Paul Thomas of Furman University in South Carolina reminds us that “the crisis in reading” is a staple of American educational history. Every generation complains that young kids are not learning to read.it began long before Rudolf Flesch’s best seller “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in the 1950s.
Jeanne Chall, Reading specialist at Harvard and experienced kindergarten teacher, explored the mystery of reading in her book “Learning to Read: The Great Debate,” 1967, where she recommended early use of phonics, them a transition to engaging reading.
The National Reading Panel (1997) popularized the idea of a “science of reading,” and the myth refuses to die.NCLB codified it into law, but the “crisis” persisted.
Thomas exposes The Big Lie.
Mississippi is the latest example of a state falsely claiming that it has used the “science of reading” to raise scores.
Mississippi hasn’t broken the code. Neither has Florida.
Thomas writes:
“The “science of reading” mantra is a Big Lie, but it is also a huge and costly distraction from some real problems.
“Relatively affluent states still tend to score above average or average on reading tests; relatively poor states tend to score below average on reading tests.
“Some states that historically scored low, under the weight of poverty and the consequences of conservative political ideology that refuses to address that poverty, have begun to implement harmful policies to raise test scores (see the magenta highlighting) in the short-term for political points.
“It is 2019. There is no reading crisis in the way the “science of reading” advocates are claiming.
“It is 2019. Balanced literacy is the science of reading, but it is not the most common way teachers are teaching reading because schools are almost exclusively trying to raise scores, not students who are eager, joyful, and critical readers.
“It is 2019. Political and public efforts to do anything—often the wrong thing—so no one addresses poverty remain the American Way.
“It is 2019. It is still mostly about poverty when people insist it is about reading and reading policy.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ooooooo, You have opened the can of worms now, Diane!!! LOL. I can only imagine what this thread is going to look like in a day or two!!! In reading instruction, the devil is in the details. Yes, a lot of what passes for reading instruction these days is utter nonsense. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
When I got my master’s degree in ESL in the 1970’s, my course work was mostly applied linguistics. Someone clearly also taught you about Chomsky and transformational grammar too. I found that understandings about language from acquired from reading Chomsky helped me to sort out many of the confusions that my ELLs faced, particularly a lot of the nuanced aspects of language that depend on semantic and/or syntactic confusions. This background allowed me to better help ELLs to become more proficient readers and writers in English.
Bob, the piece you linked at your blog is comprehensive, informative, & spot-on. The part taking apart “reading strategies” is brilliant. I’ve always grasped intuitively the error of the “skills” approach to reading, but I think now I could explain it to people who think I just have a bee in my bonnet.
RE: grammar instruction: how about adding an updated version of diagramming sentences to the toolkit, perhaps as part of “sentence-combining and sentence-expanding exercises”? It could be a plus for the visually-inclined &/ or logically-oriented when diving into works w/complex syntax. Agree, grammatical taxonomy is of little use (other than a few basic terms that are helpful when learning another language). But for diagramming, you don’t need much more than “subject” and “predicate” to begin mapping out which phrase modifies what.
I think that sentence diagramming is truly fascinating as a study in and of itself, though I would like to see the classic sentence diagramming taught in the past replaced with the trees used by linguists who do generative grammar. However, I doubt that these would do much to increase students’ grammatical fluency. We mostly learn new syntactic structures automatically from our ambient linguistic environments, so early exposure to language environment using increasingly complex syntactic structures is in order, as is learning rhymes and memorizing prose passages containing those structures.
My high school “challenged” readers used to dig into scrambled sentence exercises with enthusiasm. We treated them like puzzles. It taught the kids that they actually knew a lot more about language than they thought they did, which was very important to kids who were labeled as slow. I did them right along with the kids, alone and in groups, their choice. They were much more willing to deal with more formal instruction when they realized it was just refining what they already knew.
Bob, Ling 101 is too far behind me, had to google linguistics tree diag, but: yes! I was picturing the logic diags I used when learning to program w/BASIC in the ’80’s, same idea.
Retired teacher, I should have figured ESL teachers would have this down! Looked up some examples, great idea. As you [and Bob] say so well– just as in diagramming sentences, the fun is in exercising that built-in syntactical “muscle,” realizing you know more than you thought you did, being spurred to try even more challenging material.
I was thinking of the puzzle-solving pleasure I got when first reading Henry James. Came across this old NYT article on point: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/taming-sentences/
The correlation between reading levels and poverty is no accident, but Ed Deformers want you to believe that there is some magic bullet that will fix reading because fixing poverty would require, horror of horrors, a living minimum wage, universal healthcare, and more steeply progressive taxation.
and an additional horror of horrors, perhaps there really is no ‘test’ which can force those stubborn kids into magically reading well…
A hungry kid who needs eyeglasses and has a single mother at home who is always freaked out about where the rent or the next meal is going to come from doesn’t do well in school. What a surprise! Of course, testing that kid more often will fix everything.
It not just about bad reading policy. It’s like everything else. Follow the money. The Phonics First parade began in earnest during W’s tenure as Texas governor. The phonics folks who produced the materials were lobbying like made to become millionaires by peddling their “scientific” approach. Politicians are greedy suckers so it was just a matter of time before it became federal guidelines. Precursors of Gates and the other techno wizards who sell digital education because it is “scientific” just so they can make more money.
Steve Nelson is right.
Like Gates and those others technocrats with shoddy products know?
Bill Gates “microsoft” set a new low standard … not testing his software. Takes money to test software. Software is not an add on.
“Balanced literacy is the science of reading, but it is not the most common way teachers are teaching reading because schools are almost exclusively trying to raise scores, not students who are eager, joyful, and critical readers.”
This is a quote from his article. To put it another way, test scores are the actual antithesis of measurement, not the claimed gold standard claimed by the testing people.
