Exciting news!
The Network for Public Education will hold our 5th Annual National Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana on October 20-21, 2018.
You are invited!
We are jumping right into the heart of Mike Pence country, abetted by our great grassroots Hoosier allies.
We will once again line up great speakers, organize wonderful panels, and we promise you a weekend of inspiration, support, encouragement, and good fellowship.
Mark the date and plan to join us.
See you in Indy!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great! I might actually get to attend this one.
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Me two. Not far from home.
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Me three. Thanx for choosing Indy!
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Off topic but important IMHO: I’m very excited and encouraged that yesterday the New York Times gave a platform to Dan Willingham’s ideas about reading instruction and its implications for curriculum: https://nyti.ms/2k0fPuk . This may be the crack in the dam of bad ideas holding back progress for American students. I hope we can widen this crack.
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That’s exactly why informal reading assessments that we used to give assessed fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension on both familiar and unfamiliar passages. It is also why I spend quite a bit of time with the beginning readers I volunteer tutor making sure they can relate to and understand what we are reading. Decoding skills are important but totally useless if they can’t attach meaning to what they read.
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Willingham is saying that our approach to teaching reading is all wrong. Teachers fail to understand that the key to reading is knowing lots of words and lots about the world. When kids fail to comprehend it’s not because they lack skills like “the ability to make connections with the text”, it’s because there’s no prior knowledge in their brain that connects to the words on the page. If they know about the topic of the text (e.g. soccer), they’ll understand the text; if they don’t know anything about it, it’s likely that they’ll fail to understand. Thus we need to reorient the curriculum to focus on building knowledge and away from the failed literacy strategies of the past decade or two. Willingham says schools must DECREASE time spend on literacy instruction, ironically, to increase literacy. Time currently spent on “literacy” would be more fruitfully spent on knowledge-rich content-areas like history and science. Schools must redesign curriculum so that it systematically builds knowledge. Right now most school curricula aim to systematically build alleged reading skills like inference-making, but it’s in vain: it’s not making better readers. Only knowledge can do that. He’s calling for a curriculum revolution.
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Ability to connect is not a skill. “Making a connection” means students have had experience with the topic or in your parlance have background knowledge of a topic. I could probably do a credible job of reading some pretty dense scientific research, but after I was done I might be very hard pressed to tell you what it said because I lack the background knowledge that would allow me to connect with the text and discuss it beyond a very basic level of understanding. In special education, how we build those connections is where skill development may come in. The skills are simply tools or methods to gain and use information. I don’t mean to sound like I am lecturing you. I think we basically agree.
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Good: Indianapolis is close at least in comparison to going to one of the coasts, although the drive out to Oakland and back sure was fun!
Not good: Wrong weekend as that is our Trophy Trout weekend which we’ve been doing for 42 odd years or so.
Decision, decision.
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Wish we had known about the Trophy Trout weekend!
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Oh, the places you will see and the stories to be heard in Indianapolis! The Mind Trust, Stand For Children and many others you hear of in other real estate reform, I mean education reform, for urban school districts. Putting in request off work tomorrow.
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