June 04, 2007
Linguistics: Words in Code
The speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages have genetic differencesFIVE years ago three well-known academics, including Noam Chomsky, wrote that the half-century old “interdisciplinary marriage” between biology and linguistics “has not yet been fully consummated.” That same year other scientists described the molecular evolution of a gene called FOXP2 which, when mutated, seems to cause people severe difficulty with grammar and articulation.
Another genetic condition that could shed light on the biology of linguistics is microcephaly (sometimes rudely called “pin-headedness”). It is linked to six genes, a spanner in the works of any of which leads the human brain to grow to only two-thirds of a pint in adults. That is less than a third of its normal volume. Those genes are alluring objects for studying the evolution of language because brain size has ballooned in people since their line split with that of their closest relatives. Even though birds sing and bees dance, nothing in nature matches a human's richly complicated system of vocal communication. In short, language makes humans unique and genes active in the developing brain make language possible.
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May 24, 2007
School District Abandons Both Rhyme and Reason in Language Programs
As budget cuts extract another ton of flesh from Madison’s public school students, classroom teachers reel from the aftershocks. Keeping a smooth, consistent curriculum takes a lot from an educator, yet as our well-trained teachers meet tough demands, we witness a loss of both rhyme and reason at both the school and the district level. Nowhere do the wounds from budget cuts show more clearly than in foreign language education. If you think Junior should learn a second language, you might consider relocating once you learn the facts.Vie the Daily Page.A child’s chance of learning the language of their choice depends heavily upon where they live within the district. In the fall of 2007, high school students at West, LaFollette, and Memorial will be able to choose from five non-English languages; kids at East get two. The German program, recently axed at East, leaves Spanish and French as the only options, stranding several students like Daniel Schott who’d devoted his time and energy to learning German. Daniel’s choice of German will carry with him through college where his opportunity to earn back credit for high school work diminishes—unless he’s willing to travel to LaFollette daily, an option that will disrupt his daily schedule beyond reason.
Imagine your child taking a novel language, say Italian, as a middle schooler. Students at Spring Harbor and Wright Middle Schools have that option. Unfortunately, the high schools to which Spring Harbor and Wright feed do not offer Italian, creating an academic dead-end for those without the resources to move to the LaFollette area. Even then, the Italian program there may disappear given the recent exodus of the Italian teacher for greener soccer pitches.
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May 23, 2007
Moving California's English Learner's to English Proficiency
Joanne Jacobs [3.7MB PDF]:
Only 9.6 percent of English Learners (ELs) in California public schools were redesignated to Fluent English Proficient status during the 2005-06 school year. According to one state education department study, only one-third of those who start in kindergarten are reclassified by fifth grade. This prompted state Superintendent Jack O’Connell to instruct school districts to reexamine their reclassification policies and procedures.Via the Lexington Institute.Reclassification rates vary significantly from one school district to the next. School districts discussed range from Riverside’s Alvord Unified, where 1 percent of ELs were reclassified as proficient last year, to Glendale Unified, where 19.7 percent of ELs were reclassified.
Some school districts set higher bars for reclassification than others, requiring higher scores on state tests, writing or math proficiency and passing grades. However, some districts with high requirements also have high reclassification rates because of effective instruction, close monitoring of students' progress and a higher percentage of ELs from middle-class and Asian families.
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May 15, 2007
Milwaukee Chinese School Starting In Fall
The Milwaukee school district is opening a Chinese school this fall.It will join at least a dozen Chinese programs in Wisconsin.
About 130 students have signed up so far to attend the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language, also part of a growing number of schools offering Chinese language classes nationwide.It will teach four-year-old kindergarten through fifth grade the Mandarin language, symbols and culture for 30 to 45 minutes a day, along with traditional curriculum in English.
James Sayavong, who started the Milwaukee school, said that he expects nearly 200 students to enroll by fall.
So far, the school's students are mostly from the surrounding neighborhood, which is generally black and low income. He said he wants this type of education to be available for everyone.
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May 06, 2007
Similar English Learner Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?
How elementary schools focus their time and energies, and what resources they have for doing it, can make a powerful difference in the academic achievement of English Learner students from low-income backgrounds, according to findings from this new analysis of data.
This new extended analysis was based upon extensive survey data from 4,700 K-5 classroom teachers (80% or more at each school) and all principals in 237 California elementary schools from 137 different school districts across the state. These schools were initially randomly selected from 550 schools in California’s 25-35% School Characteristics Index band. All schools from this band have high levels of student poverty and low parent education levels; for this analysis we further narrowed our original sample to eliminate any school that didn’t have enough English Learner students to have an EL Academic Performance Index score.The research team analyzed the school practices covered by the teacher and principal surveys to see which most highly correlated with California’s new school level English Learner Academic Performance Index. In addition, the team analyzed the same practices against percent proficient on the California Standards Tests to see if the results were similar. Finally, the team ran an additional analysis to see if the results were similar for only schools in our sample with English Learner student populations that were 80% or more Spanish speakers. The results for all three analyses were essentially the same: there are four interrelated broad school practices – backed up by numerous examples of specific actionable practices – that most strongly differentiate the lower from the higher performing elementary schools with regard to English Learner API. These four practices are the same, although in a slightly different order of significance, as the team had found in October 2005 for the school-wide API.
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April 20, 2007
Nonfiction Liberation
In the 1970s, when Ms. Magazine came out, there was a great story about three (heterosexual) couples who got together for dinner: a lawyer, a chemist, a teacher, a lawyer, a manager, and a lawyer, and one of the lawyers looked around the room and said: "This will be great, we're all lawyers!" (the men were lawyers).
In a similar way, I feel that history books just get completely overlooked in schools. People who talk about writing in the schools, talk about fiction, and people who talk about reading (in the schools) talk as if nonfiction just did not exist. It does not seem to find a place in their thoughts. Literature Rules! (good and bad)...
I know that, in the early days of women's liberation (1970s version), men would sometimes catch themselves, and say, "or she," and the like, but it was a real struggle. Now in schools there may be people who mention nonfiction in the same way, but history and other nonfiction have not really moved into the mainstream. There is a glass ceiling for nonfiction so thick, that people standing on it, as a floor, do not even see nonfiction down there waiting its turn.
The Nonfiction Liberation Movement should challenge that Hegemonic monopoly and at least teach educators that to mention writing, without mentioning academic expository writing (term papers), and to talk of reading, without mentioning history, is to be politically incorrect!
