Archives for category: Literacy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Tom Ultican: The “Science of Reading”=Profits & Propaganda

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2023 //
52

For almost two centuries, the debate about teaching reading has raged. Not every day, but in spurts. It started in Horace Mann’s day in the early 19th century, and periodically flared up again, as in the 1950s, when Rudolf Flesch wrote a national bestseller called Why Johnny Can’t Read, excoriating “look-say” books like the Dick & Jane series and calling for a revival of phonics.

In 1967, the literacy expert Jeanne Chall wrote the definitive book, called Learning How to Read: The Great Debate, which was supposed to end the debate. It didn’t. She recommended early phonics, followed by emphasis on engaging children’s literature. Chall warned against extremes, which would lead to extreme reactions. In the 1980s, the “whole language” movement swept the reading field, led by anti-phonics crusaders. A reaction set in, as Chall warned it would. No Child Left Behind mandated phonics instruction in 2002, based on the findings of the National Reading Panel.

I covered most of this contested ground in my 2000 book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform. My book came out before NCLB was passed, so it did not cover the post-1999 developments. Chall warned against going to extremes between the pro-phonics and anti-phonics ideologies. She said we had to avoid extremes, yet here we are again, with phonics now bearing the mantle of “the science of reading.”

I favor phonics, as Chall did, and agree with her that it should be taught early and as needed. Some children absolutely need it, some don’t. Nonetheless, I maintain that there is no “science of reading,” as there is no science of teaching any other subject. There is no “science” of teaching history or mathematics or writing. There are better and worse ways of teaching, but none is given the mantle of “science.” Calling something “science” is a way of saying “my approach is right and yours is wrong.”

Tom Ultican writes in this post about the cheerleaders and critics of “the science of reading.” He is especially critical of journalist Emily Hanford, who has been the loudest advocate of “the science of reading.”

He begins:

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. It more accurately should be called “How to Use Anecdotes to Sell Reading Products.” In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. From Jump Street, the establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort. The panel was given limited time for the study (18 months) which was a massive undertaking conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers. The NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains while ignoring 10 other important reading domains. In other words, they did not review everything and there was no new research. They simply searched for reading studies and averaged the results to give us “the science of reading.”

It has been said that “analysis is to meta-analysis as physics is to meta-physics.”

Ultican reviews the recent history, starting with the report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) at the beginning of this century. He describes it as the work of dedicated professionals that has been distorted. What he doesn’t know is that the panel was selected by Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He believed passionately in phonics, as did a majority of the NRP. After the election of 2000, Lyon was President George W. Bush’s top reading advisor. The NRP final report strongly recommended phonics, decoding, phonemic awareness, etc. Given the membership of the panel, this was not surprising.

One member of the NRP wrote a stinging dissent: elementary school principal Joanne Yatvin of Oregon, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Yatvin complained that the NRP was not balanced and that it did not contain a single elementary teacher of reading.

In 2003, Yatvin wrote in Education Week (cited above):

Out of the 15 people appointed, nine were reading researchers, two were university administrators with no background in reading research or practice, one was a teacher- educator, one a certified public accountant (and parent), one was a middle school teacher, and one an elementary principal (me). When one researcher resigned after the first panel meeting, the NICHD declined my request that he be replaced by an elementary-level teacher and left that position unfilled. As a result, the panel included no teacher of early reading instruction.

Moreover, the science faction of the panel could hardly be considered balanced. All were experimental scientists; all were adherents of the discrete-skills model of reading; and some of them had professional ties to the NICHD. With so many distinguished reading researchers available in the United States, it is difficult to understand why the NICHD could not find one or two involved in descriptive research or with a different philosophy of reading.

A balanced group that included classroom teachers of early reading would have produced a nuanced report. The NRP report became the basis for the $6 billion-dollar “Reading First” portion of No Child Left Behind. An evaluation of the program by the federal government found that more time was devoted to reading instruction because of the NRP recommendations, but there was no statistically significant improvement in students’ reading comprehension.