This supports the idea that obeying a law that requires teaching to raise a test score is like a doctor obeying a directive of an insurance company that he knows will harm a patient. In his book, Duane has called this malpractice.
While I laud the strikes we are seeing and many of the ideas promoted around the issues that caused them, I wish the organization of teachers would act decisively to rid the classroom of erzatz professionalism, no matter its source.
what do I do with my two grandsons who hate reading (and school) because of what’s been done to them thru these new teaching models? loyal to public schools but…
Read to them. I read to my kids way beyond when they could read to themselves. Helping them find the books that lit the fire was important. The two of them who have children now make books a major component of their time together.
Reading comprehension follows knowledge. There is no such thing as a good reader who lacks a big find of general knowledge.
How do good readers acquire knowledge? Mostly be reading.
For instance, I’m an avid reader and I read a lot. Even when I’m on the road driving, I’m reading signs and license plates. I can’t stop. And while I’m driving reading those signs and license plates, I’m listening to audio books. It’s amazing I haven’t had any serious accidents for the last fifty-eight years. I’ve been driving that long.
Can you read? is very different from, Can you understand what you read? Most adult Americans can read this passage, few would be able to answer correctly without guessing. Welcome to the world of the low knowledge, weak vocabulary reader.
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
As far as I am concerned, you are not reading unless you comprehend what you read. Otherwise, it serves no purpose. Reading is a meaning making process; I am not going to fully understand everything I read without the background in or context of a particular selection. That is certainly why we look for the layman’s version of unfamiliar subjects. Without understanding it is just word calling. Years ago I taught a boy who had aphasia. He would frequently echo what I said when he didn’t understand. The children I taught who fell on the autism spectrum often just echoed what was said to them. They understood that a response was required but not what that meant. In my last teaching position, I taught many ESL high school students, mostly Latino. We were required to give frequent fluency tests which were mostly a waste of time since no one seemed to care whether they understood what they read, just how fast. For my own information, I used to ask questions about what they had read and was amazed at how little they had understood or retained. They “read” flawlessly, but had probably had so many of these speed tests over the years that they didn’t bother to absorb the content.
” They “read” flawlessly, but had probably had so many of these speed tests over the years that they didn’t bother to absorb the content.”
The same remark applies to the math speedtests. They are useless from the educational point of view.
Ponderosa – how does one gain that knowledge if not through reading? You seriously think you have to sit down and teach kids about something before they can read and understand a story about it? Most of the “knowledge” I’ve learned comes from interest developed through reading, talking to other people and other actual experiences, not because someone sat me down and “taught” me “knowledge” that I’d need to know in order to read.
Children of relative affluence and relative privilege with supportive parents gain enormous amounts of worldly knowledge and deep vocabularies just from the wide variety of conversations and experiences they are routinely exposed to. The background knowledge that accrue by children from a typical upper middle class or upper class home is invaluable in producing reading comprehension skills. The “haves” not only “have” material things but they also “have” the benefit of a nearly constant supply of enriched language experiences and enriched learning opportunities. The “have not” children not only miss out on life’s physical luxuries but more importantly they miss out on the nearly constant input of important background knowledge and vocabulary. By asking, ” Do you seriously think you have to sit down and teach kids about something before they can read and understand a story about it?” you are showing how little you understand about the intellectual deficits of the “have nots” and just why it is so important for schools to teach as much of this missing knowledge as possible. Remember, the reading comprehension problems are rarely found in the affluent suburbs for a reason.
I do not understand the debate over which comes first: knowledge or reading. People can gain knowledge by reading, but also, some books are unreadable without enough knowledge (content, language, however you want to call it).
Now, if you wanted to discuss motivation to read and motivation to learn (such as, “gain knowledge”), that I’d understand because the methods to motivate these are as varied as teachers and kids.
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I think dienne’s point if carried to its logical conclusion would be to expose them to as many enriching experiences as possible through music, art, dance, drama,…as well as through direct instruction in content. This is a both/and situation rather than an either/or.
Rage – I think you’re misunderstanding. I agree with what you’re saying, but what you’re talking about is experience. The thing is, Ponderosa has repeatedly advocated for direct instruction as “knowledge” – kids have to be directly taught things before they can understand them, which is exactly backward. The only way kids understand the things they’re directly taught is if they have some prior experience to build on. You can’t teach a kid algebra without years of scaffolding with basic math skills, which themselves are built on the experience of playing, counting, sorting, etc. that young children typically do before they even get to school. The reason children of poverty are at such a disadvantage isn’t that no one ever sat them down and directly taught them things, it’s that – as you say – they have so little direct experience of such things.
“which themselves are built on the experience of playing, counting, sorting, etc. that young children typically do before they even get to school. ”
I insert here that math teachers need to continue providing similar experiences all through K-12. Math is a dry subject without constantly pointing out that its concepts and methods come from our surroundings, activities. IMO, ongoing motivation in teaching math is at least as important as the formulas and methods.
Dienne, I distinctly remember my lawyer father directly instructing me about income taxes and marginal tax rates as he drove me and my brother to middle school. My parents, a nurse and a lawyer, were didactic, as are most well-educated parents. I had no personal direct experience with income taxes. But the topic somehow came up in conversation, my dad explained, and I learned. Having this concept in my head, I’m sure, has enabled me to better understand certain texts. My parents’ talk, TV, movies, travel, etc. gave me a huge starter kit of background knowledge and I entered school as a relatively advanced reader. From this point on I could glean new words from some books (though War and Peace would have been Greek to me), but I continued to build up my vocabulary from verbal exchanges with adults, many of them pointedly didactic. My beloved middle school teachers were lecturers. Mrs. S, the science teacher, taught me “osmosis” despite have no prior direct experience with or curiosity about osmosis. Your assertion that didactic instruction does not work without prior experience with the topic at hand does not hold water.
