehension depends upon knowledge. Texts depend upon contexts.
2. Lack of Understanding of the Key Prerequisite for Reading of a Robust Internalized Grammar. If you look back at that list of five elements of reading from Reading First, you will notice that “grammar” in the linguists’ broad sense of the internalized model of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic structures of the spoken language is ENTIRELY ABSENT!!!!! The USDE assembled the leading experts on reading in the country to develop a new reading program, and yet these people missed this!!!!! The internalized grammar of a language is partly a biological inheritance (some of it is inborn, or innate) and partly learned. The process of the construction of that internalized grammar begins even before birth! This internal grammar of the language is constructed automatically, without explicit instruction, by dedicated mechanisms in the brain–linguists call this the language acquisition device or LAD–based upon the ambient spoken linguistic environment. Crucially, making sense of written language depends upon prior automatic construction of that internalized model for the spoken language. If a child has not developed that robust internalized competence in the standard grammar (using the term broadly) of the spoken language, then the transition to comprehension of the written language will be compromised. Low-SES kids come into school having heard 30 million fewer words and having had experience of a much smaller subset of the grammatical structures of a language than do middle-SES kids, and the differences between their internalized competence in the grammar of the spoken language are doubtless profound and doubtless have profound consequences for their ability to decode written strings, but this crucial precursor to reading WAS ENTIRELY MISSED by the Reading First “Reading Experts”!!!!
So, what’s the moral of all this?
The moral is that we are never finished learning, and so it’s always a mistake to write our approaches in stone. Even our finest “experts” are often wrong, and their expertise is always going to be a work in progress. At the turn of the twentieth century, most physicists believed in the existence of a “luminiferous aether” that filled all of space; many still doubted the existence of atoms.
It’s important that we have continual discussion and debate of standard, pedagogical approaches, curricula, and learning progressions.
And, of course, that we match these to the needs and goals of particular students.
Students differ.
Bob Shepherd,
When you wrote that you had a comment awaiting moderation, I thought, Oh, No…
But now I want to say, I Love You. Can I wallpaper my house with the words of your posting here?
YOU ROCK!
Many thanks.
You are very kind, Linda, but it’s been my experience that Diane has enormous patience for a wide variety of viewpoints. She believes in a free and open interchange of ideas, and that’s one of the things I admire about her. So, I wasn’t thinking that she was going to censor anything I might say but, rather, that she had not gotten around to checking her comments cue (comments with more than one link are automatically placed for moderation by WordPress unless this setting is changed by the blogger).
It’s very important, of course, to have open and free interchange of ideas, for as Milton said in the Aereopagitica [the spelling is as in the original]:
“And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter.”
I cannot quote those beautiful words often enough.
Thanks, again, Linda. I appreciate the comment.
Bob, I spent considerable time mentoring teachers in the Early Reading First (ERF) component of Reading First, which was aimed at Preschoolers, ages 3-5, and the goals differed. Oral language, including vocabulary development, were very much a part of ERF. These were the 4 goals of the ERF program:
Oral Language (receptive language, expressive language, vocabulary development, listening comprehension, etc.)
Phonological Awareness (such as rhyming, alliterations, segmenting and blending)
Print Awareness (the purposes of print, such as how different information is communicated in a menu and a storybook, and print conventions, such as parts of a book and directionality)
Alphabet Knowledge (uppercase and lowercase letter recognition)
The curriculum materials that were adopted by different groups in ERF varied in their approach. (Some were more balanced than others.)
Yes. You make an excellent point. Properly understood, “Oral Language” encompasses what I have written about here. I would love to see continued development of more finely grained diagnostics for assessing early Oral Language development. The diagnostic tools that I’ve seen do a pretty good job with vocabulary, a so-so job with morphology, and a terrible job with syntax.
In many cases, I think that kids need lots of compensatory Oral Language work early on to make up for deficits there that they come into school with. It’s a big mistake to have that work be overly simplified with regard to syntactic form. It’s important that kids be exposed to oral language employing the full range of syntactic forms in the language so that the LAD can do its magic. And that Oral Language work can also, at the same time, strengthen background knowledge. This is an area that definitely needs additional work.
Hmm. I was so blind. In 2012-12 before I retired, we used “Words their Way” word sorts, tests, the whole shebang. I didn’t bother to correlate that this was another Pearson program shoved into our school at all grade levels, with no training. We just robotically did as we were told.
