The New York City Department of Education placed literacy coaches in struggling elementary schools to lift test scores. A new study concluded that the literacy coaches made no difference. The Department responded by increasing the funding for literacy coaches and expressing its confidence that its failed strategy is working. At the least, the Department should try an experiment in reducing class sizes to no more than 12 in similar schools. Hiring literacy coaches is a strategy that was long ago described by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.”
Leonie Haimson predicted the failure of this initiative last April, as it builds on a similar failed program started by Joel Klein.
A major push by New York City to help poor children in public schools learn to read by assigning literacy coaches to their teachers had no impact on second-graders’ progress, according to a study of its first year.
The city Department of Education conducted the evaluation, but its officials said Thursday it was too early to judge the initiative. They said they would strengthen the program while boosting annual funding to $89 million, from $75 million.
The initiative has been a key part of the education agenda of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who early in his tenure set a target of having all students read on level by the end of second grade, by 2026.
Research shows that if children lag behind in reading in third grade, it is very hard for them to catch up. About 43% of the city’s third-graders passed 2017 state exams in English language arts, with some high-poverty schools showing much lower pass rates.
The literacy program embedded 103 coaches in 107 high-need schools in fall 2016. Each coach was assigned to spend the academic year honing teachers’ instructional skills in kindergarten through second grade.
This evaluation tested second-graders in schools that had literacy coaches, and compared their results with peers in similar city schools that had no coaches. The report found that both groups of students were behind in skills in October 2016 and fell further behind expectations by May 2017.
Each group gained an average of four months of skills, when they should have gained seven months. At the end of second grade, students in schools with coaches on average performed at the level expected in the second month of second grade, on a measure known as the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. It covered decoding skills, word knowledge and comprehension.
The disappointing results didn’t surprise Susan Neuman, a New York University professor of literacy education. She said the department deployed coaches of varying quality, gave them insufficient training and, in some schools, principals shifted them to drilling for state exams…
Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack said he had confidence in the coaches, their training and principal buy-in. He noted that some schools showed real improvements.
“We think we are on the right track,” he said. “We know we have a lot of work to do.”
Skeptics of the initiative have long argued it would be better to reduce class size, add services for the disabled and require a stronger focus on phonics, which teaches children to sound out letters as a primary way to identify words.
The department has expanded the literacy initiative yearly, and will dispatch about 500 coaches this fall, with every elementary school getting a coach or additional attention.
Nothing is as inexplicable as doubling down on failure.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
38 comments followed the WSJ piece–mainly conservative, anti-union and it-all-starts-in the home reactions.
Also, if de Blasio said he wants all 2nd graders to read on level by 2026, he is echoing NCLB’s impossible 2002 objective–making 100% of children proficient by 2014.
When does the BS end?
Never!
Because it’s all based on the false premise that standardized test scores mean something when they mean nothing.
The conflict here is this IS / should be job-embedded professional development we clamor for instead of sit-and-get… however (from article)
The disappointing results didn’t surprise Susan Neuman, a New York University professor of literacy education. She said the department deployed coaches of varying quality, gave them insufficient training and, in some schools, principals shifted them to drilling for state exams…
So is the problem the approach which is one we want or the poor implementation?
Too often food ideas get blasted because they are implemented without teacher buy-in and participation
The problem isn’t the approach per se. It’s that these kids are in school for a certain number of hours a day. There’s only so much that can be done. Then they go home to often dysfunctional environments with poor role models. Education starts in the home. The city can pump all the money in the world to funding schools. Nothing will change I’d we don’t address the elephant in the room: parenting.
“principals shifted them to drilling for state exams…”
Ahhh, another excellent example of adminimal decision making capabilities, eh!
Why does a certain reading level make a child? Why don’t we allow all people to read books they want to read and are interested in? The problem is we spend too much time on test prep for flawed tests that don’t mean diddly doo and then evaluate tests that mean nothing. Then we place students on the level the tests show they need. Humbug I say! Humbug! We need to go back to the sheer pleasure of reading and never mind the darn grade levels! We also need to turn off the darn technology for several hours each day. Instead of sharing selfies, why not share a book? Hey, I am all for comics and graphic novels, too! Brenda Starr…I miss you!