This week I lectured to my students about the pogroms against Jews that started in the Crusades. Most of my students have never been to Europe; many know no Jews; and none have ever experienced a pogrom, and yet they were riveted and they understood. And they learned, incidentally, the word “pogrom”, “persecute”, “secular”, “blood libel”, “infidel” and many other new words in the course of this lesson. Should students now encounter a text that includes any of these words, they will not stumble (though there could be other stumbling blocks that stymie comprehension). Comprehending a text requires recognizing about 94% of the words; knowing fewer than that causes comprehension breaks down. I cannot read Spanish easily because there are too many unfamiliar words, not because I lack experience with the topics therein. My experience with Spanish texts is the experience many English-speaking kids have when confronting certain English texts: there are too many unfamiliar words. Lecture, like the one I gave this week, is one of the more efficient ways to teach new words and thereby build reading comprehension ability. Is it the only way? Of course not. But it’s better than constructivism and other minimally guided methods, as this paper very clearly proves:
Click to access kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf
Teachers must replicate what well-educated parents do for their kids –that is, they must use words to explain the world to them so they can understand the world and the texts that discuss the world.
“as this paper very clearly proves:”
This paper of proof says
These results suggest
that expert problem solvers derive their skill by drawing
on the extensive experience stored in their long-term memory
and then quickly select and apply the best procedures for solving
problems
Besides that “suggestion” is not considered proof in any science, how is it then that many of the greatest discoveries in science (ie., when the greatest problems solved) are not made by mature experts whose “long term memory” is full of “experiences” but twentysomethings who are just learning the ropes of their fields? (I remark that I made my first mathematical discovery when I was a freshman though previously, while in K-12, I had trained almost 8 hours a day as a competitive swimmer, so I think my long term memory had had more water than anything else in it).
Note also the reference to “quick recollection” and chess in the paper which may suggest that the kind of problem-solving the authors consider are what happens when kids take a timed test. (But we don’t know for sure what they do, because they don’t say as precisely as science would dictate)
The paper says
Learning, in turn, is defined as a change in
long-term memory
Is this what learning is, so mechanical, so simply definable? Doesn’t it matter how and why these changes happen? For example, the only mathematical information I can consistently recall from my 5 year, 300 credit hour college math (mostly direct) instruction are those that I discovered myself (sometimes with guidance), hence their entry into my long term memory was accompanied with great satisfaction. And why ignore sensory memory, as the authors of the paper explicitly do? Doesn’t a big splash in a chemistry lab make me remember not to pour water onto acid better than any direct instructional grave warning? Doesn’t the caring attitude of a teacher (as Lakoff states), have a crucial effect on how well I learn something?
Btw, I appreciated your description of your personal experience with lecture style learning and in no way I am criticizing your teaching style. In my case, I mostly grew up with my mother who has always been a woman of very few words but lots of action, so my background is full of direct personal experiences during varied and colorful activities.
So I guess our childhood backgrounds could also explain our preferences in teaching styles.
A few years back 8th graders were taking the NYS (Pearson) ELA test. I was reading one of the passages and came across the word, “chateau” and thought to myself, there are 8th graders in Chappaqua, Scarsdale, and Great Neck (among other affluent school districts) where students instantly understood the word because their parents own one or they have rented one. Now think of the far less privileged kids who couldn’t even pronounce “chateau” much less had any clue as to what it was. The only chance that the less fortunate students have to make up some of the enormous knowledge gap is through an enriched and varied curriculum, where direct instruction is the most reliable and efficient method for playing catch up.
There is no one path that will teach reading. Phonics or whole word reading are not on opposing sides of the argument as knowing one supports the other. Most young children learn to read through logo reading, which is whole word reading. That is how they can read their name on coat racks or a sign on McDonald’s. English is about 84% percent “regular,” which means there is a sound system that must be used in order to become a efficient, fluent reader. Phonics is part of the mechanics of reading, but it is a means to an end, which is understanding and thinking.
Reading is often a challenge for poor students as they often lack exposure to rich language and access to print. These students are also missing exposure to many of the experiences that middle class students have had when they enter school. In addition, poverty is an overarching stress in their lives. Many of these students are delayed in both the mechanics and comprehension of reading material as a result.
THIS!!! Yes. Yes. Yes.
with the caveat mentioned below
Kids have to have experiences early on that teach them that reading is great good fun–a LOT of these. And most need some phonics instruction because there is no dedicated internal mechanism for intuiting sound-symbol correspondences (though there are generalized innate pattern-recognition abilities). This is what “Balanced” reading instruction means.
The one thing I would quibble with is the notion that most kids learn to read using a whole-word method or that a whole-word method is ideal for most reading instruction. I suspect that you didn’t mean that. Memorizing a lot of logograms is a difficult, slow, time-consuming business, as anyone familiar with Japanese or Chinese can tell you. The total number of Kanji in Japanese is about 50,000, but an entire sequence of primary and secondary school is officially expected to teach people only 2,136. Word-by-word learning isn’t ideal.
From working with many poor students, particularly ELLs, I saw that few of them knew about rhyming, which middle class students understand by age two and half to three. Reading poems and rhymes to students during shared reading can help students overcome this difficulty. ELLs also benefit from games involving minimal pairs in order to train them to hear the difference. I have to add this should only take about five minutes at a time, not a whole boring lesson. Every reading lesson, IMO, must include actual reading and writing as they reinforce each other. The goal is fluency and understanding.
I do wish, retired teacher, that our policy makers would spend a LOT more time listening to experienced teachers like you and a LOT LESS time listening to Ed Deformers!
Learning rhyming songs and poems is also valuable for teaching syntactic structures, as I mention in that essay I linked to above.
very reading lesson, IMO, must include actual reading and writing as they reinforce each other. Yes. Well said!!!