We had Successmaker Math from Pearson.
We had been using Lucy Caulkins Writing but dropped it. She has since upgraded it. I don’t think we readopted it. It was horrific to use.
We used Stephanie Harvey’s reading strategies. I like those for all genres.
We had been using DRAs and online record keeping. I think they dropped the latter piece.
All of this stuff just took tons of time to figure out how to plan and implement.
We had differentiated reading groups. As any of us would know, the reading groups and the spelling groups are not going to be the same
But I was evaluated on how well I integrated the two. Five reading groups based on DRA levels. They use lexiles now. Then I had 6 spelling groups that crossed lines with the reading groups. It was insane.
Lesson plans had to have standards listed, Ohio decided to use CCSS but told us they were Ohio standards and then we had to also write the local curricular objectives for every lesson…I wrote all that down and didn’t look at anything except materials needed each class time.
I have always said that if cooks had to write down their recipe, nutritional facts and procedures each time they cooked, they wouldn’t bother. But, oh, that is what a recipe is!
There is no recipe for education. No two classes are the same. No two years are the same.
Reteach – Those four goals seem right in the money to me. That’s what I want for my grandson. I’m sure that is exactly what he needs, as well.
Exposure to the modeling of proper language usage in natural environments is the most effective strategy for promoting language development with young children. ERF had a parent component which included training parents in Oral Language development etc. Since the 30 million word gap occurs by age 3, Preschool is already a very late start for this. It really needs to start MUCH earlier.
Wow, Reteach. YES!!!!! That’s awesome!!!!
Yikes, deb. Sounds like a nightmare.
…yes Bob, but we got the scores the district coveted…and withstood constant badmouthing from the principal…and plugged on, never letting the kids know. Argh.
Ellen, It’s a great start, but the devil is in the details. For example, the major components of developmentally appropriate ERF curricula for young children are not very evident in the goals, including an emphasis on a wide variety of literature, reading to and talking with children daily, using comprehension asides (synonyms, body language, pointing to pictures,etc.) to help children understand new and sophisticated words, as well as promoting skill development through play and meaningful experiences.
Reteach, at one point I worked at an inner city school in Buffalo with a high poverty, high minority ratio. Many of the children in the PreK 3 and 4 year old classes were already far behind in their speech development. I saw my job, as librarian, to foster their language skills through songs and movement along with stories. It was a small way to help the teacher. (One of my three year old students ended up in the same high school where I eventually worked. He remembered me from that PreK class. He graduated the same year I retired, fifteen years later.)
Due to this background, I recognized my own grandson was behind in his speech. Point and grunt was not doing it for me. I advised my daughter to call Erie County prior to his third birthday, and he received speech services (for free) this past year (3x a week). He now is talking up a storm and will be ready for PreK in September when he turns four. Luckily I know my way around the system.
Unlike the city, in the suburbs, the speech teachers not only work with speech problems, but they also focus on language development. The difference between the haves and the have nots, even though those city children desperately need the extra help.
Robert, you always make so much sense.
It’s unfortunate that you aren’t in a position to make changes to the educational system in this country. With your expertise, the children would not only learn how to read, but enjoy it as well.
Right now, reading has become a chore.
Awesome, Bob! Thank you.
I have a comment awaiting moderation.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. This is how I feel about Moats coming out against the CCSS. If you are unfamiliar with her philosophy of literacy instruction, she is against the teaching of anything but isolated phonics skills to primary students. She helped write the Foundational Skills standards, but must have been very unhappy when the National Council of Teachers of English’s recommendation to remove those standards from the main document was followed. You can read NCTE’s recommendations and rationales to the CCSS authors here. See page 5:
Click to access NCTE_Report_CoreStds_12-09.pdf
I am against the unfair, high stakes testing of the CCSS. I am thankful, however, that the authors took advice from NCTE and corrected the path that Moats would have had us continue to follow.
As someone who taught Kindergarten for decades, I know all too well that children come to their first year of formal schooling with wildly diverse backgrounds, as demonstrated by a 4 year spread in development in typical Kindergarten classrooms each September. It truly infuriates me that Moats was permitted to get the following Foundational Skill into the Kindergarten standards because not all 5 year olds are ready for this:
Fluency:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4
Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.
yes yes yes yes yes!!!!