As a friend of mine has suggested over and over, get retirees into the schools to work one on one with the students. We could also give the ATRs back their jobs in classrooms and lower class sizes. These coaches work with the teachers and too often their advice is ignored or poopood. One to one with students would be more supportive beginning in the early grades.
Yes.Yes and more yes
Many truly USEFUL solutions ignored as, in our district, so many young, never-taught-long recruits have been hired to “fix” veteran teachers instead of working directly with the kids
Teacher training matters. A good reading teacher can figure out where students are lagging. Then, the teacher can work on the areas that are in need of improvement. One of the reasons I went back to school to become a certified reading teacher in New York was that learning to read in English was essential for my ELL students. Many of my ESL students arrived with little to no reading skills in English, and most of them were behind in all other academics as well. My goal was to become efficient and effective at helping students develop literacy. The training I had was very helpful, and very few of my former students wound up in special education. There is a large over representation of ELLs in special education nationally. I would like to see more ESL programs require teachers in training to have a better understanding of how to teach reading. Struggling readers will continue to have academic programs, and most of them become reluctant learners.
If the city wants better results from literacy coaches, they should invest in training the coaches. With training, their coaches will be able to do a good job. Teachers College, NYU and Bank St. all have qualified people that could help the city do this.
Retired teacher-
You are spot on and showing, as usual, great common sense. Good training does matter. I, too, am a retired teacher currently working with future elementary teachers to teach them mathematics at a deeper level in the hope that with that better understanding, they will be better at teaching their students the mathematics they need.
Indeed, BEWARE any time a “coach” comes into your classroom or any other setting where a specific and complicated form of expertise is called for.
In a few ways it sort of reminds me of the times I was there to “coach” my wife during childbirth.
Yes, I WAS indeed thrilled and in total awe of being in the room when my kids were born. And, of course, I tried to help and be encouraging in any way possible. I followed the “coaching” plan from the childbirth class to the letter. (Plenty of ice chips etc..) I certainly meant well.
But when the delivery of my son, our first child, met some serious complications hours in, most that “coaching” stuff went right out the window. Me and the guy doctor got booted to the side of the room and the woman who stepped in took serious charge. She wasn’t only one tough MD but, from what I later heard, she was a fierce competitor on the basketball court, hacking and fouling under the hoops in a three-on-three tourney a friend of mine encountered her in. (Our baby was fine and is now a healthy, 20-year-old, First Amendment using journalist.)
So, yeah, coaching. Coaching to me presumes that you are not only skilled at something but can direct, lead and inspire the people around you effectively in using those skills.
Too many of the educational-style “coaches” I’ve run into inside schools during my 30 year career just don’t fit that bill. So the study sounds like it confirms my impression. (Couldn’t find the entire article…pay wall there at the WSJ.)
Wasn’t there an entry on this blog a while back about a “coach” or administrator who came into classrooms with a microphone that was connected via earpiece right into a
teacher’s cranium? The poor teacher would be doing his or her thing,speaking to students and this alleged “expert” would talking into their brain at the same time…(Like the nice people at McDonalds who take my coffee order in the drive through line..wearing an earpiece and microphone talking to multiple customers all at once.)
My God, what else will these so-called “school improvers” think up next? More and more of the same “Leave No Consultant Behind” mentality -just jazzed up with different names and perhaps some new technology heaped on. I’m not a particularly church going person but when you think of the piles of money that have been wasted in our country on all this unproven educational crap while so many kids are in dire need….well, THAT to me qualifies as a sin.
Well said. I remember I had some great coaches when I was a teacher. They were my colleagues who willing to share their experiences and ideas with me. Imagine that.
Absolutely. I still use ideas from my wonderful colleagues. It was part of being a member of a school’s faculty. That idea, our faculty, meant a lot years ago.
Poor readers don’t need coaches, they need background knowledge.
Not a reading expert, but this makes sense. The word enormous can be learned, understood, recalled, and used in a new context if there are good and vivid referents in experience and representations of experience beyond words alone. Second graders can become fans of big words like enormous.
Field trips matter, short films, picture books, music with lyrics, word forms and patterns in poems, chants, silly play with words and sounds, dramatizations of words and actions (dramatic play with masks and costumes, or puppets), let’s pretend as the context for learning and reason-enough to learn vocabulary, context depended meanings, and complex relationships– speech to written words.