What Bob said. I will not pretend to have any insight in this other than personal experience, but I’ve always believed that the key to loving reading is access to books and quiet time with no distractions. Not sure it that’s scientific, but it worked for me.
Reading is not incremental; it is exponential and dependent on multiple avenues in one’s brain. Discrete teaching of skills must be interwoven with meaning. There is no panacea, just time on the task of developing background knowledge, using it to decode based on generalizations about sound, spelling, and grammar. Gradually you get it.
I am reminded of a friend who spoke no English when he arrived in Union City, New Jersey. He recalls three years of seemingly not understanding and then one day everything coming together and making sense.
I am also reminded of a gentleman who talked about teaching himself to read. Highly motivated he put the puzzle of reading together by figuring out what the newspaper reported. And how about the fortunate slaves who reported learning to read through the grace of a benefactor leading them through the Good Book.
A colleague tried that, only with Dickens. Reading test scores improved by two years.
So much of what you write resonates with me, WCT.
I didn’t speak a word of English on my first day of school in an American kindergarten. By the middle of 2nd grade I was promoted to the “accelerated” English reading group. And by that time I was in my third school in my third state. My education was an example of exponential learning (I like that term).
“Not sure it that’s scientific,”
Neither it has to be scientific.
Outstanding conversation! Can I sum up, hopefully without oversimplifying? Practice makes better. More reading is better than less reading. Therefore, any Common Core or other pseudoscientific instruction method that teaches how to read instead of guiding reading for the joy of it is the antithesis of solid practice. Read meaningful literature, not instruction manuals and office memos. We reading, English, and literature teachers are guides, not scientists. One more time, to sum up, Bill Gates and the data mongers are out of their league and out of line.
“Every generation complains that young kids are not learning to read.”
Strange, if every generation of young kids never learned to read, why is the publishing industry in the United States so huge.
Every year I’ve read the results of that industries sales from magazines, to paper books and ebooks and sales blip a little one way or the other but are always impressive.
“The latest figures show that there were 7,176 magazines in circulation in the United States in 2017. In the modern age, magazines are now available in printed or electronic formats. As of 2018, the printed magazine industry remained popular with consumers.”
https://www.statista.com/statistics/238589/number-of-magazines-in-the-united-states/
“The statistic shows unit sales of printed books in the United States from 2004 to 2018. In the last presented year, 695 million printed books were sold in the U.S., up from 687 in 2017.”
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+many+paper+books+were+sold+in+the+United+STates+in+2017
It’s been estimated that there are more than 60 million avid readers in the US.
“Estimated number of avid book readers—those who read five or more hours per week—ages 18 years or older in the United States, or about 28 percent of the 18-plus U.S. population. Avid readers purchase 10-plus books per year; 63 percent of them are women.”
Source: “2010 Survey of Book-Buying Behavior With Verso Digital,” presented at American Booksellers Association Day of Education at BookExpo America, May 2010
And what about publishing industry revenues — can’t make money if all those young people don’t learn how to read when they are growing up? I mean if all those children and teens didn’t learn to read, that industry wouldn’t be making any money. How could they?
“The latest net revenue numbers for the U.S. book publishing industry are out: The industry earned an estimated $26.23 billion from 2.72 billion units (includes every type of book, paper, e-books, audio books) during 2017, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).Jul 22, 2018”
2.72 billion units!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/07/22/estimated-u-s-book-publisher-revenue-was-north-of-26-billion-in-2017/#768474e63196
Amazing isn’t it how so many of those kids that were not learning how to read when attending K-12 public schools miraculously became readers as adults who keep supporting America’s publishing industyr.
How did that happen — magic maybe?
Secondary school age: Magazines on topics of interest, i.e., Sports Illustrated, if sports are of interest.
Elementary/Middle: Kids Discover subscription.
National Geographic (pictures are handy).
As a reading teacher, it was devastating to have a child who didn’t want to read. Diagnosed ADD and later as BiPolar, perhaps it was his mental state.
He voluntarily read On he Color Line and a biography of Jack Kervorkian. Sensation may have been the commonality with his personality.
My middle school male students always chose books on scientific subjects. There are great books containing lots of pictures and short texts that my students would actually take the time to read. Seems less arduous to them but could lead them to other texts as they develop interest.
Roam a book store once you know their interests.
My post was meant for Lauren.
Why do we continue to conveniently ignore children on the dyslexia spectrum?
“The “science of reading”
Don’t they mean the “Art of reading”? Probably not, because you cannot put numbers on progress in Art, you cannot talk about “efficiency” in Art, you cannot sponsor fake research about “proven best practices in Art”, and you certainly cannot put together a “Core Material on Art Every 21st Century Citizen Must Learn to Compete Successfully in the Economy”.
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Mr. Wierdl, please report to the Ministry of Love for reprograming. (And if anyone wants to have a fight with me about whether there should be two m’s in programing, have at it.)
I’ll have at it. The root of program is the Latin programma. Programming. Programing is British English, which we know is inferior to Murican, our standard language. You’re probably one of those weirdos who writes judgement rather than the Murican correct judgment. So there! 💩 And if you want to get into a lift or stand in a queue, then get out of Murica! Murica foist!
If it’s a fight, I need to be part of it. In Hungarian, we write program with one m and the origin of the word, of course, is in Hungarian; its meaning in ancient Hungarian is program.
Since y’all have expressed such interest in Hungarian, let me also tell you that in Hungarian one m or two m’s do make a difference (we pronunce two m’s stronger and longer), unlike in Engglish/Murrican, where spelling, in general, has absolutely nothing to do with a word’s pronunciation.
Hmmmmmmmmmm. No coment.