I don’t think that this can be emphasized enough. Kids come to school with VASTLY differing experiences behind them. Kids differ, and we must meet them where they are.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but I don’t think that any advocate of the importance of phonics instruction–Dr. Moats, say, or Diane McGuinness–believes that one should do ONLY “isolated phonics skills” instruction at these levels. However, there is no question whatsoever about the importance of explicit phonics instruction for most students.
This makes sense, if you think about it. No one knows for sure when language first developed, but we know that spoken language has been around for a very, very long time and that we have dedicated internal mechanisms for intuiting the grammar of a language (using that word “grammar” in the wide sense with which it is used by linguists) from the ambient spoken language environment. This is an evolutionary inheritance. We are born with an innate language endowment.
Writing, on the other hand, is a recent cultural invention. Again, there is no dedicated, innate device, developed over eons, for intuiting sound-grapheme correspondences. Furthermore, those correspondences are entirely ARBITRARY. And so those have to be, for most people, explicitly learned. There are exceptions, of course. I learned to read long before ever going to school using a look-say/whole-word recognition method on my mother’s knee. But that’s not OPTIMAL FOR MOST CHILDREN, and there’s a lot of research on that, and I had to unlearn what I thought I knew there from my own experience.
Most kids need both–highly motivating early experiences with literature AND direct instruction in phonics. I think that there is a broad consensus on that. And I think that McGuinness is correct that if the phonics instruction is approached properly, without a lot of muddying of the code, it can all be accomplished pretty quickly. I must say that I found Dr. McGinness’s
Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading
and
Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill.
to be quite convincing. I understand that there is much debate about this.
But surely NO ONE thinks that kids should not, early on, experience whole works of literature–listening to and discussing stories, memorizing songs and poems, and so on. No one, surely, would deprive children of those delights.
That was the core of my library program, Bob. You would hope that children would develop a love of literature from their teachers. I personally feel that reading a chapter or two a day from a good book, even in Kindergarten, develops special listening strategies which will help enrich their reading skills. This is an Intuitive belief, I have no psychological jargon to support it, just my personal experiences with children.
If the child is not listening to a story each day (just for fun) they are missing out. And with the stress of CCSS, I can’t guarantee the teachers are able to find the time for this luxury during the school day.
Thank God for all the teachers and librarians who help kids, year after year, fall in love with lit!!!!
Thank you, Robert. Unfortunately, the elementary librarians are the first ones to be laid off in times of financial trouble. Or they are spread thin over two or three schools. I was lucky if I saw the kids more than once a month, so I made each experience count. I never worried about some parent taking my place – I had a reputation as a superb story teller. Even the teachers enjoyed my lessons. Now someone else is in my spot. She’s doing a good job, but I take solace in the fact that she isn’t me. (A little pat on my own back, but I am proud of my tenure as a school librarian throughout my career.)
Yes, Bob, those folks do exist. Look at Diane’s page about the teacher ed professor whose holistic reading methods textbook was rejected by NCTQ:
I would hope that you are correct that Louisa Moats wouldn’t advocate for “only” phonics instruction at primary levels…. but what she has written surely sounds that way. Her “Whole Language High Jinks” makes her views very explicit. I want to be clear that I am not anti-phonics and as a reading specialist, I teach phonics every day. I have been living the “reading wars” in my building, however, and the struggle is very real to keep authentic reading and writing (and authentic assessments) at the forefront of instruction.
Thanks for dialogue! I appreciate reading what you’ve written!
As no one should discourage a child from learning to read as you did. Rather than unlearning I would say you developed more sophisticated tools for analyzing words. Just as a child’s first attempts at any skill are rudimentary that does not mean those attempts are deleterious.
BTW, I don’t think that moving those skills to a separate document entitled “Foundational Skills” did anything to prevent schools from seeing those skills as something considered to be critical to the teaching of reading at those grade levels, since they are numbered standards and labeled “foundational.” From my understanding, the CCSS tests don’t exactly exclude them either.
“The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges.”
So, this whole program is geared towards the benefit of the elite, and the lumpen will still benefit from it.
All I can say is, Ya, WHatever.
I’ve been pondering this personal reflection.
My grand daughter is one smart cookie. She looks at the world and gets it. She understands what life is about and you can have a provocative discussion with her on issues within her world. Yet, she is failing sixth grade (luckily there is summer school available).