Then perhaps the downtrodden brothers and sisters in the History Departments will dare to assert themselves and say, boldly, to the astonishment of their peers, "I am going to assign a complete history book this semester!" and "I am going to assign a serious Extended Research Essay this semester!" A cadre of new Nonfiction Freedom Riders will arise, and our kids will no longer be sent off to college and into the world never having read a complete history book or written one serious nonfiction term paper.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics? [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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April 17, 2007
Americans Believe Writing Skills Are More Important Than Ever
While 98 percent of Americans believe that good writing skills are very important to succeed in today's economy, roughly half believe the quality of students' writing skills has declined over the past 20 years, a report released by the Berkeley, Calif.-based National Writing Project says.Via EdWeek.Two-thirds of the people surveyed wanted more resources earmarked for writing instruction, and almost three-fourths thought writing should be taught to students in every subject at every grade level. Seventy-four percent of respondents thought good writing skills were important regardless of what career students pursue. The study surveyed a representative sample of 1,501 adults in the United States.
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April 15, 2007
Advice for students: How to unstuff a sentence
Student-writers often believe that the secret of good writing is a reliance upon bigger and “better” words. Thus the haphazard thesaurus use that I wrote about last month. Another danger for student-writers involves the assumption that good writing is a matter of stuffy, ponderous sentences. Stuffy sentences might be explained by the need to make a required word-count, but I see such sentences even in writing assignments of only modest length. Most often, I think, these sentences originate in the mistaken idea that stuffiness is the mark of serious, mature writing.A writer can begin to unstuff a sentence by looking closely at each of its elements and asking if it is needed. Here is an extreme example:
To begin, it is important to note that the theme of regret is an important theme in “The Road Not Taken,” which was written by Robert Frost, and that evidence for it can be found throughout the entire poem.“To begin”: Like “to conclude,” this phrase is an unnecessary, empty transition. If a point is coming early (or late) in an essay, trust that a reader can see that. Removing “To begin” involves no loss of meaning.
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March 25, 2007
"Cooking the Numbers" - Madison's Reading Program
From the Fayetteville, NC Observer:Joanne was in Milwaukee and Madison recently to discuss her book, "Our School".Superintendent Art Rainwater loves to discuss the Madison Metropolitan School District’s success in eliminating the racial achievement gap.Only then will Rainwater reveal the methods Madison used to level the academic playing field for minority students.But he won’t consult with educators from other communities until they are ready to confront the issue head on.
“I’m willing to talk,” Rainwater tells people seeking his advice, “when you are willing to stand up and admit the problem, to say our minority children do not perform as well as our white students.”
This is an odd statement. The racial achievement gap is accepted as an uncomfortable fact everywhere; it is much discussed. No superintendent in the U.S. — except for Rainwater — claims to have eliminated the gap.
Today, Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.I found a graph comparing Madison to five similar districts in Wisconsin, all of which do much better than Madison on fourth-grade reading.Impressive, but untrue, writes Right Wing Prof, who looked at Madison reading scores across all grades.
Related Links:
- Diana Jean Schemo's article: Madison's Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
- Jason Shephard: Reading Between the Lines: Madison Was Right to Reject Compromised Program
- Mark Seidenberg on Reading First
- Joanne Jacobs on Reading War II
- Third Grade Reading Scores by Ed Blume
- Mark Seidenberg's informal talk on reading education
- "There's something deeply wrong here" and here
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March 17, 2007
More on Madison's Reading First Rejection and Reading Recovery
Reading War II is still raging as reading experts attack a New York Times story on Madison’s decision to reject federal Reading First funds in order to continue a reading program that the Times claims is effective. Education News prints as-yet unpublished letters to the Times from Reid Lyons, Robert Sweet, Louisa Moats, Linnea Ehri and Joanna Williams, Timothy Shanahan and Mark Seidenberg. Professor Moats, formerly co-investigator of the NICHD Early Interventions Project, a five-year, federally funded study of reading instruction in high-poverty schools, points out that the Office of Management and Budget “recently gave the Reading First program its highest (and unusual) rating of effectiveness.”Joanne will be speaking in Milwaukee on March 23, 2007. More: Reading First and Reading Recovery.
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March 16, 2007
Reading Recovery: More chipping and shredding in Fargo!
What makes this article from Fargo interesting is how it almost exactly mirrors the findings in my home district, Hortonville, and the recent analysis of Reading Recovery done in Madison. That being, a 50% success rate for RR students. From the article:
"However, West Fargo student data over time, as presented by Director of Knowledge Management Holly Budzinski Monday night, show that while this is happening in the short term, it?s not something the students sustain in the long run. The Administration has been scrutinizing the Reading Recovery program since two days after Budzinski arrived in West Fargo last January, and she has found that the majority of students served by Reading Recovery gradually lose their abilities to meet the class average by the time they reach sixth grade."
This findings support claims by Chapman, et. al., in New Zealand, who discovered RR results wash out over time. More from the news article.
"For example, one of Budzinski?s several studies into elementary school student achievement in West Fargo showed that while 57 percent of students served by Reading Recovery were able to meet the grade level as measured by a Developmental Reading Assessment after the first grade, by the time they had reached sixth grade only 18 percent met the standards, as measured by the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) Assessment."
The costs are astounding:
"School District officials presented data Monday night showing that a $500,000 first-grade reading program does not serve its targeted student population, the lowest performers....That's $500,000 for 104 kids and a 57% success rate, or $4800 per kid. When you figure in the success rate, the number becomes $8421 per success. most which washes out in a few years.
There are 14 Reading Recovery teachers in the West Fargo School District, providing one-on-one instruction to a total of 105 students for 30-minute increments each day during a time period of between 16 and 20 weeks."
A 50% success rate in Hortonville could be a fluke. A 50% success rate in Madison should raise an eyebrow. A 50% or so success rate in Fargo, is, a clear trend.
----------
Complete Article:
District officials scrutinize reading program
Forrest Adams
West Fargo Pioneer - 03/13/2007
School District officials presented data Monday night showing that a $500,000 first-grade reading program does not serve its targeted student population, the lowest performers, as well as proponents of the program claim it does. They asked for the help of teachers involved in it, many of whom attended the School Board meeting, to help them find a better way to serve these students.