The general spelling rule in English, when adding -ed or -ing to two two-syllable words ending with a consonant, is that the final consonant is doubled only when the second syllable is stressed (for example, you would double the final r in occurring or referring but not in harboring or signaling). In recent years, in deference to widespread violation of this rule, some dictionaries have started preferring “programming” to “programing.”
Bob, I put the Ministry of Love in google maps, and the voice tells me in a strange tone “Are you sure you want to go to miniluv?” and when I answer “No, I wanna go to the Ministry of Love”, the voice curtly says “Suit yourself” and GPS’ arrow suddenly turns backward. What does this mean? Spooky.
Therein, I suppose, you must minister unto yourself. LOL.
The subtitle of Diane Ravitch’s Blog is “A site to discuss better education for all.” It’s wonderful to read, on her site, these sometimes heated discussions of curricula and pedagogy. As many readers of this blog will know, Milton, in his great defense of unlicensed printing (and thus of free speech), wrote that
“Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
When there are vigorous debates about curricula and pedagogy, when teachers have the autonomy to follow competing models, when a practitioner or scholar can propose materials and approaches in print with some expectation that readers might adopt (and perhaps adapt) these, then innovation occurs, and we move forward.
In stark contrast to this is the Ed Deform model–one ring to rule them all.
One set of national “standards” that become the default, defacto curriculum,
one set of state tests that dictate what, finally, matters and what doesn’t,
one curriculum commissariat and Ministry of Truth convened by billionaire money to do the thinking for all the rest of us,
depersonalized educational software with an invariant approach and learning path, hyped as “personalized” because a pretest plops students down at different places on the path.
I’ve worked as an English teacher and as an ELA textbook writer and editor all my life. Never have I seen the sort of horror of standardization and regimentation that has occurred since the adoption of the high-stakes testing regimen and the Common [sic] Core [sic]–which is being used in almost all states, though it has typically been given local names because of the widespread disdain for Master Gates’s and Lord Coleman’s puerile bullet list.
Every textbook or online curriculum project, these days, starts with a spreadsheet containing the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in one column and the places in the program where these are “taught” in the next column over. If a person on the development team dares to suggest that a concept, a bit of descriptive or procedural knowledge, or an approach be taken, in any part of a new project, today, that is not already on Lord Coleman’s bullet list, it is immediately shot down, however necessary or valuable it might be. End of discussion. There will be no innovation, no deviation from the script, until Master Gates reconvenes his Ministry of Truth to write the next-generation of standards for the rest of us to follow.
Go to the library. Check out some copies of The English Journal from the 1970s. There you will find hundreds of interesting, practical ideas for great lessons in English classes–practitioners of the art and science of instruction in English daring to think anew and for themselves. But this is not how things are supposed to work in the New Feudal Order. Any innovation is supposed to be dictated from on high.
What? The Ed Deformers cry! You are suggesting chaos. No. I am suggesting democracy. In place of the current top-down standards-and-testing accountability regime, instead of “One Ring to Rule Them All, we need
a. Bottom-up continuous improvement based on local (school-level) programs of peer collaboration and evaluation via something like Japanese-style Lesson Study (in which teachers are given the time in their schedules to meet, weekly, to go over, with their peers, what worked and didn’t the previous week and to plan for the upcoming week)
b. Instead of bullet lists of “standards,” broad, very general frameworks describing overall goals–frameworks that are general enough to allow for the degrees of freedom within which real pedagogical and curricular innovation can occur
c. A national forum for posting, by scholars and by teacher practitioners, of suggested, COMPETING curricular outlines, learning maps, lists of key descriptive and procedural knowledge in various areas of study, reviews and evaluations and studies of pedagogical approaches and curriculum materials, reading lists, vocabulary lists, public domain materials, check tests, model lessons illustrating the use of various approaches and materials, sample assessments, lesson and assessment templates, free diagnostic and formative tests, and blog threads for debate and discussion about these
By its own preferred measure, test scores, twenty years of Ed Deform has UTTERLY FAILED. It has brought about no statistically significant improvement in test scores, and it has not closed achievement gaps. Enough. It is incredibly stupid to look at a failed policy and say, “Well, what we need is more of that.”
Ed Deformers often ask, “What’s your alternative?” Well, I just outlined it. But they will HATE my suggestions. Why? Well, the Ed Deformers are billionaire masters of the New Feudal Order or paid minions of those masters. They like top-down control. They have a rage for standardization and regimentation. They think that everyone else should simply shut up and do as they are told.
But in a democracy, that’s not how we roll, is it?
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
Good stuff (is this metaphorical?) on that blog entry, except the misspelling of Ponderosa to Ponderisa at the end. 🙂
” It has brought about no statistically significant improvement in test scores, ”
I, of course, agree with you, Bob, on what you wrote except the above remark. Not that the opposite of the above is true, but because statistics is irrelevant, especially when it comes to describing the quality of education.
Wolfgang Pauli, one of the heroes of 20th-century physics (and who himself believed that science is inadequate to explain how scientists work and make discoveries) exclaimed when he heard such irrelevant claims “It’s not even wrong!”.
I think we better stay away from the framing of education by reformers as far as possible.
My comment has to be read in context. I was saying that Ed Deform has failed BY ITS OWN PREFERRED MEASURE. It has brought about no statistically significant increase in test scores. I did not mean to suggest that there was anything at all valid or reliable about those test scores. Particularly in ELA, but also, to a lesser degree, I think, in mathematics, the high-stakes tests we have been using for the past 20 years are utter scams.
“The students can’t read! The students can’t read!” shouted Chicken Licken.
“Which students?”, asked Ducky Lucky.
“It must be all of them”, answered Chicken Licken.
“How do you know that all student cannot read?, inquired Ducky Lucky
“Why I just looked at their test scores.”, said Chicken Little.
“You looked at all the test scores?” Ducky Lucky wondered aloud.
“Well of course not” said Chicken Little, “only the scores of the ELL and IEP students who have tests read to them, except of course their reading tests.”