Her cousin doesn’t have a clue. She is confused about life, worries about things because she doesn’t understand how the world works. She just doesn’t get it. Yet, she is an excellent student and just completed the fifth grade with decent grades (upper eighties)
My question: who will be more successful in life? Does good grades transform a child into a successful adult?
Within the next two years we need to transform my grand daughter into a good student. Can this be done without breaking her spirit?
How many others are like my grand daughter – street smart, not test proficient?
And where do we go from here?
Standards are fine, we have a common language and number system.
I see standards as the basic skills that should be mastered by everyone above negative one standard deviation. And, should only take up half the school day to teach. So if 84% of people aren’t passing, the material is too hard. Having consistent standards like being able to do fractions to graduate high school? I think that is a good idea. Gearing them to the elite, and making them so hard that everyone else is gripped, gridlocked, or spinning in circles, is a recipe for wasting resources.
I concur.
“The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges.” THIS makes me angry! They are lofty for even the kids who are aiming for highly selective schools…well, isn’t that just so nice? When the general public thinks of educational standards they think of bare minimums, not “lofty aspirational goals.”
If they’re lofty aspirational goals, they should call them that.
The CCSS set a high target, but they are not lofty for students who will be admitted to highly selective schools.
Standards are a target, not a ceiling, and students intending to be admitted to highly selective schools will need high school experiences that go above and beyond the Common Core.
Common core standards. The basic nationally recognized skillset, that 84% of the population can master upon completing the 12th grade.
Only half the people can master it? Well that’s not very common.
It takes all year to teach? Well that’s not very core.
NCLB and 100% mastery? Well, that’s outer space.
TC – funny because it is too true.
And who can afford their own space ship?
I just want to say that it is an extraordinary pleasure to come to this site and be witness to the vigorous, thoughtful, experience-based reflection here. Jean, Ellen, Reteach, Linda, and others here–you are AWESOME!!!
More of this. More of this vigorous discussion and debate. More of this sharing.
In my perfect world, all teachers have a lot of time in their schedules for just this sort of thing–time for Japanese-style lesson study, in which they meet and go over what worked and didn’t work last week, discuss particular issues with particular kids, pour over materials, discuss and debate and decide upon pedagogical strategies–in which they are treated like the professionals that they are and not simply dictated to from on high. In such situations, strong teachers, as many who post here probably are, will recognize and help along weaker ones. That’s how you get real continuous improvement. This is why I favor guidelines, not mandates. Real continuous improvement flows from the bottom up. What generally flows from the top down? Well, Diane doesn’t allow that sort of talk on her blog. 🙂
Right back atcha, Bob. Thank you!
I feel the same way about all of you.
I’ve been planning our “convention”. I think Niagara Falls would be a good location, but the Buffalo Waterfront would also be a good pick. Any one of us could conduct an excellent workshop. Diane would be our keynote speaker, but I’d also like to bring in Stephen Krashen.
As long as I’m dreaming, I might as well dream big.
I’d model the event on the various library conventions I have attended. After all, librarians know how to do it best.
Feedback?
Either location sounds great to me, but others should weigh in because I could never afford to attend.
Imagine! It would be truly incredible.
If I won the lottery, I’d fly you all out.
“Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved!”
I think that she is incorrect here. The vast majority of teachers are qualified and prepared to teach the CCSS. It’s that we don’t see the point. It’s clearly not higher standard for actual learning, and with the high stakes nature of testing bolstered through its implementation, it’s an insult to our professional dignity.
In fact, I think it’s the reverse… the vast majority of people who wrote the CCSS were not qualified and prepared to write them. As we know, they had no (except for 3 of them was it?) experience as teachers. This was an academic exercise. People who are knowledgeable got together, under the auspices of a Gates funded organization (Achieve) and together they came up with what they thought everyone should know…
The tragic arrogance of they, and their benefactor, has forced them into a kind of hubris, or, as in the case of Moates, a mea culpa (of sorts).
To be clear… I am perfectly qualified and capable to teach the CC$$. I do not see the point outside of expanding wealth for the 1%, undermining public schools, and proliferation of charter schools. I, and most teachers I know, do not want to part of this machine. It is not in the best interest of our children, our profession, and our society.
James, you are so right. Once again teachers are denigrated as incompetent and even, perhaps, stupid. Just because the creators of CCSS didn’t have a clue, doesn’t mean the teachers don’t know what their job should entail and how they can get the desired results.
But we know what they think of teachers – it takes but five weeks to become an expert. And teaching isn’t a career, it’s just a stop on a career path meant for bigger and better things. (Except for the teachers of their own children).
