Russ Walsh has been teaching about literacy for 45 years. He started blogging to share his thoughts.
But then he discovered that his views about literacy did not exist in isolation. They were part of a great national debate that involved the Common Core, education reform, charters, and other aspects corporate education reform. He read other bloggers and found that he was engaged as a. Teacher,a reader, a writer, and a thinker. These were not stages of development but a process of thinking, writing, and acting.
Now he too is part of the national debate.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those educated in an era in which literacy and some remaining semblance of classical education were the defining model will always be part of the conversation. Being part of the “Great Debate” was the “raison d’etre” for the education; not being “college and career ready” or “global citizens”. The latter were a side effect of the former.
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‘Being part of the “Great Debate” was the “raison d’etre” for the education. . . ”
No doubt that that “being part of the ‘Great Debate'” was a fine reason. But just what is the “Great Debate”? Please define!
Unfortunately, “being a part of that ‘Great Debate'” was limited to only a very small very segregated part of humanity (no women, blacks, Latinos, Catholics, etc. . . need apply). What about those who have no interest in the “Great Debate”? Does not being interested make them less “worthy”, less “intelligent”, etc. . . ?
There are many kinds and modes of being educated with the “Great Debate” just one of them all. To privilege it over others is, well, elitist clap trap. (And that’s coming from one who very much enjoys and participates in “Great Debates”-whatever they are.)
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I think most would choose to be part of the debate if they knew there was one. Public education that is vocation aligned is relagating generations to roles as soldiers to philosopher kings.
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Duane, I’m almost scared to enter an opinion here, because I’m going to sound a tad out of my league. But whatever. My experience as a 30 year teacher of history gives me some right to weigh in regarding literacy and my students. As an adult, I usually do not read fiction. It’s just my personal preference, because nothing destroyed reading for me more than having to hyper analyze a work of fiction during classes. It kills the joy. People read what they enjoy to read, and I have rolled my eyes ALONG with my ninth grade male students as they struggled through the required reading of Jane Eyre and other completely age and content inappropriate “Classics.” I don’t “get” the “Great Debate” myself, given the simple fact that kids are reading less and less every year. I have choices in what I read…and THEY need choices as well. I’ve had this discussion many times with a male colleague in our English Department, and he feels like a lone wolf trying to advocate for age and content area appropriate choices for kids. I PERSONALLY would never read the Vampire and Werewolf books that came out several years ago, but I’m not a 14 year old girl. And you know what? Those girls, including my own daughters, devoured those books. So what did I care? They were READING. We are attempting, in my department, to move away from the traditional textbook driven curriculum (I’ve written them, I’ve worked with them…for students it’s like trying to break a code) towards using more interesting reading material, and a lot of it is non fiction. Well guided, the kids are digging it, which is encouraging. So I guess after this lengthy post, at the end of the day, the REAL Great Debate is “How do we get kids to love reading? My answer is “Understand your audience, and start where THEY are, not where the Book Club Ladies believe they should be. And cease with the judgement calls.
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I hear you. And I loved nothing more than a Classical Humanities based education. But that’s ME. And the Plato thing was a bit over the top…this year my niece graduated with a PHD in Comparative Literature from the University of PA, has a tenure track job as an associate professor in the University of California system, and her dissertation will soon be published. My nephew graduated from a Voc Tech School, has an HVAC license at the age of 18, and is going to a state university for Business. And you know what? I’m EQUALLY proud of both of them. Please cease with the judgments about what is “right” for everyone.
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Again, I do not understand your hard core inflexibility. It’s 2014, and my students arrive in my classroom as they are. It’s MY job to meet them at that point, to understand the complexities of teaching reading and writing in a world where they are absorbed by technology. We teach kids whose writing skills are “conversational,” and I push back VERY hard against that almost overwhelming reality. I also want them to read…readers make better writers. But they won’t read if we try to shove books down their throats that they are not interested in. A really good Socratic seminar on a fictional or non fictional piece, done in a short period of time, almost always works. Elongated dissection of an Oprah’s Book Club work of fiction? THAT will turn kids off.
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Thanks for posting this, Diane. I enjoyed writing this piece. Sorry to hear of your recent set back after your knee surgery. I hope things are going better soon. I had both my knees replaced 2 years ago and things are going well now. Be well.
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Russ,
This statement caught my eye: “Certainly, you need to know “stuff” in order to think critically about “stuff.” But does learning proceed in a linear fashion: first we learn that low level “stuff”.”
And it is that “stuff” that educational standards and standardized testing supposedly delineate and measure. What exactly is that “stuff”? (that’s being asked rhetorically as there is really no way to accurately know exactly what goes on inside another’s head). Allow me to elaborate (with a little help from Noel Wilson):
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ (Russ’s ‘stuff’) and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.”
The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
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Exactly, Duane. Who owns the “stuff” and why is it that “stuff” that counts. Follow the money. Kids don’t sort neatly until adults put their sorting mechanisms into action.
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Oh..and I meant that previous post for janinilargent, whom I do not know, and I’m sure does her job well, but whose values regarding what constitutes a “real” education I just happen to disagree with.Kids are not all the same…my nephew would no more engage in a heated discussion about 17th Century British Enclosure Laws than my niece would take apart and put back together again a washing machine. Who’s smarter?
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One does not have to be interested in the Burke/Paine great debate to understand that in a system of self government one needs to be able to engage in the discussion. The issue if where we are and we want to go as a society is not reserved for the “experts”.
