Tag Archive for 'Literacy'

A Promising Start for Core Knowledge Early Literacy Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 23, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education News and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results.  As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it: 

The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy.  Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.

Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:

Kindergarten is just a start.  There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research.  Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card.   These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding.   But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades.   Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low.   Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.     

The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge.  “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”

More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.

New York Times Discovers Reader’s Workshop

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 29, 2009 in Education News. 2 Comments

When America’s paper of record discovers a “trend” that is literally decades old and presents it as cutting edge, it makes you wonder about the articles in the paper you don’t know anything about.  But there’s the New York Times, and a series on “The Future of Reading,” gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the spectacle of classroom teachers letting students choose their own books to read!

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.

No one seems to have mentioned to the Times that this is more or less standard practice, for good or for ill, and has been for a decade or more.  Here’s a dead giveaway: search “reading workshop” on Google and you get 241,000 hits.

May I suggest to the editors of the Times that they assign an investigative team to a few other ideas that are “catching on.”  I understand there’s a new sport that involves driving cars very quickly that a lot of people seem interested in called “NASCAR” or some such.   And although I haven’t seen it myself (I don’t own a TV, you see), I also keep hearing about this something called “reality TV” that’s apparently becoming quite popular.   You can even read about it on your computer over something called the Internets, or some such.   Have you heard of it?

Update:  “Progressive schools let kids pick their own books in the 1920s and 1930s. Now it is supposed to be a major innovation. Ha!” tweets Diane Ravitch, who is quoted in the piece.  The paper “applauds the death of any version of a common culture.”  Just desserts of the NY Times,” she adds.  “By encouraging the death of reading, they doom the NY Times.”

Whose Core Knowledge?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 11 Comments

The normally thoughtful and engaging Clay Burell swings and misses at E.D. Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed about reading tests, painting with an uncharacteristically broad brush.   Relying on the standard misperception of Hirsch and Core Knowledge as promoting ”the white male-privileged narrative of history,” Burell writes that such a curriculum is “unfair to those very disadvantaged students Hirsch claims will benefit from his model.”  This ignores the fact that the curriculum has had its greatest success with low-SES students.  Pay a visit to schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx; P.S. 124 in Queens; Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary; among others.  I don’t believe you’ll find much evidence of unfairness.

There are a couple of problems with Clay’s analysis of Hirsch’s piece.  First, the immediate benefit of teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum is not cultural (although no apologies need to be made for familiarizing students with the history and culture of their own country and the broader world) but structural.  Reading comprehension suffers in disadvantaged children exactly because they lack the background knowledge to make sense of what they read.  Indeed, Burell himself underscored the crucial role of content knowledge in creating strong readers in a post a few months ago praising Dan Willingham’s Teaching Content is Teaching Reading YouTube video.  Hirsch has been making the same argument for decades. 

Clay wants Hirsch’s essay to address critical thinking, but that wasn’t the point of the piece.  Hirsch’s singular service to education has been to attempt to define the broad body of background knowledge that speakers and writers assume their audience knows, and point out that literacy (as well as critical thinking and other so-called “21st Century” skills) depends on sharing it.  The curse of this contribution is that it is easy to dismiss it, as Alfie Kohn typically does (and I fear Burell does too) as “a bunch o’ facts” and “rote memorization” even though Hirsch has never even so much as hinted that kids should memorize lists of names and dates.  Clay wants the curriculum infused with critical thinking questions, but where is the disagreement?  There’s absolutely nothing in the Core Knowledge curriculum that suggests or implies it has come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets and must be taught, unquestioned, in a specific way.  Good teachers like Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator, have always–will always–infuse their teaching with thoughtful perspectives and critical thinking.  How does a set curriculum prevent them from doing so?  How does defining what to teach determine how to teach it?  The answer is simple: it doesn’t.  

He also takes issue with Hirsch’s criticism of reading strategy instruction.  Allowing for Clay’s personal experience, I think he underestimates the damage done to children by a heavy over-reliance on such instruction in the elementary grades.  In many disadvantaged schools, strategy instruction IS reading instruction, at the expense of science, history, art and music.   The result is a vicious circle where kids robotically search for the main idea or “question the author.”  But their lack of content knowledge prevents them from meaningfully answering the ”metacognitive” questions they are trained (speaking of rote memorization) to pose. 