A recent discovery is relevant for children who are classified as autistic: some respond to questions and actions programmed into humanoid robots. Why? That is being investigated.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2610246/The-robots-making-school-scary-place-autistic-children-Friendly-mini-droids-chat-play-games-teach-pupils.html
In regard to NY literacy coaches–well qualified or minimally adequate: follow the money on contracting for these services.
Yes, and that is exactly what kids lack today with this hyper focus on reading and math. As a social studies teacher in junior high, I am frequently horrified at the lack of background knowledge my students have for history and geography. In short, they know almost nothing. Many of them don’t even know the continents.
And this summer, while reading the AP Human Geography test, my colleagues and I were surprised and saddened. The question asked for students to name some specific countries marked on a map. I would say that about one quarter of the students put that the country was Africa. And these are the AP students.
As a 7th grade teacher, I often wonder whether kids are learning anything at all in K-5 these days. It’s a scandal. We’ve jettisoned content for “skills”. Kids’ wallowing in ignorance is justified by alleged gains in mental processing ability. But it’s a fraud. Kids emerge ignorant AND devoid of “skills”. The only real education in America is happening in the homes of didactic upper-middle class parents. Pseudo-education prevails in our elementary schools. That’s why kindergarteners who read poorly will become high school seniors who read poorly despite years of reading practice and instruction in reading strategies. It’s a quack cure. Poor readers need general knowledge to read –and think and write and engage in the political sphere. But, incredibly, schools don’t think general knowledge is important.
I’m not sure when or how the education establishment is ever going to wake up. E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham have been plugging away on behalf of teaching actual knowledge for years. They continue to be blackballed in schools of education. The edu-charlatans reign supreme. Our descent into barbarous CNN-bashing is partly their fault. Ignorant people are putty in the hands of demagogues. Hack ed school professors are purveying pedagogy and curriculum that is worthless.
Not only are students entering middle schools with enormous and disturbing knowledge (and vocabulary) gaps, even more troubling is that they really don’t seem to care. I find the lack of general curiosity and the desire to become knowledgeable has been hammered out of them by the relentless pursuit of higher, yet meaningless test scores.
NCLB/CCSS/RTTT have distorted the goals of the K to 12 experience to such an extent that we are now looking at a lost generation of students – no skills, no knowledge, and no curiosity. The “IDK” generation. So much for producing “lifelong learners”. This of course excludes the relatively small pool of driven, highly motivated, children who’s enriched and privileged upbringing has overcome the exasperating expansion of the null curriculum via test-and-punish policies.
“I find that the general curiosity . . .” (not lack of)
Any “reform” that blames schools, teachers, standards, or curriculum for low test scores is merely a means of distracting from the main cause, poverty. To reduce poverty, a population would need to raise taxes or raise incomes of working people. Not going to happen under our current leadership.
Literacy “coaching” is a reform that blames teachers for not doing a good enough job in their classrooms. Hence the need for them to be “coached”, often by an inexperienced “teacher” that is an expert in scripted worksheet curriculum.
Are these coaches working with teachers or helping students? There is a big difference.
Instead of coaches for the teachers, why not invest in coaches that work with the kids?? Having at least one person trained in an Orton-Gillingham approach with the time to pull small groups of students for targeted, systematic reading instruction would be a far better use of resources. I don’t know what it’s like in NYC, but in Chicago, very very few schools offer OG reading programs which are especially effective for kids with learning disabilities like Dyslexia. We need more people in our schools working directly with the kids, especially struggling learners, which then frees up the General Ed teachers to work with everyone else. Coaches for the teachers comes out of the idea that the problem is the teachers. What if the problem is lack of resources and specially-trained staff to support kids?
Yes.
Not all students with reading problems need Orton-Gillingham, which is a visual kinesthetic approach. A qualified reading and/ or special education teacher would have to determine the best approach based on diagnostic testing. While many delayed readers may have auditory processing problems, not all do. A trained professional would have to determine the best way to help these students, and the approach would vary based on the needs of the student.