Students are not widgets to be standardized. When Gates made his infamous remarks about how standardization would lead to innovation–just has having standard electric sockets led to innovation in electronic equipment–he was thinking of the revolution that he thought was going to occur when teachers were replaced by educational software keyed to a single set of national standards–products that could be sold “at scale”–that is, nationally, by, ofc, big companies like his that could afford to compete “at scale.” What kind of twisted logic does it take to make someone thing that regimentation and standardization will lead to innovation–to invention and variety? Well, it takes that authoritarian mindset–the same one that gave stack ranking to Microsoft. The national standards were about as successful as was Clippy the Microsoft paperclip.
STANDARDIZATION
Our 100,000 public schools
have NEVER
and will NEVER
have students with . . .
standardized intellects
standardized psyches
standardized talents
standardized abilities
standardized anatomies
standardized health histories
standardized experiences
standardized parents
standardized families
standardized home lives
standardized neighborhoods
standardized friends
standardized influences
standardized opportunities
standardized teachers
standardized curricula
standardized pedagogies
standardized motivations
standardized support systems
standardized goals and aspirations
Yet somehow,
the HOLY GRAIL of
the 21st century
education reform movement
was standardization.
Any doubt as to why
STANDARDS-BASED reform has
FAILED?
The more honest reformers really believe in the applicability of the scientific method in education. Science is searching for common traits, laws, which they can then use as widely as possible to predict what will happen in the future. The test of a scientific law is its repeatability.
In Art and in the stuff you put in your unstandardizability list, our purpose is to create or do something unique, so it’s the exact opposite of what science wants to accomplish. No parent wants a completely predictably behaved, acting, thinking child, hence they shouldn’t expect education to become one of the sciences.
Ahem…apparently educational schools are still teaching reading techniques that have been scientifically debunked for years. When confronted with evidence that their methods don’t work,graduates believe “that’s your science” and their methods are okey-dokey! Too bad so many kids can’t read:
https://thecriticalreader.com/unbalanced-literacy/
What do you mean by “educational schools”?
Read the article…
What article?
https://thecriticalreader.com/unbalanced-literacy/
It is an opinion piece, not scientific research, written by someone with an obvious bias. It is not a academic discussion of various theories and their strengths and weaknesses. I could stomach it if they stuck to a discussion of the value of its own preferences, but it goes on to attack its own caricature of other approaches/theories.
Well, I found it interesting and informative. But of course, I know nothing about how to teach reading, so I cannot tell how much of an attack of the blog entry is. My kids learned to read in English here in the US and they taught themselves to read in Hungarian as they followed along with my reading stories for them.
Different kids learn in different ways. Teachers need a variety of strategies.
Both my sons were readers before they started school. I read to them every night. They love reading and became voracious readers.
If nothing else, you have to wonder how so many people have managed to learn to read under the blatantly biased account given of reading instruction in general. The choice of words in describing “other” instructional methods and anecdotes chosen to support their outrage tainted the article beyond redemption for me. As a special education teacher phonics was an important part of reading instruction, but it was not emphasized over engaging the children in texts they wanted to read through a multitude of approaches. As a special ed teacher, I also had trouble understand how phonics was supposed to help those students whose eyes bounced all over the page skipping words and lines. I can’t imagine a special educator exclaiming that the student obviously needed a phonetic approach. No criticism of you, Máté, you have to be steeped in the reading wars narrative to understand.
I think what’s missing from the article and from much of these debates on education is the role of caring. Even for university students, whether the teacher cares about them learning the material is crucial—and George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist, emphasizes this point clearly.
It sure doesn’t hurt to you care about your students.
Abby’s blog: The second reason is that in taking on the gap between what balanced literacy is supposed to be vs. how it actually plays out, Hanford calls attention to major shortcomings in the way teachers are trained, and about how broad policy decisions get turned into actual curriculum.
The above apparently is a recurring theme in K-12 education.
It also raises serious questions about the default American tendency to turn pedagogy into a matter of individual preference, without consideration of vast differences in knowledge and preparation among teachers. It is one thing to train teachers well and then give them lots of autonomy in the classroom, but it is another issue altogether when teachers are trained poorly and then left to their own devices.
I am not sure that teachers get this much autonomy nowadays—see Common Core System Story.
The various players involved cannot even agree on what sort of evidence should be considered credible, or on who can be considered an authority, or on what constitutes proof of effectiveness.
True, except “proof” in this context I think is a strong word.
Being excited about learning is seen as equivalent to learning.
That’s an issue. But isn’t excitement at least necessary for learning? Isn’t excitement a better motivator than coercion (such as the possibility of a bad grade)?
As the cognitive scientist and reading specialist Marilyn Jager Adams has pointed out, much of education is essentially a con job that involves persuading students that they really do want to learn whatever it is you’re trying to teach them. This is a huge part of what makes teaching difficult!
True.
You know what’s interesting: partly you argue that learning necessarily involves discomfort, frustration, while advocates of direct instruction in math argue that the other teaching methods cause too much frustration in kids.
Personally, I think both excitement and discomfort are part of learning. What needs to be avoided at any cost is boredom (for the child!). Perhaps that’s what you are thinking when you advise turning drills into games.
The blog entry was an interesting reading. As you contrast your views on testing with Peter Green’s is a big argument in itself.
Thank you, Abby, for this link. Erica Metzger is a trenchant new voice in the education blogosphere. One tidbit that really struck me: as a tutor in a wealthy district, she sees how wealthy parents mask the defects of the Doing Without Learning/Common Core/NGSS curriculum by paying for high-priced tutoring in phonics and other subjects. She points out that the tutors never use the tactics prescribed by the education schools (e.g. Constructivism or whole language) because they simply don’t work! If a tutor wants results, she must do the kind of intensive direct instruction that education schools deride. A powerful indictment of the intellectually bankrupt/corrupt education orthodoxy in this country.