The death knell for Reading First, however, was not the evaluation of its results but charges that some of those responsible for the program had conflicts of interest and were steering lucrative contracts to corporations in which they had a financial stake. The Department of Education’s Inspector General substantiated these charges. Kenneth Goodman, a major figure in the whole-language movement, released an overview of the scandals in the Reading First program.

Be sure to read the critiques of “the science of reading” quoted by Ultican, especially those by Nancy Bailey and Paul Thomas. Today, even the New York Times and Education Week write uncritically about “the science of reading,” as if it were established fact, which it is not.

It seems we are doomed to repeat the history we don’t know.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Literacy

Mamie Krupsczak Allegretti: Why Do We Teach Students to Write?

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2023 //
69

After I posted about a computer program that can apparently write student essays better than most students, teacher Mamie Krupczak Allegretti posted the following response:

Writing is more than just setting words down on paper in a “good” essay. If we just want a well worded essay from a student by any means possible, then, sure, let the students use a computer to do it for them. But writing teaches one to sort out thoughts, expand ideas, analyze facts and ideas. Isn’t this what we want students to learn? Writing is also a vehicle for the spirit to come through a human being. It is an art. Many of the great writers have said they they do not consciously write, but their spirit or psyche uses them and writing as a vehicle to make itself known. So. If we want to lose a part of our humanity, we will allow computers to take over every function of a human being. And then where will we find our meaning as human beings?

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Technology

David Herman: What If a Machine Writes a Better Essay Than a Student?

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
187

David Herman is a high school teacher. He wrote an essay in The Atlantic that asks whether the English essay is obsolete, replaced by a computer that does it better. The machine may write a well-worded essay, but we should not forget the warning from MIT Professor Les Perelman, who has studied writing machines extensively. The computers don’t have any knowledge. They don’t know any history. They ignore factual errors. Here is one of his critiques of the SAT essay, titled “Mass-Market Writing Assessments as Bullshit.” Or there is this nonsensical essay that he wrote for a machine. Is ChatGPT superior to the SAT machine reader? I will ask Dr. Perelman.

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes date back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick.

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

Herman goes on, adding examples of essays that the writing machine produced.

What do you think?

Categories Creativity, Education Industry, Literacy

Why Reading Fiction Matters

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2022 //
49

As educators know, the Common Core standards emphasize the reading of informational text and downgrade the reading of fiction and poetry. The CC standards actually set percentages for how much time should be devoted to informational text vs. literature. In the elementary grades, the CC advises, instruction should be divided 50%-50% between literary sources and informational text. In grade 8, the CCSS recommended division is 45%/55%, diminishing literature. In grade 12, it should be 30%-70%, a huge reduction in reading literature. These percentages are based on the federal NAEP test guidelines for test developers; they were not intended to be guidance for teachers. In fact, as Tom Loveless showed, the Common Core affected teaching and curriculum by downgrading literature. In 2021, Loveless published a book about the failure of the CC.

In the past few weeks, I have seen some strong refutations of this downgrading of literature. Literature sharpens the mind and memory, teaching readers to be attentive to experiences, feelings, insights.

In July, the New York Times published an article about how to prevent cognitive decline. It was a summary of a book by a noted neurologist. It offered several key findings based on brain research. One was: read more novels.

Hope Reese wrote:

As we age, our memory declines. This is an ingrained assumption for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health, decline is not inevitable.

The author of more than 20 books on the mind, Dr. Restak has decades’ worth of experience in guiding patients with memory problems. “The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind,” Dr. Restak’s latest book, includes tools such as mental exercises, sleep habits and diet that can help boost memory…

One early indicator of memory issues, according to Dr. Restak, is giving up on fiction. “People, when they begin to have memory difficulties, tend to switch to reading nonfiction,” he said.

Over his decades of treating patients, Dr. Restak has noticed that fiction requires active engagement with the text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end. “You have to remember what the character did on Page 3 by the time you get to Page 11,” he said.

A few days ago, an article by Washington Post technology columnist Molly Roberts opined that the failure to read novels was a serious error by Sam Bankman-Fried, whose crypto-currency businesses collapsed in November, evaporating billions of dollars in real currency.

The problem with SBF, she wrote, was that he doesn’t read books. He only reads quick, informational summaries.