We’re never going to get away from the rhetorical questions with which Burell challenges Core Knowledge (”Knowledge of what? From whose perspective? In whose interests?”) nor should we.  But it’s dispiriting that smart educators like Burell are chary about a specific curriculum out of some misperception of balance, fairness or perpective.  If you want students to be critical thinkers–and to his credit Burell clearly does–what better way than to give them the background knowledge they need to grapple with precisely the questions he suggests?

Clay is on more solid ground, I think when he suggests “If we can talk leaving high school content under the control of local teachers, not dictated by national content tests, then maybe  – high school teachers could fill in the silences left by the national(istic) 3-8 standards, teach race, gender, and class-based perspectives in history that almost surely wouldn’t be covered earlier.”   Not a bad idea, that.  If every kid comes to high school with a shared body of knowledge that is both strong and subtle, then those high school classes could be rich in critical thinking and challenging perspectives.  Without it, we’re frozen forever at the starting line, searching for some shared subject or common ground to engage with and argue about. 

Email me your address, Clay (Seriously).  I’ve got a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence with your name on it.  See what’s in it, and see how pedagogically prescriptive it’s not, and ask yourself which students would get the most out of your high school humanities class: those who walked in with a firm grasp of the content it describes?  Or those whose sense of history, science and the arts was left to chance?

The Obama Effect Sounds Good, However…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 30, 2009 in Education Leadership and Education Practice. 2 Comments

The “Obama Effect” sounds good in theory, but it’s going to take a lot more than inspiration to close the achievement gap, says Richard Whitmire.  Writing on U.S. News’ blog, the edublogger and president of the National Education Writers Association notes that he’d like nothing more than to jump on the Obama Effect bandwagon.

But as a veteran education reporter who spends a lot of time in classrooms, I see events that indicate the Obama education halo could tarnish early. And if that happens, the letdown will be a lot less fun than the buildup. Inspiration is great, but inspiration needs pathways to success. What I see developing for lower income and minority students are pathways closing up.

Whitmire lists some of the factors needed to make the Obama Effect more than a short-term, feel-good story: enhanced college access, dramatically improved high schools, higher teacher quality and way higher literacy rates.   “I want to apologize for being the picnic skunk. Really, I want to believe,” Whitmire concludes.  “In the real world, inspirations need well-lit pathways. And I’m just not seeing those pathways opening up for the Obama effect children. I wish I saw this differently, really I do.”

No apologies needed, Richard.  If it sounds too good to be true…

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 22, 2009 in Humor. 2 Comments

A government ministry in England has been called on the carpet for the “impenetrable language peppered with jargon” in its reports.  OK class, let’s use our reading strategies to make sense of this passage, shall we?

An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew and modernise further education establishments to create state of the art facilities.”

Turn and talk to your neighbor and see if you can find the main idea.  No?  Hmmm.  Let’s use context clues, then.  The agency that wrote the passage in question is the “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.” 

They’re responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults.

The Adult Literacy Paradox

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 28, 2008 in Education Theory and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

It’s a given that as a nation, millions of children struggle to attain a functional level of literacy, but Tom Sticht of EducationNews.org wants to know, where does the reading problem go when children grow up?  Overwhelmingly–but not always accurately–adults rate their own reading skills very highly.  When broken out by ethnic groups, Sticht notes, the ratings are

Whites: Very Well-77%, Well-21%, or Not Well/Not At All-3%.
Blacks: Very Well-67%, Well-27% and Not Well/Not At All-6%.
Hispanics: Very Well-46%, Well-22% and Not Well/Not At All-32%

Just because adults think they read well, however, doesn’t mean they do.  When the average proficiencies of whites and blacks on the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) prose scale were compared, Sticht notes, the average proficiency of whites who rated themselves as reading very well was 308, well above average.  Blacks rating themselves as reading very well scored 259, well below average.  What’s going on here?  Sticht has a theory:

Perhaps when children grow up and get out of the pre-K-12 world they adapt to the ambient literacy demands of a cultural niche that they find possible to occupy. They find jobs they can qualify for, they get information from sources they have access to and feel comfortable in using, and as they slip ever more firmly into their literacy niche, they feel more and more satisfaction with their literacy skills. Maybe this is why so many U.S. adults think they read Well or Very Well, despite their poor performance on literacy tests.

If they are using themselves as a standard, Sticht concludes ominously, many adults are not able to judge whether or not their children are learning to read well in school and fail to act accordingly.

