Wendy Lecker, civil rights attorney, explains here how disappointing the recent Connecticut funding decision is.
“As noted in my previous column, CCJEF trial judge Thomas Moukawsher refused to order the state to ensure adequate resources in schools, though determining constitutional adequacy was his responsibility. By contrast, the judge freely issued sweeping directives regarding educational policy.
“The judge issued far-reaching orders involving elementary and high school education and teacher evaluations. He also aired abhorrent views toward children with disabilities, which several commentators already addressed.
“This column addresses his orders regarding elementary education. I will address the others in subsequent columns.
Moukawsher observed that the educational disparities in secondary school begin in elementary school. (He actually acknowledged that they begin before elementary school, but declined to rule that preschool is essential.)
Moukawsher’s “fix” for elementary school was to order the state to define elementary education as being “primarily related to developing basic literacy and numeracy skills needed for secondary school.”
“Most of us understand that to thrive in secondary school, children must develop skills beyond basic numeracy and literacy. From an early age, children must develop the ability to think critically, creatively and independently.
There is no real division among brain functions — cognitive, social and motor — so they all must be developed in concert. As neuroscientist Adele Diamond observed, “a human being is not just an intellect or just a body … we ignore any of those dimensions at our peril in … educating children.”
“However, Moukawsher ruled that elementary school should concern itself with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Moreover, he demanded that this definition have “force,” “substantial consequences” and be “verifiable” — code for high-stakes statewide standardized elementary school exit exams.
“The judge’s myopic focus was emphasized by his suggestion for giving the required definition “force.” He declared that the state definition “might gain some heft, for example, if the rest of school stopped for students who leave third grade without basic literacy skills. School for them might be focused solely on acquiring those skills. Eighth-grade testing would have to show they have acquired those skills before they move on to secondary school. This would give the schools four school years to fix the problem for most children.”
Many children who do not score well on standardized tests are poor and experience stress in their lives that inhibits learning. Others are just learning English. Others have disabilities. Any lag in reading does not mean a child cannot think at grade level or beyond. Moreover, many low-income children have limited exposure to the wide variety of experiences their more affluent peers enjoy. Yet Moukawsher’s prescription for “fixing” them is to limit their education to reading instruction. No art, music, physical education, social studies, science, drama, or field trips. This “solution” will leave our neediest children further behind developmentally.
Moukawsher’s proposal not only threatens to hinder development for our neediest children. It is not even an effective way to teach reading.”
Read the rest of her analysis. This is the same decision that the New York Times treated as historic. Apparently, no one at the Times actually read the decision.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What the judge (and, sadly, many educators) doesn’t understand is that reading comprehension is not learned in reading class. It’s learned in all the other classes, and at home. It’s learned through learning words. You learn words through learning about the world. You learn about the world by learning science, history, reading and listening to stories, watching movies, traveling, listening to parents tell about the world, etc. Thus the judge’s dictate to narrow school to reading and math is totally wrongheaded. It’s the same mistake that the authors of NCLB made when they decreed “reading and math uber alles” and then imposed reading tests that induced schools to fixate on steroid-like quick score boosters –metacognitive strategies –rather that the building kids’ core capacity to read –general knowledge. This is what happens when amateurs dictate policy. Though sadly, many of the “experts” are wrong about reading too. E.D. Hirsch’s excellent new book “Why Knowledge Matters” explains this all brilliantly. Hirsch convincingly argues that the only way to shrink the achievement gap is to give poor kids a knowledge-rich curriculum, not more of the anemic NCLB-era literacy drills.
LikeLike
Cross-posted at with this comment which has embedded links
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-Reality-of-That-Disapp-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Connecticut_Decision-making_Evaluation_Judicial-Activism-160929-982.html
Diane WAS Undersec’y of Education for the first Bush administrations, and IS the top academic on our education system! 24 million people have visited this special ‘teacher’s room,’ where teachers and parents talk… and tell it the way it is IN OUR SCHOOLS, s an UTTER FAILURE by the MEDIA which is totally owned by the perpetrators of the destruction.
Living in Dialogue is a great site, http://www.livingindialogue.com/bloodbath/
like that of Diane Ravitch or the Network for Public Education (NPE), http://networkforpubliceducation.org/about-npe/
to learn how fast YOUR PUBLIC EDUCATION is being usurped by the plutocrats of the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
There are 15,880 school systems, and the media is hiding there reality that schools are being systematically privatized, state by state. Put ‘PRIVATIZATION’ into the search field at the Ravitch blog, and see for yourself, or Put charter school failure in the search field and judge for yourself what is happening.