Literacy, the ability to think critically and engage in logic and rhetoric within a liberal arts spectrum is, to me, the pure nature of education and the essence of liberty. I have never thought public education to be vocational in nature; subject to the whims of the corporate world.
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I just looked again at Susan Ohanian’s website where, an as long time teacher of English and great research-writer she makes mincemeat of the CCSS Lexile scale for reading and the Coleman formula for informational versus literary texts, and more.
Among other reasons the informational text is a preferred imposition on kids is that computer programs get confused by literary texts, unconventional metaphors, figurative speech, alliteration and such. She has some wonderful and wondrous examples of the recommend readings generated by the Lexile software and the grade levels to which they are assigned. Mind you, the grade levels are not just grade 4, but grade 4.3, an entirely fictional metric with no basis other than the way the algorithm works. So, I hope Russ will take advantage of the expertise out there in the alternative press and blogosphere.
My iPad spell check is tuned up for the word “blogosphere.” Amazing.
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Laura, Thank you for the input on my blog piece. Nice to be mentioned in the same paragraphu with the great Susan Ohanion, who I follow regularly. I have been discussing the problems with lexiles and other aspects of reading and the Common Core on my blog. Perhaps this post would be interesting to you.
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-common-core-and-text-complexity.html
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Laura,
This is unorthodox, but in my experience, children will wade through a book that is “too hard” if they are sufficiently interested. That’s why I am not a big fan of Guided Reading and Lexile levels.
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NJ Teacher,
I don’t disagree with you that children will wade through difficult texts with sufficient interest, but I don’t think that makes for a good argument against Guided Reading. Research would suggest that students need focused instruction on a text that is in their instructional level, Guided Rerading provides a structure for that. Guided Reading does not preclude occassional close reading or giving studnets challenging reading on occasion.
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Saw this in my grade 8 class with kids eagerly reading paperbacks that were purchased by relatives…from Larry Flynt’s bookstore.
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Russ~ always love to read and learn from your blog.
The children we have been dedicating so much of our attention to and fighting for in our urban schools often end up with a massive dose of phonics drill and kill for years. I have witnessed the same groups of children being phonicst-to-death. They started in Kindergarten, then remedial 1st with heavier concentration of phonics…still not working, entering separate instructional remediation with more phonics and special education placement with, you guessed it, more phonics! Still not working, let’s bring in summer program specialists and place those struggling readers in this program, with to all our surprise…more phonics.
For many struggling readers who have been in phonics quicksand, it is obviously not working.
I am writing all this to point out that the months and years of only focusing on phonics drill, the content teaching and exposure in the classroom marches on and these students will and have missed most of it, which is criminals. Then, those students continue to fail academic tests due to reading and due to lack of information. This cycle has been a huge concern of mine for years, but little changes.
In this quicksand, even bright kids lose out and give up. Maddening and a waste of valuable time. There is so much to learn, even if reading continues to be difficult. We know what that is and how to educate kids with reading disabilities.
And, it ain’t lifelong phonics!
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H. A.,
Exactly. At some point we need to recognize that phonics is not moving a child toward literacy and find another way. It seems foolish to me when a phonics focus does not work for a child that we keep right on doing it slower and harder.
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I couldn’t find a good place to post this, so here goes. The following is one of the most astonishing stories I have ever read. It’s about how standardized test anxiety led to a civil war. No kidding.
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I don’t know where to post this, but one of the commenters on Russ Walsh’s blog mentioned Douglas Frey. I’ve had training based on Fisher and Frey’s article on text dependent questions 4 times ( that’s the same training, with different names, 4 times – not a series of trainings on the topic). It seems to me they make some good points about how questions in Lit. Books often don’t require students to have read the text – so if that was your model, you could do better. They also offer some good thoughts on how to write different levels of questions, not just on the surface facts, working towards inferences. So I can see that this might be a tool I might use occaissionally, and I appreciate thinking about the questions I ask. But I. Don’t see how this would ever build student independence. At the end of the year, I think students would just be waiting for me to ask the ” right” questions so that they can get to my reading of the text. Does anyone know if Fisher and Frey move beyond this to develop independence? I hate to spend money on their books if this is all I’m going to get.
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If I were looking to go beyond Fisher and Fry’s text dependent questions, I would look to a great book from Probst and Beers called Notice and Note. It has an enlightened approach to close reading that works from the standpoint of student engagement.
By the way, you have indentified the clear problem with close reading and teacher developed questions – a lack of student engagement. Thanks for the comment.
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Thanks for the reply. I’ve heard good things about Notice and Note. I guess I should just go order it!
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Anyone interested in literacy and reading development/instruction should frequent “Russ on Reading.”
Another gift to public education from the great State of New Jersey!
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Kind of you, Galton. Trying to keep up the good fight.
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When i first got involved In literacy issues, I was amazed at how many believe it is only a socio-economic issue. That issue led me to the fight to have common core repealed! Common core is not developmentally appropriate! Children need to know the basics and have a good solid foundation before they can apply ( think critically) what they have learned.
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Leta,
I think you will find that children are thining critically before they have much of any foundation and because they are thinking critically they gain the foundation. The two go hand in hand. Why are toddlers famous for asking a lot of questions? Why this and why that? Because they have begun to think critically about their world and to question how it works. By asking why, they are insisting on the foundation of understanding. The foundation for all learning comes from thinking critically about things. Both critical thinking and the knowledge needed to critically think develop simultaneously.
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