“What we’re really trying to do is talk about the rate at which every kid in this school system is growing,” District Superintendent Dr. Dana Diesel Wallace said. “It seems to be the program, not the people. We’ve got teachers doing really good jobs.”She said modifications to the early childhood literacy strategies in the School District do not mean teachers involved with the program in question, Reading Recovery, will lose their jobs, just that the District will possibly implement a more cost-effective solution to address the issue of reading instruction among the lower performin g students.
“We have teachers with wonderful training working in good schools; we have smart people who work really hard; I’d like for us to think more broadly about solutions,” she said. “Can we have a successful literacy program using the skills we have here? Yes we can. If we don’t address how kids read in earlier grades, some of the proficiency marks we’re shooting for in Goal 2011 will not be reached. This is for all of the students. There is room for growth in all students.”
There are 14 Reading Recovery teachers in the West Fargo School District, providing one-on-one instruction to a total of 105 students for 30-minute increments each day during a time period of between 16 and 20 weeks. Reading Recovery was developed in the 1970s by an educator in New Zealand and has been implemented in Australia, Canada, England, as well as the United States.
Advocates claim Reading Recovery is the best tool on the market because it helps the lowest performing c hildren learn to read and builds a foundation for them to attain the average level of their local class by the end of first grade through design and implementation of an individual program to meet each student’s needs.
However, West Fargo student data over time, as presented by Director of Knowledge Management Holly Budzinski Monday night, show that while this is happening in the short term, it’s not something the students sustain in the long run. The Administration has been scrutinizing the Reading Recovery program since two days after Budzinski arrived in West Fargo last January, and she has found that the majority of students served by Reading Recovery gradually lose their abilities to meet the class average by the time they reach sixth grade.
For example, one of Budzinski’s several studies into elementary school student achievement in West Fargo showed that while 57 percent of students served by Reading Recovery were able to meet the grade level as measure d by a Developmental Reading Assessment after the first grade, by the time they had reached sixth grade only 18 percent met the standards, as measured by the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) Assessment.
“The students are not able to sustain their gains,” Diesel Wallace said after the meeting. “Some [research] says [the program] works. Some says it doesn’t.”
Vickie Bouttiete, the District’s Reading Recovery Teacher Leader for the past eight years, says her data show the program works. She and Eastwood Elementary Reading Recovery teacher for the past eight years Peggy Sola will present it to Administration officials on Wednesday. There will also be a Reading Recovery presentation at the next School Board meeting in two weeks.
In an interview on Tuesday morning, Bouttiete said Reading Recovery is the best program available for intervention to help low-performing children learn to read. In her opinion, one-on-one instruction is vital.
“By getting to know each student one on one, we can figure out what they need. Reading Recovery is very complex. There are many different components in the program,” she said.
Bouttiete suggested the District enter into a research study comparing small-group reading instruction to one-on-one instruction.
“We know that first grade can’t be responsible for what happens in other grades. I think we need to sit down and come up with a reasonable plan. Eight years ago we had small-group teaching. It wasn’t working then,” she said. “When you deal with human beings, you can’t always think about members. There are other variables, like what support are they are receiving at home. You can’t control what happens outside of school. There’s a humanistic side that I think is very important and very significant.”
Since it was first implemented in the School District, costs for Reading Recovery have exceeded $2.5 million, and that’s not including materials and training, reported Bu dzinski. The School Board does not normally get involved in curriculum issues, unless, as President Duane Hanson said, there’s a price tag attached to them.
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March 15, 2007
Mark Seidenberg on the Reading First controversy
Via a reader email; Language Log:
Last Friday, the New York Times ran a story about how school administrators in Madison, Wisconsin, turned down $2M in federal Reading First funds rather than change their approach to the teaching of reading (Diana Jean Schemo, "In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash"). Considering the importance of the topic, it's remarkable how poorly (or misleadingly) reported this article was. The story's key claim:Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
One set of problems with the article is discussed by Ken DeRosa here. Apparently the Madison program "raised reading scores" only because the test scoring system was changed. Once apples are compared to apples, the test results show that "Madison's Balanced Literacy reading program [...] failed to increase student performance in Madison and actually caused a relative decline in the schools that were supposed to get Reading First funding."
Last night, Mark Seidenberg sent me a note in which he lays out some additional background, and identifies what he calls the "big lie" in Schemo's story:
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March 13, 2007
Q: Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test Changes
Does anyone have solid information about how and when the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test has been revised over the years?
One obvious question in comparing scores from 1998 to those in 2005 is how the tests were changed. [NYT Article on Madison's Reading Program]
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Saving Literature from English Departments
I am surprised that I am not a novelist. I am an inveterate liar, so I have at least one of the necessary skills. I love the novel as a form in as deep and devoted a way as any man loved any art, and writing novels is the only thing in the way of a life's work that I've ever really wanted to undertake. Still, I remain novel-less.I have Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson to blame for my early misdirected energies. They encouraged me to believe that the essence of writing was the wild life that preceded it, to believe that I was doing the better part, and the most important part, of novel-writing by imitating them not on the page, but in the bars and on the highways. I realize now this was an error in judgment.
So, too, was my decision to get a Ph.D. in literature as a step toward the nice cushy professorship that would allow me to lay back and watch myself write novel after novel, with perhaps a collection of stories here and there. The graduate work and academic gigs that followed meant that I had to teach and write a bunch of other things, those publish-or-perish scholarly books and the requisite pile of articles full of words like "overdetermination," "supplementarity," "hybridity," "imbrication" and "polyvocality," words that produced the squiggly red underlines of my spell-checker and earned me the enmity of the very novelists and poets I wanted to join.
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Elementary School Foreign Languages
That's about all the time she has if you add up all the 15-minute Spanish lessons she gives twice a week to kindergartners at Stormonth Elementary School.The other day, her instruction involved an animated session using stuffed toys for a lesson about the Spanish words for animals, as well as the movements and sounds they make.
"¿Cómo mueve la rana?" Harris asked the students, posing in Spanish the question: "How does the frog move?"
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March 12, 2007
Knowledge is Power Only if You Know How To Use It
In the 17th century, they note that reading know-how was such a known quantity that the colony of Massachusetts had a law requiring it to be taught in the home. But a century later, when Cotton Mather championed a new and effective smallpox inoculation in Boston, most of the physicians in town rejected the treatment because it was not supported by the accepted know-how of the time.Today the situation is reversed. “While almost every child vaccinated against measles is safe from the disease,” the professors write, “an alarming number of children who are ‘taught’ to read in school never really learn to read at a level necessary to perform well in today’s society.”