She wrote:

Amid all the bombshell revelations about fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, a seemingly trivial bit of information might tell us everything we need to know: He doesn’t read books.

If you’re anticipating a caveat or qualifier, you’re as out of luck as the FTX investors whose money SBF allegedly lost. “I’m addicted to reading,” a journalist said to the erstwhile multibillionaire in a recently resurfaced interview. “Oh, yeah?” SBF replied. “I would never read a book.”

Now, there are plenty of people who don’t read. This does not indicate that they are likely to end up accused of having robbed thousands of others of their fortunes in a speculative adventure that is part financial experiment, part Ponzi scheme. Some prefer to listen; some prefer to do something else altogether. The thing is, the reason counts.

Behold, then, SBF’s reason: “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. … If you wrote a book, you f—ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Now, this is paragraph five of this column, so we’re running short on worthwhile words. But this means-to-an-end worldview might be the key to understanding SBF’s character, and his career. The point for SBF, it seems, isn’t the book itself but what he takes away from it — the instrumental knowledge that, presumably, he can gather more efficiently from a SparkNotes version of any opus than from the work itself.

Part of the problem might be an unspoken focus on nonfiction versus fiction, and maybe highly technical nonfiction in particular. After all, it’s easier to argue that you can learn everything you really need to know about the history of securities regulation from a cleverly constructed issue brief than it is to insist that if someone tells you Elizabeth Bennet ends up marrying Mr. Darcy, you’ve absorbed the sum total of “Pride and Prejudice.”

But no matter the type of book he’s talking about, what SBF is missing is the experience. You’re supposed to read not in spite of the digressions and diversions that stand between you and the denouement, but because of them; the little things aren’t extraneous but essential. And what you come out of a book with isn’t always supposed to be instrumental at all, at least not in any practical sense. You read to read; you don’t read to have read.

Editor’s note: the words in the Times article in bold print were emphasized by me. In the Washington Post article, the bold words appear in the original.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literacy, Literature

David C. Berliner on Censorship

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2022 //
15

David C. Berliner is one of the most honored researchers in the field of education.

He sent the following reflections on censorship. His thoughts reflect my views about censorship and abortion. If you are opposed to certain books, don’t read them. If you oppose abortion, don’t have one. Don’t impose your views on others.

Dr. Berliner wrote:


I was asked some time ago to write about censorship for the Horace Mann League. My explorations of the topic led me first to a personal statement:

“It is the right of people to not listen to, and not read, anything they find offensive. But this right is limited: it does not give them the right to limit what others choose to hear or read. It gives concerned citizens absolutely no right to forbid anyone else to listen to or read what they choose.

The only exception to this statement is with one’s own children. Parents do have both a right, and an obligation, to react to what their children are listening to and reading.

But that right and obligation is limited to their own children—not mine! I will make such decisions for myself. And I happen to trust school teachers, and librarians, to act for me, to act in “locus parentis.”

And I hope that every librarian and teacher is thoughtful enough to remember that merely avoiding certain discussions is itself a form of censorship!”

David C. Berliner

Some of the thoughts of others that I thought worth thinking about follow:

“The real heroes [in our society] are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.”
― Bruce Coville

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”
― Clare Luce Booth

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
― Mark Twain

[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”
― Judy Blume

“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, “Fuck the government.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession

“[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]”
― John F. Kennedy

I

“Only the nonreader fears books. ”
― Richard Peck

“Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.”
― Eugene Gladstone O’Neill

“If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.”
[Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]”
― Stephen King

“When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…”
― Christopher Hitchens,

“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series

“Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.”
― Holbrook Jackson

“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.”
― Judy Blume

“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
― Henry Steele Commager

“Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.”
― Suzy Kassem

“I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don’t believe in forbidden knowledge.”
― Andrea Cremer

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Librarians, Literacy

Jan Resseger: Why Ohio Must End the Failed Policy of 3rd Grade Retention

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2022 //
46

The ever wise Jan Resseger points out that the Ohio House overwhelmingly voted 82-10 to end the policy of holding back third graders who don’t score proficient on the state reading test. Now, she hopes that the State Senate will complete the elimination of this disastrous experiment. The idea that children will become better readers if they are failed is nonsense. Years of experience and research shows that failure leads to negative consequences, causing a loss of confidence, a sense of failure and higher dropout rates in later years.