I think it was only 2; and Sandra Stotsky (one of the two) would not sign off on the statement that they were any where near comparable to what she would expect might equate with standards supposed to be called “international”… I may have her wording incorrect here but I think you get the gist. She has written many articles on this ; if you go to Pioneer Institute, Boston, you will find some of her writings and also standards that she would support as an experienced teacher/educator. Still she became persona non grata in the state department of ed and now her work is subsidized by the Walton Foundation….. so I am disheartened by that
As we know, they had no (except for 3 of them was it?) experience as teachers.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Most people who read Diane’s blog also read janressenger
quote: “School Funding Declines due to Tax Cutting, Austerity Budgeting, and Paring Down Title I and IDEA
by janresseger
They raised the standards, set impossible goal of 100% achievement/compliance at the same time they depleted the funds….. Romney did this as Governor of MA by cutting state budgeted funds for schools (cities/towns) then with the Great Recession more funds were lost to the schools …..
Amazon describes Moats as “NCTQ-recommended.”
Nuff said.
yes, this is accurate but Kate Walsh at NCTQ (Fordham I. and Gates supported) takes it out of context, takes only a minuscule /reduced view of what the goals are, prepares her “catechism” and then uses a flawed process to rate schools (the real estate agents have always loved this kind of ranking because it sells more houses in affluent areas).
For a good review of the NCTQ process, see Jack Hassard at the blog “Art of Teaching” which he used to call “Art of Teaching Science”… Jack did two write-ups on NCTQ process this weekend and dismisses it as junk science.
Amazon describes Moats as “NCTQ-recommended.”
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
I would not hang my hat on anything or anyone recommended by the self-appointed Minister of Teacher Mis-Education, NCTQ, which has determined that a completely online university founded by governors is the best graduate school in the country. (I know better because I’ve taught at such schools.)
Yeah, I think we all need to remember how hard NCTQ pushes the focus on Common Core in teacher education and the fact that it was governors, along with Bill Gates, who got the CC ball rolling and foisted upon the states. This is all about collusion amongst corporate-sponsored “reformers.”
Go Joy …We have to keep this news moving forward…Great news
I’m sorry to keep repeating myself; this quote is from 2010 Oregon SEA.
quote: “Differences Between Oregon Reading First and the National Reading First Impact Study
• Oregon Reading First has consistently maintained that implementation fidelity is essential in strong reading outcomes. Strong fidelity leads to systematic increases in the quality and explicitness of classroom instruction, which leads to strong reading outcomes. The National Reading First Impact Study has not addressed the association between fidelity and outcomes. it is very important for understanding the impact of complex education practices such as Reading First.
• In Oregon Reading First, 90-150 minutes of reading instruction is provided each day in grades 1-3. In the National Reading First Impact Study, an average of 59 minutes of daily reading instruction was provided in Reading First classrooms. This difference is substantial and could help explain why Oregon Reading First is achieving stronger outcomes than Reading First schools in the National Reading First Impact Study. Also, 59 minutes of daily reading instruction indicates a potentially serious problem with fidelity of implementation.
• In Oregon Reading First schools, systematic increases in reading outcomes across a variety of measures (including the SAT-10) have occurred across all four years of implementation. In the National Reading First Impact Study, there was no statistically significant increase in reading performance across two years of implementation.
—————————
this is data supplied in support of my comment that “reading first” was not a total failure and anyone saying that is over-generalizing . Federal policies get mediated differently through the implementation in DIFFERENT states…. I don’t think that Oregon was “cooking the books” because I saw some excellent results in Massachusetts .
references from University of Massachusetts Donohue Institute (Boston)
quote: ”
UMDI Researcher presents findings of Chelsea Early Reading First study
Posted on: 12/12/11
As a culmination of the UMass Donahue Institute’s 2007-2011 evaluation of the Chelsea Early Reading First (ERF) project, UMDI Research Manager shared the study findings with Early Childhood Development and Literacy specialists at two recent national conferences. a session titled Using Videos as an Observation Tool in Coaching to Engage Teachers in Self-evaluation of Literacy-promoting Skills with Pre-K Children was held at the National Association for the Education of Young Children Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando. Highlighting the role that videos played in the project, the session discussed using videos as a tool for not only assessing changes in teacher practice over the course of the project, but also as a way for coaches to enable teachers to reflect on—and improve—their own storybook reading skills. The use of videos as a coaching tool was believed to be one of the factors that contributed to sizeable and statistically significant gains in the receptive vocabulary development of the children in the project.