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March 08, 2007
Madison's Reading Battle Makes the NYT: In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
Diana Jean Schemo has been at this article for awhile:
The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.Much more on Reading First and Madison, here.According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
Notes & Links:
- UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg:
Whole Language was a massive, uncontrolled experiment, with millions of children as unwitting subjects.
How it's done: Someone gets an idea
- Often a Guru. Many Gurus in reading instruction.
- Guru has brilliant insight about how children learn, how to teach reading - Their own personal theory
- The idea may be personally promoted by the guru, with direct appeals to teachers
- The idea is implemented on a vast scale, based on intuitions that it is good.
- Ruth Robarts on Madison Schools' Reading Progress.
- Mark Seidenberg: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data.
In part one of his response, Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning provides a reading passage altered to force readers to guess the meaning from context. Struggling this way does not inspire love of reading.NYT Letters to the editor. Finally, others have raised questions about the MMSD's analysis and publication of test score data.In part two, DeRosa analyzes the statistics to argue Madison students aren’t doing better in reading compared to other Wisconsin students; if anything, they’ve slipped a bit. Because the state reading test was made easier and the cut score for proficiency was lowered, all Wisconsin students look better. However, there was no progress in fourth-grade reading on the federal NAEP test.
With help from Rory of Parentalcation, who’s great at finding data, Ken shows that claims of fantastic progress by black students are illusory. Their scores improved on the easier test at a slightly slower rate than white students. It looks like to me as though blacks nearly caught up in basic skills but remain far behind at the proficient and advanced level. Perhaps someone who knows more statistics than I do — lots of you do — can find flaws in Ken’s analysis.
Diana Schemo's NYT story on Reading First is not surprisingly sparking a lot of pushback and outraged emails, especially from the phonicshajeen. But, they have a point. There are problems with Reading First, but this may not be the best example of them at all...but, while you're there, don't miss the buried lede in graf eight...it's almost like Schemo got snowed by all sides at once on this one...
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March 07, 2007
Why Illinois Test Scores Went Up?: Changing the Test or Academic Improvements?
Via a reader looking at this issue: Stephanie Banchero, Darnell Little and Diane Rado:
Illinois elementary school pupils passed the newly revamped state achievement exams at record rates last year, but critics suggest it was more the result of changes to the tests than real progress by pupils.Kevin Carey criticized Wisconsin's "Statistical Manipulation of No Child Left Behind Standards". The Fordham Foundation and Amy Hetzner have also taken a look at this issue.
State and local educators attribute the improvement to smarter pupils and teachers' laser-like focus on the state learning standards—the detailed list of what pupils should know at each grade level. They also say that the more child-friendly exams, which included color and better graphics, helped pupils.But testing experts and critics suggest that the unprecedented growth is more likely the result of changes to the exams.
Most notably, the state dramatically lowered the passing bar on the 8th-grade math test. As a result—after hovering at about 50 percent for five years—the pass rate shot up to 78 percent last year.
While the number of test questions remained generally the same, the number that counted on pupil scores dropped significantly.
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March 06, 2007
18 Year Old Madison Resident Wins National Vocabulary Championship
Rich Cronin, the president and chief executive of GSN, said he was not just thrilled to watch the competition, he was euphoric. “One person will be the ‘American Idol’ of vocabulary,” he said. (In the end, after an afternoon with its share of technical difficulties and dashed hopes, the winner was Robert Marsland, 18, of Madison, Wis. He will receive $40,000 toward college tuition. The winners in the finals and in the earlier citywide competitions held nationwide divided more than $80,000 in tuition money. The Princeton Review, a tutoring and test preparation service, came up with the questions. )Susan Troller:Off camera, it took Joel Chiodi, GSN’s vice president for marketing, a moment to remember a word he had learned from listening to contestants around the country.
Madison's Robert Marsland, 18, took first place at the inaugural National Vocabulary Championship Monday in New York City, nabbing a trophy and a $40,000 scholarship prize. Last year, he nailed a perfect 36 on his ACT college entrance exam, and in 2003 he represented Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee.He is a student at the tiny St. Ambrose Academy on Madison's west side, where he studies both Greek and Latin.
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February 14, 2007
Differentiate This!
Friday afternoon is not an optimal time for academic focus, but when Keesia Hyzer peers over her glasses and commands three minutes of “think time,” the 21 students in English 10 at West High School get busy.“The only thing you’re thinking about right now is what you can get passionate about!” she proclaims as she snakes her way around aisles of desks.
Hyzer is teaching a new “core curriculum” class that puts the most-struggling students together with the highest-performing. It’s part of the Madison school district’s effort to reduce the achievement gap between racial minorities and whites.
The students are being asked to brainstorm topics for a semester-long research project. One by one, they stand and share their ideas, which Hyzer scribbles on the blackboard. Among the topics: Greek mythology, genocide in Sudan, prejudice against gays and lesbians. The students quiz each other on these ideas before breaking up into topic-based groups, listing on posters what they already know and what they want to learn.
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February 13, 2007
February 2007 Madison West High School Memo to Freshman Honors Parents
From a reader and parent. Full size. West High's website.
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February 04, 2007
Whole-language Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
Louisa Moats 324K PDF:
How to Tell When “Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction” Isn’t.Press Release.
In this practitioners’ guide, renowned reading expert Louisa Moats (author of the American Federation of Teachers’ Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science and an earlier Thomas B. Fordham Foundation report, Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced” Reading Instruction) explains how educators, parents, and concerned citizens can spot ineffective reading programs that surreptitiously hide under the “scientifically-based” banner.While the field of reading has made enormous strides in recent years—especially with the publication of the National Reading Panel’s landmark report and enactment of the federal Reading First program discredited and ineffectual practices continue in many schools. Although the term “whole language” is rarely used today, programs based on its premises, such as Reading Recovery, Four Blocks, Guided Reading, and especially “balanced literacy,” are as popular as ever. These approaches may pay lip service to reading science, but they fail to incorporate the content and instructional methods proven to work best with students learning to read. Some districts, such as Denver, openly shun research-based practices, while others, such as Chicago, fail to provide clear, consistent leadership for principals and teachers, who are left to reinvent reading instruction, school by school.