Of course not all kids need OG. The point is that many kids DO need this type of specialized intervention, few schools provide it, and it would be a better use of money to invest in Reading Specialists who could implement interventions like OG rather than a coach for the teachers.
I agree that it would results in better outcomes for students.
Katie, please read E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters. It convincingly argues that teaching content is the best and only way to teach reading comprehension. There is no teachable reading comprehension skill, just as there is no teachable JOKE comprehension skill. Think about that last sentence.
A pair of centuries and some late wickets put South Africa in a strong position with Australia 4 for 112 at stumps on day two of the second Test in Port Elizabeth. South Africa was bowled out early in the final session for 423, after AB de Villiers (116) and JP Duminy (123) both ground out tough, vital centuries for the home side. Nathan Lyon finished with 5 for 130 after bowling tirelessly all day, while Australia’s fast bowlers uncharacteristically struggled on a lifeless pitch. Wayne Parnell’s (2 for 19) first three balls featured the wickets of Doolan and Marsh, as the left-armer made the most of his Test recall. Parnell coerced edges out of the Australia pair with fine line-and-length bowling, needing only a fraction of movement to earn the scalps. Warner and nightwatchman Nathan Lyon (12 not out) faced a number of close scares to reach stumps unbroken. De Villiers grassed a regulation chance behind the stumps when Warner was on 39, while Lyon was also dropped by the usually safe hands of Duminy and given not out when replays proved he nicked one behind to the keeper.
1) Which best describes the “fraction of movement” needed to earn scalps in this cricket match?
a) nicking behind the keeper
b) edging out a lifeless pitch
c) breaking fine-line wickets
d) stumping vital centuries
RageAgainstThe Testocracy: What? This is English? Okay, I flunked. I don’t care who earns scalps. Both sides are complete nonsense and I’m a bad guesser.
Where did this come from? If this is from some actual test it doesn’t measure anything.[I normally consider myself a native English language speaker.]
The point is, of course you can read the words but you cannot comprehend it because you do not have the requisite background knowledge/vocabulary. The passage is an actual article summarizing a cricket match. For many kids reading feels just like this. That is why reading comprehension could best be improved by focusing on content knowledge/vocabulary, instead of empty and isolated skill sets.
“Each coach was assigned to spend the academic year honing teachers’ instructional skills in kindergarten through second grade.”
I do not like the sound of this. It reeks of teachers don’t know what they’re doing and need to be taught. This stinks since teachers are the professionals.
Imagine, in a law firm, needing ‘coaches’ to inform the attorneys how to do what they need to do to practice their profession. Imagine hiring ‘coaches’ to tell doctors what they should do to treat their patients in a hospital. THE DISRESPECT FOR TEACHERS has been fed by the weaponized DISINFORMATION that has appeared in the media. Those ‘bad’ teachers… over and over and over..until lies become truth.
And of course, pedagogy is a COMPLEX Professional DISCIPLINE — but most people only think of teachers as they remember them when they went to school. They have no appreciation for the difficulty of enabling a young human mind to WANT to do the WORK, that acquiring a skill (like thinking, reading or writing) requires… not to mention the skill required to do the REAsoning skills of math or physics.
Yes, colleges must create education curricula that offers teachers the knowledge and practice they need.
Yes, ‘fad’ ed degrees must be eliminated. There is no doubt that teachers need more than ‘training,’ to enter a classroom. Trained ambulance medics do not operate in surgeries.!!! Trained TFA novices
Yes, great seminars and staff development is necessary for teachers to maintain their professional grasp of educational practices…but the crap that is forth-coming today is only a way to enrich the ‘sellers’ and privateers…mcuh as the crud that big PHARMA promotes to doctors.
$$$ for all the wrong reasons.
Today, many of those professions you mentioned work as teams. Collaboration is happening everywhere — it is a good thing. Let us not get too caught up in titles — a literacy coach is a teacher as well, I’m sure they belong to the same union. How could having another teacher in the room helping the students be a bad thing? Or assisting teachers to help get information or resources?
I taught in NYC for decades.
In no school to which I was assigned, was I ever given more than a classroom and a pupil list. NO guidance, no objectives, nada — but a set of ‘readers.’ In all schools where I brought my education and experience, and know-how — the kids learned!