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=PRIVITIZATION
LikeLike
Ponderosa, I applaud your support of a context/content rich approach to learning, but as a former special education teacher I was confronted with the fact that a skills based component to reading instruction geared to the age and instructional level of the child is frequently a necessary element of a well rounded program. For some reason, we don’t run into the same debate around mathematics instruction. The push has been toward more real world problem solving, but nobody denies that a basic skill set is essential. Some children seemingly pick up the skill component of instruction by osmosis. That is not the case for all children. Since I think we all agree that each child is unique, how much support is needed is different for each child.
LikeLike
“. . . how much support is needed is different for each child.”
Yes, and there is no excuse for not providing the proper resources so that each child can learn as much as they are capable of no matter what the level. And that learning should include basic facts, concepts along with personal learning skills.
LikeLike
You’re right that decoding, the first part of reading instruction, is a skill and this skill must be taught. But comprehension, the second stage of reading development, is not really a skill in the same sense. It’s a result of recognizing lots of words and concepts that one already knows, and then inferring the meaning of the handful that one does not know. If more than 2% of a text’s words are unfamiliar, comprehension breaks down. All the metacognitive reading strategies in the world will not avail you unless you already KNOW 90-98% of the words on the page already. That’s where a content-rich curriculum comes in. Teaching strategies has some utility, but not that much. We are born to infer; this does not, and cannot be taught. Studies of chimps show that they are sophisticated inference makers. The reason kids fail to infer meanings of unfamiliar words in a text is usually because they don’t know enough about the context, not that they are inept at inference making, or are failing to attempt inference making.
LikeLike
YOU ARE NEVER TO OLD TO TEACH when you show that kind wisdom. But, those who need the ‘HOW-TO’ advice are the NON- classroom practitioners. Words have meaning, sir, and ‘teachers’ ARE the ‘PRACTITIONERS of the profession of pedagogy. It is my experience over 4 decades of teaching across the grades and disciplines, that any successful teacher -practitioner grasps that the job of ‘teaching’ skills, is one of showing a child HOW-TO-DO something.
All we ‘teachers’ actually do is SHARE what we our selves know who to do.
Learning anything takes practice, which begins with the basics, and that is the same for learning to play an instrument or playing a sport like tennis.
Children learn to speak, in this way, and to read in this way, and to write in this way.
The basics for reading, like in math, is to know the symbols represent something — sounds- in this discipline.
Writing requires the practitioner to instruct children in how to form letters, and group sounds, and words and build structures that they have ALREADY ENCOUNTERED WHEN THEY READ, and when they began to speak.
I taught reading and writing in primary school, and I shoed all kids how to do that, and all my students, even those who had been ‘held-over,’ as non-readers in grade 2.. (how they failed to earn to rad by age 8 was always a mystery to me, but they left reading.
Thankfully, top-down mandates were not part of the experience, so I used the techniques that I knew worked… like phonics, but I knew I had kiddies in that room, so I made it fun.
Everyone left reading on grade level at least because I knew how to engage kids and to show them how things worked.
Writing, however is more than penmanship and grammar. Mastering mechanics comes with practice (and lots of reading good stuff (like the ay John Steinbeck puts words together) but crucial to that process, was teaching kids how to do some really strong critical thinking… to get the ideas that power a story. Reading stories and articles, and plays, and TALKING TOGETHER ABOUT THE IDEAS that we encountered was crucial
Teaching kids HOW-TO think critically, to compare and contrast, to hypothesize and to predict …TAKES A TEACHER who knows how to do this!
Intelligent, educated and experienced teachers need to know the objectives… what a child must BE ABLE TO DO, when June rolls around, and I loved the NY state and THE NY city MANUALS of OBJECTIVES … (which I still have AND WOULD BE HAPPY TO BRING TO THE NPE CONFERENCE).
It is a good thing I had them, because ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION, I supplied all the materials and activities, having found myself in almost every new assignment, with little more than a room with furniture, and in one Bronx school not even that… I used samples of rugs that I got from a local carpet store until the AP could round up desks and chairs.
How-to do something complex, needs someone WHO KNOWS HOW THE SKILL IS ACQUIRED BY THE HUMAN BRAIN … in other words, the WAYS IN WHICH it is done!
When I was the cohort for the National Standards research, the LRDC staff developers explained that I should replace the word HOW in my lesson plans, with the words THE WAY IN WHICH. This made it clear that there was a plan.
The ways in which a child acquires the ability to read, includes IDENTIFYING THE’freaking’ SOUNDS! (Forgive me!)
Gimme a break, Mr Gates and friends, and let us teachers teach!
LikeLike