She writes:

Ohio’s Third Grade Guarantee, enacted by the legislature in 2012 and implemented beginning in the 2013-2014 school year, requires that students who do not score “proficient” on the state’s third grade reading test must be retained for another year in third grade. Brown reports that,”Ohio has retained around 3,628 students per year.”

Jeb Bush and his ExcelInEd Foundation have been dogged promoters of the Third Grade Guarantee, but last May, the Columbus Dispatch’s Anna Staver traced Ohio’s enthusiasm for the Third Grade Guarantee to the Annie E. Casey Foundation: “In 2010, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released a bombshell special report called ‘Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters.’ Students, it said, who don’t catch up by fourth grade are significantly more likely to stay behind, drop out and find themselves tangled in the criminal justice system. ‘The bottom line is that if we don’t get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty… And the price will be paid not only by the individual children and families but by the entire country.’”

But it turns out that promoters of the Third-Grade Guarantee ignored other research showing that when students are held back—in any grade—they are more likely later to drop out of school before they graduate from high school. In 2004, writing for the Civil Rights Project, Lisa Abrams and Walt Haney reported: “Half a decade of research indicates that retaining or holding back students in grade bears little to no academic benefit and contributes to future academic failure by significantly increasing the likelihood that retained students will drop out of high school.” (Gary Orfield, ed., Dropouts in America, pp. 181-182)

Why does holding children back make them more likely to drop out later? In their book, 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, David Berliner and Gene Glass explain the research of Kaoru Yamamoto on the emotional impact on children of being held back: “Retention simply does not solve the quite real problems that have been identified by teachers looking for a solution to a child’s immaturity or learning problems…Only two events were more distressing to them: the death of a parent and going blind.” Berliner and Glass continue: “Researchers have estimated that students who have repeated a grade once are 20-30% more likely to drop out of school than students of equal ability who were promoted along with their age mates. There is almost a 100% chance that students retained twice will drop out before completing high school.” (50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, pp. 9-97)

In a recent report examining the impact of Third-Grade Guarantee legislation across the states, Furman University’s Paul Thomas explainsthat short term gains in reading scores after students are held back are likely to fade out in subsequent years as students move into the upper elementary and middle school years. But, Thomas quotes the National Council of Teachers of English on how the lingering emotional scars from “flunking a grade” linger: “Grade retention, the practice of holding students back to repeat a grade, does more harm than good:

  • “retaining students who have not met proficiency levels with the intent of repeating instruction is punitive, socially inappropriate, and educationally ineffective;
  • “basing retention on high-stakes tests will disproportionately and negatively impact children of color, impoverished children, English Language Learners, and special needs students; and
  • “retaining students is strongly correlated with behavior problems and increased drop-out rates.”

Here is what Thomas recommends instead: “States must absolutely respond to valid concerns about reading achievement by parents and other advocates; however, the historical and current policies and reforms have continued to fail students and not to achieve goals of higher and earlier reading proficiency by students, especially the most vulnerable students who struggle to read.” Specifically, Thomas urges policymakers to eliminate: “high-stakes policies (retention) around a single grade (3rd) and create a more nuanced monitoring process around a range of grades (3rd-5th) based on a diverse body of evidence (testing, teacher assessments, parental input)…. Remove punitive policies that label students and create policies that empower teachers and parents to provide instruction and support based on individual student needs.”

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Ohio

PEN America: The Growing Movement to Ban Books

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2022 //
5

PEN America is an organization that represents authors and defends freedom of expression, here and elsewhere in the world. I am proud to be a member. I support their belief in the freedom to write and the freedom to read.

PEN has closely followed the recent upsurge in book banning and has kept a list of books that have been attacked and removed from school libraries and public libraries. The American Library Association also maintains a list of banned books and highlights the books most frequently banned. The ALA lists the 10 most challenged books and the 100 most challenged books.

The overwhelming number of banned books deal with race and gender. The censors apparently think that no one will learn about race or gender if no books are available.