“E.D. Hirsch has written extensively about the romantic belief that learning should be “easy” and “natural,” a belief that has become one of the great guiding principles of contemporary American education. Not only is this belief often at odds with reality, but adherence to it is often expressed in a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the difference between how novices and experts engage in a particular skill.”
The conflation of how experts (scientists, historians, mathematicians, writers) engage in the practices of their professions with the best ways for novice learners to acquire foundational knowledge is the very root of promoting failed and debunked methodologies like discovery learning and problem-based learning. We are in the process of taking a generation of students and simply wasting their time while trying to fool them into thinking that behaving like expert professionals will somehow enable them to magically accrue the mountains of foundational knowledge they need to do so. The instance that this can work is an embarrassment to our profession.
” learning should be “easy” and “natural,” a belief that has become one of the great guiding principles of contemporary American education.
[…] The conflation of how experts (scientists, historians, mathematicians, writers) engage in the practices of their professions with the best ways for novice learners to acquire foundational knowledge is the very root of promoting failed and debunked methodologies like discovery learning and problem-based learning. ”
Are you saying scientists smile all the way while they are usually 99% unsuccessful in their work? The reports I read were criticizing the problem-based methods exactly because it creates too much frustration for kids.
Today’s Common Core-based education is difficult to describe as an easy joy ride for the kids or for the teachers. My daughter regularly slept 4 hours in high school, and my students at the university unanimously tell me that college is much less stressful for them than high school was.
So I am not sure what you guys are so upset about. Lack of direct instruction? At the university, I meet kids with an enormous amount of content in their heads but almost no inclination to do even the simplest exploration without a formula and a step by step recipe on how to use the formula.
If a teacher is more pleased seeing a frustrated kid than a happy one while learning some material, since that’s apparently the real sign of learning, fine. Just don’t bore the kids to death. As in theater, it shouldn’t matter for the actor if the audience cries when they are supposed to laugh or laugh when they are supposed to cry—as long as they don’t cough or snore. 🙂
I think you meant to type “insistence”.
I’m worried. Our schools are collectively squandering billions of hours of potential learning time with these fruitless, fake learning curricula. Our whole K-12 system is bordering on Trump U. level of fraud. Meanwhile China, Russia and India are educating their citizens rationally. They’re actually learning stuff. America is toast if this continues. (And please don’t come back at me with “But our universities are the envy of the world”. Please. 75% of the STEM graduate students come from abroad, and our humanities departments are often warrens of BS.) Let’s get smart, please.
Ponderosa, this is exactly what the reformers are saying. Hence they propose their magic bullet. Your magic bullet is direct instruction.
Part of the problem is we keep talking in extremes. Direct instruction vs. discovery learning. Phonics vs. whole language. I’m not sure what the antithesis of progressive is. There is no magic bullet or even magic combination although having a repertoire of instructional techniques that run the gamut seems the most promising to me. I am all for content knowledge and direct instruction, but you had better be able to use it. My son had a Chinese grad student under him who was having a terrible time formulating a research project. She had absolutely no practice in asking questions; she had a broad knowledge of subject matter but no idea how to generate research questions. It was very frustrating to my son that she could not see avenues for investigation until I explained to him why she was struggling. Then he was able to help her learn to think creatively. I could probably find some examples from the other end of the spectrum as well. For myself i know I needed a base of content before my mind could take fight. I was taught by direct instruction for most of the K-12 years, and it wasn’t until college and graduate school that I was actually encouraged to present my own thinking rather than just regurgitating what I had been taught. I could have used a little more encouragement in thinking for myself. I still have a vivid memory of giving a presentation on geology and the types of rock and how they were formed. I had an interest in the topic as an avid rockhound and chose to pursue it on my own. I remember the science teacher asking a question about the formation of lava tubes that I was able to explain without having directly researched the answer. I can still see her smile and how it made me feel. With my own special ed students it was very important that they get to play with the subject matter. Content knowledge was very important, but they needed the chance and the encouragement to make it their own.
I have no qualms with having kids use their knowledge. But, please, let’s give them some knowledge instead of the pseudo-education that’s currently on offer.
“Regurgitate” is extremely pejorative. If my Spanish teacher asks me to recite the days of the week in Spanish, am I regurgitating, or am I practicing so that I learn it by heart and simultaneously helping the teacher know where I do and do not need reteaching? “Regurgitate” is part of the Progressivists’ KGB-caliber disinformation campaign designed to discredit traditional education. They’ve succeeded, unfortunately.
My brother supervises Chinese chemistry PhDs. He finds them to be exemplary scientists, and prefers them to his American employees. I think it’s a myth that our chaotic, content-lite curriculum makes more creative thinkers than the content-packed Asian systems. Content is the font of creativity. We fool ourselves.
Regurgitate is strong; I probably should not have used it, but Spanish is a poor example to use. Practicing the vocabulary etc. that is being taught is hardly regurgitating unless your teacher had you recite back to them exactly what they said. We were encouraged to engage in conversation from early on. I still associate regurgitation with a particular poli sci professor in college who wasn’t interested in any opinion but his own. I never really resented it in K-12 and wouldn’t have used that terminology at the time. Direct instruction was the default system although not exclusively. We had to memorize a lot of stuff; there wasn’t a whole lot of flexibility in how we were taught, but that is not to say there weren’t classes I enjoyed. I had one history teacher in high school who wrote her lecture on the board word for word for us to copy. I liked history and she had really good lecture notes, so for some reason I did not find this task onerous.
Where did your brother’s Chinese PhDs get their degrees? I would be surprised if they were educated in exclusively Chinese universities although I would hope their universities are improving since they send so many of their students to schools in the West for advanced degrees.