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February 02, 2007
Palo Alto School Board Rejects Classes in Mandarin
It would have seemed to be a perfect fit: an academically ambitious plan for an ambitiously academic city.Mandarin is offered at one Madison High School - Memorial.But after weeks of debate occasionally tinged with racial overtones, the Palo Alto Unified School District decided early Wednesday against a plan for Mandarin language immersion, citing practical concerns as well as whether the classes would give the small group of students in them an unfair advantage.
The proposal, which was voted down 3 to 2 after a marathon six-hour meeting of the district school board, would have established two classes taught mostly in Mandarin — the world’s most spoken language, used by nearly one billion Chinese — to 40 kindergarten and first-grade students at a local elementary school.
Grace Mah, a second-generation Chinese-American and the founder of Palo Alto Chinese Education, which lobbied for the program, said the vote was a major disappointment.
“I think there’s a number of people who are afraid of change,” said Ms. Mah, a 46-year-old computer engineer and a mother of two, including a third-grader in Palo Alto schools. “I think here’s a number of people who don’t believe in alternative education. And I think there’s a number of people who insist on equity, when in life, it just isn’t.”
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February 01, 2007
Why Johnny can't read very well and what to do about it
Juan/Sean/John doesn't read too well because we don't teach him how very well. Results from the 2005-'06 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations show that 55% of Milwaukee Public Schools 10th-graders do not read at a proficient level. The majority of our kids have reading problems.Leaders in the school district, in the Legislature and at the federal level need to take a stand and do something practical, like earmarking funds for literacy wherever literacy is a problem.
We need to go way beyond literacy coaches and in-content-area reading programs to try to solve this problem.
Reading should be made a department in every high school just as math, science and English are, and reading classes should become a part of every high school curriculum.
I'm not saying that we don't teach reading in the high schools. But, primarily, we teach reading to students who already can read. Those who can't, or who can't read well, struggle, and many fail. If they aren't designated special education or a special needs learner, these students disappear into the cracks of the system.
Typically, the struggling reader who has fallen behind somewhere in his education gets to high school and is expected to take the same English, history, science and math classes as the proficient reader.
The student in junior-year English who reads at a third-grade level but is studying the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson or "The Fall of the House of Usher" will drown in language he doesn't understand. The textbooks he has to read for history, science and math will be eight grades beyond his reading level.
hat student is primed for failure. While the content-area teacher can provide reading instruction, it is impossible to meet the needs of all the struggling readers and non-readers (reading at a second-grade level or lower) when one teacher teaches 30 students at a time.If a 9th- or 10th-grade student hasn't passed a proficiency test in reading, shouldn't learning to read be the core of his whole curriculum? What other subjects could this student do well in if he or she can't comprehend the course material? What does one do if one can't read? Without basic reading skills, a whole life can spin out of control.
The reason reading does not lie at the center of our schools is the same reason fighting poverty is not at the top of our government's list. Our priorities are out of whack: We are interested in profit; we invest in success, not in those on the brink of failure; and we want a measurable return on our dollar.
Federally, the billions of dollars spent for war and massive violence is mind-boggling at a time when there is not enough money for improving education.
The point is: Make reading and literacy the primary educational goal at the high school level. Then hire and train more people to do it, to study it, to carry it into the community through colleges and into the schools. Push teaching as a great career and attract talented young people.
Too many teenagers stand at the brink, where not much seems possible in life. We can make the possible a stronger likelihood.
We can push the study of literacy and reading at the high school level.
Refocus legislation from conceal and carry to reveal and carry books. At the federal level, spend money on tools of mass instruction. Inject reading into brains so we can help prevent drugs injected into veins.
The payoff will be innumerable, immeasurable dividends.
Thomas Biel of Milwaukee is a high school English teacher for the Milwaukee Public Schools. His e-mail address is tbiel@sbcglobal.net
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January 30, 2007
Grammar Girl
Mignon works hard to balance the needs of her business with the growing success of the Grammar Girl podcast. If more than a few days pass without a new Grammar Girl episode, it is almost certain that she has a deadline for a client's project. Never fear! She will return.Grammar Girl believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.
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January 29, 2007
Whole Language in Sheep's clothing
In a Fordham report, Whole-Language High Jinks, reading expert Louisa Moats warns that ineffective whole-language reading programs with names like “balanced literacy” are trying to grab funding intended for programs that have been proven far more effective. New York City, Denver and Salt Lake City have been misled by programs that are whole language in disguise, Moats writes. Warning signs include:
- Use of memorization and contextual guessing, instead of direct, systematic teaching for word recognition and actual comprehension;
- Rejection of explicit phonics, spelling, or grammar instruction;
- Application of the whole-language principles for English language learners.
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January 09, 2007
More Demand for Mandarin Classes
In Milwaukee, the School of Languages added Chinese as a partial immersion program this school year. The Marshall Montessori International Baccalaureate High School is starting to build a Mandarin program. When the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Languages opens in the fall, students as young as 4 will have at least a half-hour of Chinese-language instruction daily.The trend is as strong in urban public schools as it is in wealthier suburban and private ones, according to experts. The University School of Milwaukee in River Hills, one of the most elite and expensive private schools in the area, will offer Chinese next school year as part of a new global studies program at the school. Ten University School teachers will travel to China in summer in preparation. "I think we see China as the next emerging power, and there's an intense interest both among our students and our parents," said Roseann Lyons, the head of the upper school.
This year, the College Board unveiled its first Advanced Placement exam in Mandarin; AP exams are often considered in college admissions, and good scores can provide students with college credit. The College Board surveyed schools about their interest in the exam before its release, and the Chinese exam caught the interest of 10 times more schools than a new topic normally would, said Michael Levine, a vice president of the Asia Society, a non-profit organization that works to educate Americans about Asian cultures.
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December 28, 2006
ILLITERACY REINFORCES PRISONERS' CAPTIVITY
State prisons are crowded with inmates lacking a basic education -- Their dismal job prospects mean they're likely to land back behind bars.Gregory Davenport, a congenial 46-year-old in prison blues, shared with a visitor to the big state penitentiary here a common inmate's lament -- he left behind two well-educated daughters with whom he could not correspond because he could not read.