They forget about the Internet and television, which they can’t censor.

The only book, to my knowledge, that has been specifically banned by state legislation, is The 1619 Project. That’s a shame because it is enormously informative about the history of racism.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Literacy, Racism

Bob Shepherd: What You Need to Know About Reading Instruction

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
38

Bob Shepherd, the brilliant polymath and man of many interests and talents, has had a long and distinguished career in educational publishing. He has developed assessments, written textbooks, and ended his career as a classroom teacher in Florida. I defer to his superior knowledge on almost every subject.

Pour yourself another cup of coffee and sit back for a long read about literacy and how it is acquired.

He wrote about the flaws in the teaching of reading in an essay that begins with these words:

An Essay Touching upon a Few of the Many Reasons Why the Current Standards-and-Testing Approach Doesn’t Work in ELA

NB: For all children, but especially for the one for whom learning to read is going to be difficult, early learning must be a safe and joyful experience. Many of our students, in this land in which nearly a third live in dire poverty, come to school not ready, physically or emotionally or linguistically, for the experience. They have spent their short lives hungry or abused. They lack proper eyeglasses. They have had caretakers who didn’t take care because they were constantly teetering on one precipice or another, often as a result of our profoundly inequitable economic system. Many have almost never had an actual conversation with an adult. They are barely articulate in the spoken language and thus not ready to comprehend written language, which is merely a means for encoding a spoken one. They haven’t been read to. They haven’t put on skits for Mom and Dad and the Grandparents. They don’t have a bookcase in their room, if they have a room, brimming with Goodnight, Moon; A Snowy Day; Red Fish, Blue Fish; Thomas the Tank Engine; The Illustrated Mother Goose; and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. They haven’t learned to associate physical books with joy and closeness to people who love them. In the ambient linguistic environment in which they reached school age, they have heard millions fewer total numbers of words and tens of thousands fewer unique lexemes than have kids from more privileged homes, and they have been exposed to much less sophisticated syntax. Some, when they have been spoken to at all by adults, have been spoken to mostly in imperatives. Such children desperately need compensatory environments in which spoken interactions and reading are rich, rewarding, joyful experiences. If a child is going to learn to read with comprehension, he or she must be ready to do so, physically, emotionally, and linguistically (having become reasonably articulate in a spoken language). Learning to read will be difficult for many kids, easy for others. And often the difficulty will have nothing to do with brain wiring and everything to do with the experiences that the child has had in his or her short life. In this, as well as in brain wiring, kids differ, as invariant “standards” do not. They need one-on-one conversations with adults who care about them. They need exposure to libraries and classroom libraries filled with enticing books. Kids need to be read to. They need story time. They need jump-rope rhymes and nursery rhymes and songs and jingles. They need social interaction using spoken language. They need books that are their possessions, objects of their own. They need to memorize and enact. And so on. They need fun with language generally and with reading in particular. They need the experiences that many never got. And so, the mechanics of learning to read should be only a small part of the whole of a reading “program.” However, this essay will deal only with the mechanics part. That, itself, is a lot bigger topic than is it is generally recognized to be.

Permit me to start with an analogy. As a hobby, I make and repair guitars. This is exacting work, requiring precise measurement. If the top (or soundboard) of a guitar is half a millimeter too thin, the wood can easily crack along the grain. If the top is half a millimeter too thick, the guitar will not properly resonate.  For a classical guitar soundboard made of Engelmann spruce (the usual material), the ideal thickness is between 1.5 and 2 mm, depending on the width of the woodgrain. However, experienced luthiers typically dome their soundboards, adding thickness (about half a millimeter) around the edges, at the joins, and in the area just around the soundhole (to accommodate an inset, decorative rosette and to compensate for the weakness introduced by cutting the hole).

To measure an object this precisely, one needs good measuring equipment. To measure around the soundhole, one might use a device like this, a Starrett micrometer that sells for about $450:

It probably goes without saying that one doesn’t use an expensive, precision tool like this for a purpose for which it was not designed. You could use it to hammer in frets, but you wouldn’t want to, obviously. It wouldn’t do the job properly, and you might end up destroying both the work and the tool.