You might try taking your own advice and cut out the inflammatory rhetoric. We all know you are opposed to progressivism and it “KGB-caliber disinformation campaign.” You have important points to make. It’s easier to hear when you don’t totally dismiss in such derogatory terms any opinion not totally in line with your own. I will try to do the same.
“Regurgitate is strong”
Not in math.
“My brother supervises Chinese chemistry PhDs. He finds them to be exemplary scientists, and prefers them to his American employees. I think it’s a myth that our chaotic, content-lite curriculum makes more creative thinkers than the content-packed Asian systems. Content is the font of creativity. We fool ourselves.”
If we are talking about scientists, and now I think we do, I pointed it out many times that many of the greatest discoveries in theoretical science were made by young researchers with a cursory knowledge of their own science. Old and wise Einstein did absolutely nothing in physics. Math is even more striking: some of the greatest were dead before they reached 30. Galois died at 21, Abel died at 27. Ramanujan reached the ripe age of 33, and was famous for knowing very little math, and the source of his creativity has puzzled even the most famous and seasoned mathematicians. There is a recent film about his life “The man who knew infinity.”
Nobody knows what is creativity, what is its “font”. Wolfgang Pauli, one of the greatest heroes of 20th century physics was convinced, his inspiration for discoveries couldn’t be described by science and turned to Jung. The Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff explains that creativity is best nurtured by art education. Let us finally listen to him for the entire forty minutes. After all, he is an actual, living cognitive scientist.
One thing is for sure (and you guys have pointed it out many times): the purpose of public science education is not about preparing kids for a career in science or engineering.
“Part of the problem is we keep talking in extremes.”
Which has been pointed out to no avail. The “scientific” paper we are shown to read does the same. It says “minimally guided instruction has been shown to be not effective hence we suggest direct instruction 24/7.”
A teacher has to be flexible, has to have a lot of tools in her arsenal to deal with the great variability of the individual kids and the variability of the day to day dynamics of a class. This is (should be) true even in college.
We are on the same page.
The Reformers are right to worry about competitiveness; I’ll grant them that. Sadly their “solution” –Common Core –is only making the problem worse. Deride it as a magic bullet if you wish, but direct instruction has proven value. Common Core and many other popular educational ideas do not.
You are right that Common Core is the antithesis of the “easy and natural” pedagogy that Hirsch is describing. In that sense it’s a departure from Progressivism. But it shares Progressivism’s aversion to fact learning/knowledge building. It pretends to teach skills through misery-inducing exercises. Unfortunately the rigor that the Reformers have wrought is fruitless. It is pain without gain. Not all suffering is productive. Not all doing results in learning. We assume where there’s pain there must be gain, but this is not so.
I am astounded that you have college freshmen whose heads are filled with content. Are you sure? I once talked to a University of Pennsylvania literature professor from South Africa who told me her students were adept at applying lit crit theories, but that they “knew nothing”. My other professor friends also deplore incoming students lack of knowledge base.
Please show me where Common Core is working. You’ve probably seen this, but I think it helps explain the math catastrophe I see unfolding in my district:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/math-showing-work/414924/
Kids are doing rigorous exercises ad nauseam, and yet they are barely learning. This is a national scandal.
“Please show me where Common Core is working.”
Why? When did I say, it works? It’s yet another system that forced teachers to test prep in math.
Lack of some math content, I can patch up; lack of confidence to think, I may be able to cure if the subject is willing to cooperate, but lack of enthusiasm is rarely treatable. The article you have linked to is a good description of how the CC system takes away enthusiasm: it asks the student to do what”s impossible for him: explain his work. Since this explanation has to be shown on tests as well, the teacher has no other choice, but make students memorize some explanation-looking procedures. In essence, what CC ends up doing, so that students don’t have to learn so many standard algorithms, is forcing kids to learn complicated explanations by heart, instead.
I think CC is correct in saying that less math content is enough, but it’s not correct in saying that this less content needs to be learned in depth. They should have just stayed with less content. I can easily point out material that is taught in middle and high school in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and of course in calculus, but which I never ever use, and I am a mathematician, and, more importantly, I seriously doubt, they should be part of some math culture people need to acquire to enrich their lives.
More often than not, less is more.
As a teacher, I have taught 1st-5th grades and it seems to me that there is a reading crisis. Students enter 5th grade without the basic phonics skills needed to put together a sentence. When I taught 1st grade, there was a program (many years ago) that taught students the basics of phonics and students used the skills that had been taught to read. The skills built upon each other and students were reading well by the end of 1st grade. Now with the Common Core standards, the focus is more on engaging students in literacy, but without the foundation of phonics and phonemic awareness.
Since I have been a teacher, the district has tried many different avenues of teaching. For the past few years, it was direct instruction. Now, we are teaching in Quad D learning so that students can become competitive in a global society. I understand the change is because we want to ensure that our students are critical thinkers, however how do we teach the foundational skills in literacy that are needed in order for the students to get to the Quad D moment?. Building a strong foundation is paramount in ensuring that the students not only know how to think, but know how to read, as well.
“Now, we are teaching in Quad D learning so that students can become competitive in a global society. ”
This sounds like a satirical comment, though I know, you are serious. What the heck is this Quad D thing?
We know from science that proficient readers attend to all the letters of a word. When students have difficulty in the older grades they usually guess. Why do we have programs teaching beginning readers to guess instead of decode? There is no science that says if we teach phonics kids won’t comprehend. Teaching decoding does not create word callers. There are zero studies that indicate that. There is no empirical research that says teaching students to guess based on context is beneficial. That is what poor readers do. It makes no sense to teach kids to do what poor readers do. It is a war. And it should be a war. We have children’s lives in our hands. Kids who don’t learn to read go to jail a large percentage of the time. So it should be a war. And science should win. Not big business.