But Davenport, serving time for a burglary conviction, is one of the lucky ones. He has finally made progress in his long struggle with illiteracy, a breakthrough he described while holding one of the more sought-after prizes in California's overburdened corrections system -- a classroom seat. He had to wait a year to get into a class in a cramped trailer at the prison in Norco, the California Rehabilitation Center, but now he gets six hours a day of instruction and help with a learning disorder.
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December 16, 2006
Cardozo High School AP English Teacher Video
John Poole 5:21 video:
Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, is a national pioneer in introducing Advanced Placement courses to disadvantaged students. It has found ways to build student skills so that they can begin to get passing grades on the AP exams. One of its star AP teachers, Frazier O'Leary, taught the school's first AP class 10 years ago and, since then, has become a frequent speaker and adviser to school districts around the nation.Well worth watching.
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December 03, 2006
Growing Interest in Mandarin Courses
With its booming economy and aspirations to expand its global influence, China may have achieved a victory in American classrooms.San Francisco's Chinese-American International School.Take the private Chinese-American International School here, which runs from prekindergarten through eighth grade and offers instruction in all subjects — from math to music — half in Mandarin and half in English. The curriculum also includes Chinese history, culture and language studies, and in the 25 years since the school was founded, it has attracted mainly Asian-American children. But in the past few years, it has seen rapid growth in the enrollment of non-Asians.
For example, five years ago, the school was 57 percent Asian-American, but this year it is only 49 percent Asian-American, said Sharline Chiang, its spokeswoman, adding that more non-Asian-Americans have been applying in recent years. Andrew Corcoran, the head of the school, said that in the last three to four years, applications from white and Indian-American families have more than doubled, though he declined to give exact figures.
Ms. Chiang also said that this was the first year in which the prekindergarten class had more white children, 36 percent, than Asian-Americans, 32 percent.
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November 25, 2006
LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku
I come from Tehran and no, there are no camels where I come from. There are cars and honking taxis that pass women in black veils or short, colorful scarves that barely cover their heads. In this beautiful prison of banned dreams, there certainly isn't a statue of liberty; men and women liberate themselves with cafes, cigars, smuggled drugs and secret relationships. In America, I am a writer. I can imagine, dream, live, breathe as an Iranian, an American. I can add color to anything; if only I could paint the gray streets of Tehran with my words.
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November 24, 2006
Wisconsin Math, reading proficiency are much higher on state exams than on federal
Wisconsin students continue to fare far better on the state's standardized tests than they do on those given by the federal government, according to a new analysis that raises questions about what it means to be "proficient."More on the Fordham Foundation's report and EdTrust. Finally, WISTAX offers a free report on testing.About 70% to 85% of Wisconsin students were considered proficient or better on the state's reading and math tests for the 2005-'06 school year. Yet only 33% to 40% of the state's fourth- and eighth-graders scored at least proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in those subjects, according to the study by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
The state was one of 16 in the country that had a proficiency gap of 45 to 55 percentage points, the Taxpayers Alliance found. Several states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, had even larger differences between the percentage of students considered proficient by their states as opposed to the federal government.
"It just creates confusion," said Dale Knapp, research director for the Taxpayers Alliance. "We want a sense of what our students know, where they sort of stand. And we're really getting two different answers that are very different answers."
The blame doesn't necessarily fall on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction, which administers the tests annually.
"Math is the same in Madison as it is in Missouri as it is in Mumbai." - Michael Petrilli,
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a group that has raised the idea of national standards"What that ought to be is a big signal to the folks in Wisconsin that they really need to evaluate the rigor of their standards and their assessment." - Daria Hall, Education Trust
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November 14, 2006
Developing the China Connection Through Education Programs
Oregon Representative Dennis Richardson advocates substantially increasing the number of students studying mandarin [PDF]:
The U.S Department of Education in announcing its role in the National Security Language Initiative reported some statistics:Mandarin is offered at one Madison High School: Memorial. Oregon Business Plan.Although there is no existing report on Chinese language courses in Oregon, some Oregon schools are independently developing their own programs for their students to learn the Chinese language. Portland Public Schools has a Chinese immersion (half day Chinese, half day English) program at Woodstock elementary that started in 1997. In the Fall 2006 semester it doubled in size from one class per grade (25-30 students) to two classes (50-60 students). So far the double class is only kindergarten. One grade will be added each year as the students get older. Some of the students are now in middle school at Hosford Middle School. A high school component will be added at either Cleveland or Franklin High School. The Portland Public Schools may start another Chinese immersion program at another elementary school in the future.
- More than 200 million children in China are studying English, a compulsory subject for all Chinese primary school students. By comparison, only about 24,000 of approximately 54 million elementary and secondary school children in the United States are studying Chinese.
- According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, only 31% of American elementary schools (and 24% of public elementary schools) report teaching foreign languages, and 79% of those schools focus on giving introductory exposure to a language rather than achieving overall proficiency. Richardson/Porter Proposal 10/31/06 4
- Only 44% of American high school students are enrolled in foreign languages classes as reported by the 2002 Digest of Education Statistics. Of those students, 69% are enrolled in Spanish and 18% in French, with less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu
- Less than 8% of United States undergraduates take foreign language courses, and less than 2% study abroad in any given year. Foreign language degrees account for only about 1% of undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States.
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November 09, 2006
See a Good Idea. See it Run Into Trouble
In 1991, a New York State teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he announced his departure from public school teaching after 30 years. He was no longer willing to "hurt kids" in a broken system where political pressure snuffed out worthy efforts for change. By now, he wrote, "even reformers can't imagine school much different."Order "Let's Kill Dick and Jane: How the Open Court Publishing Company Fought the Culture of American Education. More on Paul Beston. Brett posted a few words on the article.Indeed, the first priority of education reformers is often not success but the preservation of methods with which they are already comfortable. As Harold Henderson writes in "Let's Kill Dick and Jane," the American educational establishment possesses "an uncanny ability to transform golden ideas for change -- from left, right, or center -- into a leaden sludge." Mr. Henderson, a longtime staff writer for the Chicago Reader, describes the fate of one textbook company -- Illinois-based Open Court -- as it tried to bring its share of golden ideas to a resistant school system.
The book's title refers to the basal readers that were once a mainstay in American schools: Dick and Jane, created by advocates of the "Look-Say" theory of reading instruction in which children were taught to memorize the appearance of words at the expense of phonetic understanding. The theory has since been discredited, at least in part by the publication in 1955 of Rudolf Flesch's best-selling "Why Johnny Can't Read," which urged a return to phonics instruction.
Blouke Carus and his wife, Marianne, Americans with strong German roots and a familiarity with the exacting standards of the German gymnasium, read Flesch's book and formed Open Court in 1962. Together with a small band of dedicated educational theorists and consultants, they created innovative materials with the goal of educating the American masses as rigorously as the elites of Europe. Providing both a history of this remarkable company and a withering portrait of the education culture, Mr. Henderson's book is more compelling than any lay reader could reasonably expect.
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November 05, 2006
Tougher reading program means low city grades
Parents of some Pittsburgh elementary school students will find an unwelcome surprise -- unusually low marks in reading -- when their children bring home report cards Nov. 17.Because the Pittsburgh Public Schools this fall introduced a standardized grading system and what it described as a more rigorous reading program, some students have seen their performance slip on classroom tests.
That will translate into lower grades on report cards than parents are accustomed to seeing, said Susan Sauer, curriculum supervisor for elementary reading, and Barbara Rudiak, executive director for 18 district elementary schools. Some parents already have noticed a drop in their children's test scores.
"This has created a certain amount of controversy with principals, parents and teachers," said Dr. Rudiak, who is project manager for the "Treasures" reading program, purchased from Macmillan/McGraw-Hill for about 13,250 students in kindergarten through grade five. The program is also used in elementary classrooms at the district's K-8 schools and accelerated learning academies.
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October 27, 2006
Project Follow Through
Have you ever heard of Project Follow Through? Most people haven't, despite the fact that it was the largest-scale and most expensive education study ever conducted, costing more than $1 billion and involving more than 20,000 children.Clusty search results.PFT was initiated by President Lyndon Johnson as part of his "war on poverty", and was designed to see how educators could sustain and build on the advances made by young children in Head Start programs. The program tested multiple approaches to reading instruction, and generated clear evidence as to the efficacy of some programs over others.
Sounds great, right? A large-scale, longitudinal research study that offered unambiguous and actionable results. So why doesn't anyone know about PFT - and why do we still have such a hard time teaching kids to read?
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October 24, 2006
Read 180: A Reading Boost for Older Children
Reading aloud embarrassed Vanessa Hernandez when she had to do it in a classroom full of students for whom words and pronunciation seemed to come easy.But after seeing her reading ability jump two grade levels in just over a month, and with only a computer judging how she pronounces words, Vanessa Hernandez said she is finally learning how reading can be fun.
"You feel so much confidence," the sixth-grader from Waukesha's Hadfield Elementary School said of the improvements she's made this year.
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October 23, 2006
Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback: SAT Helps Return Grammar to Class
Mike Greiner teaches grammar to high school sophomores in half-hour lessons, inserted between Shakespeare and Italian sonnets. He is an old-school grammarian, one of a defiant few in the Washington region who believe in spending large blocks of class time teaching how sentences are built.One of my high school English teachers was just like Greiner.For this he has earned the alliterative nickname "Grammar Greiner," along with a reputation as one of the tougher draws in the Westfield High School English department.
Or, as one student opined in a sonnet he wrote, "Mr. Greiner, I think you're torturing us."
Greiner, 43, teaches future Advanced Placement students at the Chantilly school. Left on their own to decide where to place a comma, "they'll get it right about half of the time," he said. "But half is an F."
Ten or 20 years ago, Greiner might have been ostracized for his views or at least counseled to keep them to himself. Grammar lessons vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. A generation of teachers and students learned grammar through the act of writing, not in isolated drills and diagrams.
Today, Greiner is encouraged, even sought out. Direct grammar instruction, long thought to do more harm than good, is welcome once more
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October 16, 2006
Significant errors and misconceptions - “Billions for an Inside Game on Reading" by the Washington Post
This letter and the enclosure are an appeal to you for help in alerting your readers to significant errors and misconceptions in an article printed in the Post on October 1, 2006 titled "Billions for an Inside Game on Reading" by Michael Grunwald.The MMSD's omission with respect to Reading First was to support the Superintendent's rejection of the $2M+ grant without a School Board discussion, particularly in light of the District's devotion to the expensive Reading Recovery program. 2M is material, even to an organization with an annual budget of $332M+. Much more on Reading First here and Bob Sweet [Interview].He asserted that Reading First grants were awarded to preferred reading programs, and that billions of dollars were misspent because the requirement in Reading First that reading programs be based on "scientifically based reading research" were ignored.
Below is a summary of the essential facts that document the errors and misconceptions that have damaged one of the most effective programs to teach vulnerable children to read. Attached to this letter is a detailed presentation that seeks to correct the record.
It is my hope that you will consider printing a clarification so that the public you serve will know the truth about Reading First.
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September 30, 2006
The End of Literacy
In a comment on my post Does Reading Really Matter?, bowerbird challenged me to name names on who's arguing the position that "the end of literacy is nigh, and that's OK".
Well William Crossman for one is practically exuberant about post-literacy:
By 2020, electronically-developed countries will be well on their way to becoming oral cultures... Reading, writing, spelling, alphabets, pictographic written languages, written grammar rules, and all other written notational systems will be rapidly exiting the scene
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September 27, 2006
Reading First Curriculum Review
Reading First, subject to a scathing economic/lobbying audit recently was also just reviewed in this report from the Center for Education Policy [Kathleen Kennedy Manzo] [Full Report 176K PDF]:
“Participating schools and districts have made many changes in reading curriculum, instruction, assessment, and scheduling,” the report by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy says. “Many districts have expanded Reading First instructional programs and assessment systems to non-Reading First schools.”Rotherham has more.Titled “Keeping Watch on Reading First,” the Sept. 20 report by the research and advocacy group is based on a 2005 survey of all 50 states and a nationally representative sample of some 300 school districts in the federal Title I program, as well as case studies of 38 of those districts and selected schools.
Some 1,700 districts and more than 5,600 schools receive grants under Reading First, which was authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act.
While hard data, such as test-score comparisons, are still not available, the survey results show that “with scientifically based research, strict requirements [for following research findings], and substantial funding, you can bring about results,” said CEP President Jack Jennings.