In my last tenure, the room had no desks, blackboards or closets. I used carpet squares the first week, and as in every NYC school in which I worked, I bought everything I used –every book — and wrote the curriculum that put the school on the map — and made me famous.
In 1997, I was the ( NYSEC)NY State English Council’s “Educator of Excellence” after 2 years as the cohort for the GENUINE (Pew funded) National Standards research out of Harvard; the literacy curriculum I wrote and which was so successful, & celebrated that my work ‘toured’ the nation and was shown at staff development seminars at the LRDC (Uni. of Pittsburgh’s PH’D arm). My resume is at myauthor’s page here ! https://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
I tell you this, because you need to know that it IS the PROFESSIONAL TEACHER-PRACTITIONERs who enable and facilitate learning… and it is they who need to be hired and have autonomy in their own practice (i.e classroom).
If money was provided for smaller classes and more professional experienced teacher-practitioners (as opposed to novices or TFA’s) kids would learn… as mine did.
But, you see, In 1998, The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf took over in the nineties, and saw to it that schools system administrators at the TOP, mandated what students would know. Teachers like me, who knew what learning looked like, and had practiced pedagogy for decades would never use the Gates crap. We had to be removed, our voices silenced. Hundreds of thousands like me, were thrown out”and the unions did nothing.
This was the result during Joel Klein’s tenure as chancellor in NYC ! https://vimeo.com/41994760
That is NYC — then and NOW.. money for all the wrong things, when smaller class size, and experienced teachers, are proven to work.
NYC will never recover until TEACHERS (like doctors) are given the autonomy to practice their profession–to ‘teach’–i.e. enable & facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and SKILLS!
What they did to eradicate my tenure is another story, but after 40 years of excellent service & proven excellence, plus numerous awards, they could not accuse me of incompetence… so the alleged corporal punishment, and ‘threatening to kill the principal.’
The minions of the Manhattan union stood mute. I was gone from teaching, and would have lost my pension and benefits, if not for the UFT pres.Randi Weingarten, who had been contacted BY MY HUSBAND; she rescued me…into retirement.
“In no school to which I was assigned, was I ever given more than a classroom and a pupil list. NO guidance, no objectives, nada — but a set of ‘readers.’ In all schools where I brought my education and experience, and know-how — the kids learned!”
I other words, you are a professional who cares about your students and what you have to do to engage them in learning. Just like the teachers I had when I was in school. That’s all I wish for my children.
I posted this at QuickLink: WSJ: Literacy Coaches inNYC Were Ineffective, so Department of Education Will Do More of Same; Diane Ravitch | OpEdNews https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/WSJ-Literacy-Coaches-inNY-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-K-12_Education-Laws-180804-55.html
In many schools children aren’t reading full works of literature. They’re reading snippets because of the Common Core close reading for “the test.” Bring back literacy and the love for reading.
This is a terrible mistake. I agree with Frank Smith’s view that reading is thinking. Whole works connect parts to whole and unlock so much comprehension. We are shortchanging students by presenting short snippets to them while denying them the opportunity to make connections. Reading whole works also fosters a love of reading and a fondness for the work of particular authors.
Love Frank Smith’s work. Thanks, retired teacher. The deformers are soooooo WRONG.
If anyone questions the power of having access to books and reading for pleasure, then they are plain simple-minded. The research is clear about the importance of “choice and reading.” Here is just one name for those bozos…Keith Curry Lance, Mr. American Library Association.
One thought that keeps coming into my head is that those deformers may actually WANT “Jim Crow DAZE” back … scary. Look at the latest…the “Hate Rally” in Portland.
I am reading: March Forward Girl, a memoir written for young people by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine students who integrated Central HS in Little Rock, Arkansas. Holy cow. Powerful book.
Beals was honored with the Congressional Gold Metal of Honor. She should be potus.
Do view or read this RECENT PBS interview with Melba Pattillo Beals. It’s excellent.
https://rmpbs.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/iml04.soc.ush.civil.beals/melba-pattillo-beals/#.W2cKtd9MGhA
One of the best, most influential classes I ever had was as a 5th grader in Rialto, CA. We had an hour every day to read anything we wanted to out of the library and the books in our reading room. No reports, no tests, just occasional conversations with our teachers to describe what we were reading. I was introduced to Dahl, Dickens, polar explorations (especially John Franklin and Roald Amundsen), and Shakespeare. And it was all self-directed. That memory is why I am so saddened when I read about how the once exceptional California public education system has been decimated by profiteers and Sacramento shenanigans.