“Days of Children Reading Books Are Numbered”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 9, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

The days of children reading traditional books are numbered, says the man in charge of a campaign to improve literacy in Britain’s schools.  Jonathan Douglas, the director of the National Literacy Trust says publishers must adapt titles for readers who spend more time on the internet if they want future generations to read.

Britain’s Independent points to new research that shows reading drops dramatically as children get older. “The typical eight-year-old reads nearly 16 books a year but, by the time they reach 15 or 16, this has dwindled to just over three books per year,” the paper notes. “The study, based on interviews with nearly 30,000 pupils aged seven to 16, also shows a growing trend towards reading comics, magazines, newspapers and online articles, and playing computer games, after the first year at secondary school.”

What this means, says Douglas, is that publishers must “reinvent the book.”

You’re Not Going to Read This Post

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Literacy. 4 Comments

Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein.  Clearly he’s among those antagonists.  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.  

Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page.   Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case letter F.  ”At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page,” says Bauerlein.  ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.” 

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, “‘Reading’ is not even the right word.” The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the “nut” and nothing else.

In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it.  “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.

Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology.  “Given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces,” he concludes.  “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”

Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker.  Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.

Winning Hearts and Minds

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2008 in Educational Policy and Parents. 1 Comment

If you’re over 40 years old and grew up in the U.S., you probably vividly remember a tsunami of roadside litter along American highways. It was fairly common as recently as 30 or 40 years ago for people to simply pitch trash from moving cars.  There was little societal pressure to do otherwise.  Then along came this guy: 

 

The “Crying Indian“ did as much as anyone to change Americans’ attitudes about littering, and their behavior.  Some have even credited this public service campaign from Keep America Beautiful, which debuted on Earth Day in 1971, with launching the modern environmental movement. 

I thought of the Crying Indian while reading this op-ed in the Washington Times.  Childrens’ book author Jennifer Bryan reminds us yet again of the benefit of reading to young children.  “In an era of high-stakes testing and education reforms and revolutions, research has repeatedly proved that one simple parenting technique is among the most effective,” she writes.  “Children who are read aloud to by parents get a head start in language and literacy skills and go to school better prepared.”

Right.  We know this.  But how many low-income Americans–the group least likely to read to their children–are going to hear about it in earnest op-eds?  If I’m Obama or McCain, I put a massive public service campaign touting the benefits of reading to young children at the top of my education “to do” list.   Done well, it might be the single most effective thing we can do right now, today, to close the achievement gap. 

Effective public service messages have a long history of changing behavior, and burning the ideas behind them into the public mind.  Buckle Up.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Just say no.  Give a hoot, don’t pollute.  Only you can prevent forest fires.  This is your brain on drugs.  Any questions?

 Aim it at parents, air it where they’re most likely to see it, and plaster it on inner city billboards.  Make it direct and hard-hitting, not warm and fuzzy.

“It’s ten o’clock.  Have you read to your child today?”

Literacy, Numeracy…Visuacy??

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Curriculum. 8 Comments

An Australian federal government report argues for visual education, or “visuacy”, to take its place alongside literacy and numeracy as a fundamental part of the country’s curriculum. The National Review of Visual Education calls for “a rethinking of arts education in schools to end the distinction between art and other images.”  

“In much the same way that one might conceptualise a continuum of texts in the context of the English classroom, one might similarly do so in relation to a continuum of images from the most banal to the most aesthetically complex and challenging,” the report says.  Translation?  The newspaper the Australian says: students should study Picasso alongside pictures of Elle Macpherson’s underwear as part of a recasting of visual arts education away from traditional forms to include images of all kinds.

[The report] cites the example of scrutinising the “conditions of value and meaning” in images as diverse as Macpherson’s bras and briefs on the back of a bus or on a billboard, a blood-strewn road safety advertisement on television, Picasso’s Guernica reproduced in the pages of a book of 20th century European art and the television transmission of a collapsing World Trade Center.

Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools chair Su Baker is already playing defense, arguing images are words in a visual language that have to be taught in the same way as English or any other language. “This report isn’t about dumbing down, it isn’t about trivialising things.  It’s about the breadth of visual imagery we are confronted with and engaging with in the world we live in, which is heavily saturated with images. It’s about teaching kids to navigate, interpret and control those images.” she tells the Australian.