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September 25, 2006
Notes & Links on Reading First
Title I Monitor is all over it here. Quick reax: First, this is going to walk on the message the Secretary was hoping to get out next week in her big speech. Second, harder to argue that Jack Jennings is in the tank for Democrats now, here is his recent evaluation praising Reading First! Finally, politically, this could set the issue of good reading instruction back a good bit, and that's seriously a real shame.Joanne has more. Local notes & links.
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September 22, 2006
Audit Finds Education Department Missteps
A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.This audit confirms that Reading First is yet another example of rampant cronyism within President Bush's administration. MMSD was wise to stand up to federal blackmail by refusing to abandon its successful elementary reading program.The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.
Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found the effort is helping schools raise achievement.
US Education Secretary Margaret Spelling's statement. The complete Inspector General report [2.9MB PDF].
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September 04, 2006
Student Math & Writing Skills
I have a friend that teaches at MATC--she tells me that she is shocked at the lack of math and writing ability of the Madison high school students coming to MATC's two year technical programs. MATC is very important to Wisconsin's future. What is happening at the high school level that these students are not prepared properly? Anyone have any thoughts?
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August 27, 2006
Want to Write? Read
Elon Journalism Professor and Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Skube:
The schools are no different, even if their stake in creativity is more defensible. And so, in the middle schools and even elementary schools, students scribble away in journals, write skits and sketches, labor over sentences littered with misspelled words (this is called "creative spelling") and faulty grammar. The aim is not competency in the plain carpentry of prose but self-expression and creativity. It is the Little League of Art. Nothing wrong with self-expression. But it's worth asking when self-expression devolves into self-spelunking and the preening narcissism evident everywhere on the Internet.More on Skube.Parents know teenagers can rattle away with ease when instant messaging friends. But for many young people, the expedient baby talk of IM-ing and text-messaging becomes "real" English, as natural as conversation and often a preferred substitute.
Ask them to write straightforward English and you would think it was a second language, even for kids whose ancestors have been here generations. Sentence structure, punctuation, the parts of speech — they are almost completely unfamiliar with any of it. Wanting to sound as if they are someone they are not, college students invariably button their verbal collars, straighten their ties and turn out sentences stiff as starched shirts.
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August 25, 2006
Public Domain Audio Books
Ms. Shallenberg’s recordings of “The Secret Garden,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and other works are now available, free, to anyone with an Internet connection and basic audio software. She is part of a core group of volunteers who give their voices and spare time to LibriVox, a project that produces audiobooks of works in the public domain.“Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted,” Ms. Shallenberg said, adding that she was frustrated she couldn’t share those works. “The idea of creating audiobooks that other people could enjoy was exciting.”
LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to “The Wind in the Willows.” (In the United States, this generally means anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.
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August 20, 2006
Writing Off Reading
In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.Bill McCoy has more.A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.
"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.
At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.
"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"
I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)
As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between "then" and "than." Yet they got A's.
Exit exams have become almost a necessity because the GPA is not to be trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable than a high GPA -- more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more reflective of familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.
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August 13, 2006
Growing, Detrimental use of Powerpoint
I previously posted links to articles discussing the inappropriate use of Powerpoint - particularly in lower grades. I've been reading Thomas Rick's "Fiasco" . Ricks' mentions that Powerpoint was used to draft and communicate battle and reconstruction plans in Iraq:
[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."Yet, Powerpoint is widely used in schools. Garr Reynolds has more.
Some alternatives - outliners that help conceptualize a work prior to expressing it in words. Internet outliners are extraordinarly powerful:
Much more, here.Don Norman: In Defense of Powerpoint.
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August 09, 2006
Schools Try Elementary Approach To Teaching Foreign Languages
School systems across the Washington area are adding foreign language classes in elementary grades in response to a call from government and business leaders who say the country needs more bilingual speakers to stay competitive and even to fight terrorism.Educators say that the youngest brains have the greatest aptitude for absorbing language and that someone who is bilingual at a young age will have an easier time learning a third or fourth language later on. Compared with adults or even high school students, young children are better able to learn German with near-native pronunciation or mimic the subtle tones of Mandarin.
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August 02, 2006
Tasting Freedom’s Simple Joys in the Barnes & Noble
Nearly a decade ago, hanging out in a bookstore would have seemed so corny. Back then, Mr. Edwards was a high school dropout, known as Kat on the streets of Paterson, and Top Cat on his arrest record, the one that described his itinerary for the evening of Nov. 12, 1997. With a friend, a stolen car and several weapons, he robbed nine people within an hour. He wound up with a few dollars, some jewelry and, ultimately, a prison sentence of 9 years, 10 months and 4 days.All that time gave him a chance to reconsider the virtues of corniness. He had gotten his first dictionary in prison, from a friend serving 30 years for homicide. Mostly, Mr. Edwards took it to the law library, doing a felon’s version of homework. Only later, after he was transferred to a halfway house in Newark, had someone suggested to him that reading had purposes beyond filing an appeal.
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July 25, 2006
ED.Gov: New Report Shows Progress in Reading First Implementation and Changes in Reading Instruction
Children in Reading First classrooms receive significantly more reading instruction and schools participating in the program are much more likely to have a reading coach, according to the Reading First Implementation Evaluation: Interim Report, released today by the U.S. Department of Education. The report shows significant differences between what Reading First teachers report about their instructional practices and the responses of teachers in non-Reading First Title I schools, which are demographically similar to the Reading First schools.Reading First funds, subject to some controversy, were rejected by the Madison School District a few years ago. UW's Mark Seidenberg wrote a letter to Isthmus addressing reading last year (.doc file). More on Seidenberg."The goal of Reading First is to help teachers translate scientific insights into practical tools they can use in their classrooms," Secretary Spellings said. "The program is helping millions of children and providing teachers with high-quality, research-based support. As we push towards our ultimate goal of every child reading and doing math on grade level by 2014, Reading First is a valuable help to our efforts."
The report shows Reading First schools appear to be implementing the major elements of the program as intended by the No Child Left Behind legislation. Reading First respondents reported that they made substantial changes to their reading materials and that the instruction is more likely to be aligned with scientifically based reading research; they are more likely to have scheduled reading blocks and spend more time teaching reading; they are more likely to apply assessment results for instructional purposes, and they receive professional development focused on helping struggling readers more often than non-Reading First Title I schools in the evaluation.
Madison School Board Superintendent Art Rainwater wrote an email responding to a Wisconsin State Journal's Editorial.