To report that literacy coaches were ineffective is like saying a group of teachers — or doctors, or attorneys — was ineffective. Without more details, we cannot damn an entire profession.
I do know that coaching has been implemented in at least some NYC schools in a way that contradicted the best evidence we have about teacher professional learning and how it is influenced. It often was top-down and left teachers feeling angry and disreapected— not optimal coaching.
IF NYC does have a good model of coaching, more time could be exactly what is needed. See the research by Bryk et al. on the increased effectiveness of coaching when adequate time is allowed.
See “Coaching Matters” by Killion et al. for a summary of the research on the value of educational coaching.
My experiences teaching English with literacy coaches were undesirable. They both did nothing but try to get me to put away the books and pens, and use computers instead. One wanted me to have my students stop reading, stop writing essays, and make Power Point slides or iMovies instead. The other currently wants me to use a “blended” online curriculum platform instead of teaching. So, in my experience, the literacy coaches were just vendors in disguise. Both were English teachers who had been pulled out of the classroom, further straining funding of the classroom.
Creating a consulting position like “literacy coach” is an act against a school, against the students.
On-line tutoring schemes are abundant and being marketed as better than any school-based program. One new and big marketing effort comes from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. The pitch includes a book-length treatment of the virtues of online tutoring among other Edtech solutions to problems in education. The press for the book is well in advance of its publication date, mid-August. The authors assume that online encounters, including Skype, build “social capital” for students and “real-world experiences.” The project is really a way to market many apps, management platforms, and brokering services for underemployed adults some of these with teaching credentials, many with none.
“Social capital”, “real world experience”, “innovation”… all very familiar buzzwords used by my literary coach from years ago. I would be surprised if the Disruptive group didn’t claim technology eliminated inequality. Ah, flights of fancy from an earlier time, the computer’s honeymoon period.
No one ever got an education by being “disrupted”
Every year an “analysis” of testing info revealed our middle school of a large number of second-language learners had difficulty with multiple meanings of words. Only a large amount of reading in multiple disciplines could possibly “fix” this lack of background knowledge. But hey let’s be sure to teach phonemic awareness (something not missing in the majority of the students, except perhaps the differences that existed between English and Spanish).
Growing up I scored well on tests requiring reading because I read widely, broadly, deeply…at home. I made sure to tell my students this experience because I shared their working class backgrounds. However, I had books that had belonged to two great aunts who had attended the University of Illinois. My students were directed to the school library (which was closed down on Deasy’s watch).
Meanwhile, all kinds of money gets thrown at schools, whether for coaches, tech, wasted in-service. No one pays attention to what works, just personal hobby-horses.
The whole point is to have a two tiered system … one for the haves (white and rich) and another for the have nots. Every once in a while a few have nots are accepted if the are able to jump through hoops, behave, and show they are worthy.
So, of course, there’s “doubling down” of failure. So rather than surround the students with great books of interest, read aloud, do choral readings of poetry, sing songs, and engage the students in actual reading, “drill and kill” the students until their eyes glaze over and there is no joy. Good one, NY…NOT.
The reason this has failed is that it was not a problem to cure. Within any population, there is variance. In scientific endeavors, there is always variance win data gathered, even if it is data that can logically (one can hardly place grade level data on a par with the weight of a captured hummingbird or the length of a predators incisor) be collected, the expectation that 100% of any species will ever exhibit a certain trait. So it is with academic data. Not only should we expect to see variance because the subjects of the investigation naturally exhibit variance, but we should also expect variance to arise from the investigative process itself. The observer affects the observed.
The second reason for the failure of some of the second graders to read is that they do not and have never read very much, nor been read to by parents very much. This behavior too should be expected, because it exhibits the same variance that occurs naturally.
This is why teachers should not buy into the testing paradigm. Nothing in modern use of numbers collected on tests takes into account the generally wide variance associated with human behavior. Even the grades teachers give accept no variance from an established norm. True, there are baseline human behaviors. Without these, humanity could not function. The violation of these norms by terrorists and criminals for various reasons throws society out of sorts. But a baseline for human behavior is different from a norm established arbitrarily by officials who never will have a chance to meet and get to know the student.
So what would work? Community is the best way to narrow the wide variance of independent human behaviors. Thus man, as he survived the rigors of his development, came out a social animal. The Mentality of the pack runs through us. It is a powerful force. If used by wise leaders, it can build societies that can work together to do great things. If used by leaders who are clever and devious, this mentality can produce nightmarish behavior that seems unavoidable to the myopic leaders but silly to the society. How can we thus devise ways to get people to read more using this powerful human force, but recognition the basic principle that man, like the beast, with never exhibit 100% compliance with any expected behavior?
We must use community, because it is the most proven motivator of human behavior. Diane has created a community here that stimulates thought about educational issues. The Lions Club regularly checks the ability of children to see, an example of a community doing good work. Community schools, that is, schools that are the focus of the community, are the best bet. Fostering a sense of community will get more results than a thousand experts for each child or a threatening rod.
I now teach Kindergarten but taught First for many years. The ‘coach’ at our school mainly helps with the testing process because that is such a big deal and then runs around answering to the principal. Sometimes when I have asked these coaches for help with something they are very busy and can not help you until after testing or some program. The principal has indirectly said not to bother her.
The other point I wish to bring up is curriculum. You have to work around it and develop your own stuff to really get the students to learn what is needed. And many times you need to do this kind of on the sly because now everything is programed -it is all about the program and following it with ‘fidelity’ – also do not forget the drift – which is let us now change the program. The two things that we do not do in the United States because we love bright and shiny and disrupt and tech is everything…are the two things that make Asian and European educational work. One they believe in master older teachers that mentor and build the knowledge and wisdom of younger teachers and two they focus on their curriculum with deep lesson study – what is the best way to teach a subject.
Let’s define what a literacy “coach” is ….
“Important items to note: (As of Monday, July 9th, you no longer have to be a NYCDOE employee to apply or be a NYCDOE employee who already is tenured. We know the posting does not make this clear but it is the case now.)”
From NYCDOE website: https://nycdoe-ulitreadingcoach-apply.fluidreview.com/
And, according to the UFT, a literacy “coach” does all of this ….
“INSPIRE – teachers and students to excel.
IMPACT – reading achievement by supporting teachers and developing students’ reading acquisition.
IMPACT closing the literacy achievement gap in New York City.
IMPACT teacher practice through strong coaching methods.
INITIATE the next step of your professional journey toward teacher leadership and let us support you along the way”
https://nycdoe-ulitreadingcoach-apply.fluidreview.com/pm/resource/eyJoZnJlIjogODkxMTg0NjksICJ2cSI6IDkwNTMzfQ/
It seems that the requirements to be a literacy coach are unclear due to recent changes. And, it seems that “coaches” are being encouraged to become teacher “leaders”. So, what exactly is a literacy “coach”? Who the hell knows.
IN ADDITION, WE ARE NOW ACCEPTING CANDIDATES WHO DO NOT YET WORK FOR THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AS WELL AS NYCDOE EMPLOYEES WHO DO NOT YET HAVE TENURE!
The NYCDOE must be hard up for applicants. How can they even entertain hiring someone with no tenure? Really? How insulting to those who have the experience.
A lot of things go into ensuring that a literacy coach will be successful in a school. A few questions to think about are: Is there buy in from the principal and staff? What training has the literacy coach received? Is the literacy coach embedded in a classroom? What time is available for staff development? What literacy program is the school implementing?
I had the privilege of having our district level literacy coach in my classroom for an entire year. She was with me in the morning and then did coaching sessions with other teachers in the afternoon. I learned more during that year of teaching than I did in any of my teacher education classes. While she was teaching, my job was to take notes and observe student interactions. As the year went on, our roles reversed. I became the lead teacher again and she took notes on my teaching. She shared things I did well and suggested ways that I could improve. In regards to student growth, now (10 years later) my student growth is usually among the highest in my school. I firmly believe that it is due to the training I received from Dr. Hayes. There is definitely a place for literacy coaches in grades K-2. I am proof.