On December 1, a paper titled Vocabulary Development in English Language Learners and Monolinguals: The Role of Intense and Targeted Professional Development was presented at the 61st Annual Literacy Research Association Conference in Jacksonville, Florida. The paper explained the concentrated and embedded professional development that Chelsea ERF teachers received during the project and revealed how the pre-K children of those teachers demonstrated sizeable gains in receptive vocabulary skill. These gains occurred regardless of whether the children came from homes where only English was spoken, no English was spoken or both English and another language were spoken.
NY State’s “Standards” for public schools have produced many extremely well educated young adults who have been going to the best colleges for decades.
CCSS will tell these great schools who educated these excellent students to now change their ways and, instead, prepare them for less selective colleges.
This would only make sense in Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
I’m reading other’s posts here and am very happy to see that I’m not alone in my skepticism of Ms. Moat’s article. While I’m very (VERY) happy to see a member of the original team expressing dismay at the ways in which her work has been bastardized, I have to take issue with her “lofty goals” assessment of the CCSS.
As was mentioned: it’s already on record that the math standards are meant for COMMUNITY “college readiness”. From none other than that wing’s lead architect, as well as many experts in that field.The more selective colleges won’t be interested.
Now we hear about the “lofty aspirations” of the ELA wing. I’ve read articles which have refuted this viewpoint. While I can definitely attest to the glaring need of reading fundamentals in the area of reading REMEDIATION, I take issue with that same need for children and adolescents very near to, at, or above grade level. Students who have been given a solid background in the art and science of reading/writing since early childhood.
It would seem to me that the CCSS leans more to the needs of those who would pull our “international grade” down than those who are at grade level and above. Or am I missing something here? It’s definitely the case in math. Perhaps more attention should be spent on the ELA content, now.
Kudos, Ms. Moats, for realizing a fundamental truth: the for profit industry is just that: for profit. But did you note the absence of K-12 education specialists and psychologists in the collaborative process of writing the CCSS for ELA or is that something that’s been blown out of proportion?
Gitapik –
Isn’t it ironic that in the quest for excellence we achieve mediocrity.
Take NYS and the 5 Regent Exam requirements. In order to ensure some success, the exams have been scaled so that on Living Environment and Algebra tests, scores of 50% can be converted to a passing 65%. (Compare this to the days when I took the Regents where you got what you got.)
What is even more telling is the fact of “Five and Done”. Once those five required exams are successfully completed, why bother with Earth Science, Chemistry, Physics, Geometry, Trigonometry. So instead of encouraging students to pass more exams, they “opt out”. (At least this is true in the Buffalo Public Schools). Even the better students sometimes shy away from some of the more difficult Regents Exams.
And finally, we mustn’t forget those individuals who just can’t pass all five tests. In the past they could take a school exam for a school diploma. No more. Now they either get their GED or simply drop out.
So much for rigor!
Let me congratulate our new graduates who have met the state requirements – kudos!
And to the 46% of the students in the BPS who aren’t walking across the stage with their classmates – oops!
In cases like these, if one really does the homework and reads up on different slants on the same subject, it can come down to a case of “connecting the dots”.
The more I read, see, and hear, the more it seems that public education has been deemed “too expensive” with not enough returns on the investment to be worthy of continuation. Enter charter schools with inexpensive, inexperienced teachers who read the script and give the many, many tests that are aligned with the CCSS. No fuss, no muss and a relatively few number of people make a boatload of money, as a side show bonus.
Under this new system, it would seem that the public school kids will be prepared for life in a low to middle class setting while the private schoolers, exempt from the CCSS and the tests that come with them, will be prepared for leadership and higher order thinking roles.
And all of this on a national scale.
I know this might sound “paranoid”…but try checking out that little YouTube snippet at the beginning of this thread, where Mr. Zimba is admitting to the lack of qualifications for the more selective colleges under the lofty goals of the CCSS in math. The questioner is Ms. Stotsky, who happens to be an expert in the field of education and curriculum/assessment design.
Connect the dots. Is this just something that they “forgot to take into account”? if so, then I’d seriously question their qualifications to even manage a hot dog stand on the corner of 5th Avenue and 10th Street.
Exactly.