I hadn’t read this comment when I wrote mine!

I was about to say exactly the same thing: STRATEGIES ARE BORING.

I would have had a VERY hard time as a kid spending a lot of time practicing STRATEGIES.

You are SO right!

“Ideas, events, people, places–these things are exciting and absorbing.”

YES!!!!

Right, and as I understand “the Mathew effect,” fluent readers, who amass new knowledge through reading, pull further and further ahead of the kids left behind practicing ’strategies.’

Kids can be taught to like reading and the more they like to read, the more they will read. And they will be able to get more out of what they read the more they are prepared to take on a wide variety of texts with a wide base of content knowledge.

You’re not going to pick the right reading intervention unless you have a pretty clear idea of the specific problem(s) students are having. Is it decoding? Is it vocabulary? Is it lack of background and context?

I think not spending the time to get more than a broad brush understanding of problems is one of the reasons for the faddishness of education. If the problem is “low reading performance” there are lots of different approaches that might work, and schools seem to try one after another. What’s actually needed is to break down the problem into it’s component pieces, and use a combination of approaches.

But its harder to develop a packaged curriculum for that…

Also remember the second space shuttle disaster which was partially attribued to our “Power Point culture.” Too many decision-makers just get briefed on the “bullet points” and don’t bother with the logic and the evidence. There’s an advantage, even for adults, to reading entire paragraphs, and reading for understanding.

It’s been said that all hitters in baseball look the same when they make contact. So, if we threw 90mph fastballs and major league curves at Little Leaguers, they’d all hit like Ted Williams. I remember Williams speech where he used that logic to explain how he had made such a great hitter out of Mike Epstein.

Yes, once students have the prerequisite knowldge and comprehension skills, high-challenge classrooms should look just like high-performing classrooms and move at a comparable rate. Sure, once we teach students how to be students, our disciplinary stats for high-poverty schools should look like the stats of low-poverty schools. But getting there from here is an art, as well as a challenge that requires far more scientific rigor.

But think of the illogic, that pervades education, that “best practices” in schools that are already effective should be used to turnaround ineffective schools.

Avoiding “Cargo Cult” science requires us to discuss the operative mechanisms of our policy proposals. NCLB-type accountability is based on the hypothesis that you can focus on narrow parts of the brains of students and educators, and that chop up knowledge and human systems unto measurable pieces. At minimum Core Knowledge argues that you must consider cognitive science. And by emphasizing, AND RESPECTING THE WHOLE OF HUMAN KNOWLDEGE, it opens people up to policies that embrace the whole of schools as social organizations.