But that’s just what many Reading teachers and English teachers are now doing when they teach “strategies for reading comprehension.” They are applying astonishingly sophisticated tools—the minds of their students—in ways that they were not designed to work, and in the process, they are doing significant damage. Leaving aside for another essay the issues of physical and emotional preparedness, to understand why the default method for teaching reading comprehension now being implemented in our elementary and middle-school classrooms fails to work for many students, one has to understand how the internal mechanism for language is designed to operate.

Categories Education Reform, Language, Literacy

Nancy Bailey: The Science of Reading and Corporate Contacts

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
55

Nancy Bailey is a veteran teacher who always has wise insights into what happens in the classroom. In this post, she questions the corporate interest in the so-called science of reading.

She begins:

Many of the same individuals who favor charter schools, private schools, and online instruction, including corporate reformers, use the so-called Science of Reading (SoR) to make public school teachers look like they’ve failed at teaching reading.

Politicians and corporations have had a past and current influence on reading instruction to privatize public schools with online programs. This has been going on for years, so why aren’t reading scores soaring? The SoR involves primarily online programs, but it’s often unclear whether they work.

The Corporate Connection to the SoR

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation fund numerous nonprofits to end public education. The National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ), backed by Gates and other corporations, an astroturf organization, promotes the SoR.

SoR promoters ignore the failure of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), embedded in most online programs, like iReady and Amplify. CCSS, influenced by the Gates Foundation, has been around for years.

Also, despite its documented failure ($335 million), the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching, a past reform initiative (See VAMboozled!), irreparably harmed the teaching profession, casting doubt on teachers’ ability.

EdReports, another Gates-funded group, promotes their favored programs, but why trust what they say about reading instruction? They’ve failed at their past education endeavors.

But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continues to reinvent itself and funds many nonprofits that promote their agenda, including the SoR.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Literacy

Texas Requires K-3 Teachers to Take a 60-120 Hour Reading Course at Their Own Expense or Leave

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2022 //
38

Texas has a teacher shortage, but that doesn’t stop the state from piling new requirements on teachers.

Brian Lopez of The Texas Tribune reports:

It was one thing to ask Texas teachers — during an ongoing teacher’s shortage — to make extra room in their busy home routines for online classroom teaching for months, then to monitor the latest in vaccine and mask mandates while waiting and adjusting yet again for a return to the classroom.

But now, as teachers attempt to restore all the learning lost by their students during the pandemic, the Texas Legislature has insisted those who teach grades K-3 need to jump another hurdle: they need to complete a 60-to-120 hour course on reading, known as Reading Academies, if they want to keep their jobs in 2023.

And they must do it on their own time, unpaid.

For many like 38-year-old Christina Guerra, a special education teacher in the Rio Grande Valley, the course requirement is the final straw and it is sending teachers like her and others out the door.

“I don’t want to do it,” she said. “I refuse to, and if they fire me, they fire me.”

Course adds to teacher workload

In 2019, the Legislature wanted to improve student reading scores and came up with a requirement that teachers complete this reading skills course. Every teacher working in early elementary grades — kindergarten through third — along with principals, had until the end of the 2022-23 school year to complete it.

Governor Greg Abbott is not satisfied with the performance of Texas students on NAEP. But Texas has a growing crisis of teacher shortages.

But the pressures of the pandemic have forced many teachers to reconsider whether to remain in the profession. From 2010 to 2019, the number of teachers certified in Texas fell by about 20%, according to a University of Houston report.

After recent reports of more teacher departures, Gov. Greg Abbott formed a task force to address teacher shortages.

But teachers and public education advocates alike believe the state should hold itself accountable for the teacher departures, especially when adding requirements that add to teacher workload.

“I just feel like a lemon just squeezing, squeezing, squeezing,” said Guerra, a special education teacher in La Joya Independent School District. “But there’s no more, there’s nothing that you squeeze out anymore. There’s no more juice.”

Guerra plans to leave the profession at the end of the school year.

One way to increase the teacher shortage is to crack down on teachers, demanding more while paying less.

Categories Education Industry, Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »