Much is made of the idea that 25% of American kids read at below basic on the National Assessment (NAEP). These kids can't do their schoolwork, aren't going on to higher education, and are going to have difficulty taking care of themselves and their own children someday. There is a growing sense that if we adopt the right intervention program for them we'll catch them up, close the gap, solve the problem. High schools and middle schools just need to start programming special classes for these kids. This is a pipe dream. While I certainly support extra programming for older poor readers, my ...
As some of you know, I've been working with the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association on the common standards project. I've been listed as a participant in newspaper articles: a participant, not a leader. What that means is that, like the other people who's names you've seen, I answer queries and react to drafts, and even contribute potential standards... but ultimately, I'm not in charge. I don't set the timelines, or decide who participates, or any of the dozens of other things that those in charge have to do. This week I got an angry ...
Why aren’t we doing more for adolescent literacy? The federal government invests a whole lot more in “kid literacy” than in teen literacy (we invest nearly $20 billion per year on Head Start, Reading First, and Title I reading programs, and about $30 million on Striving Readers). The same pattern is true in the states as well, and if you look at school standards, accountability monitoring, and the professional development of teachers, you see a definite tilt towards younger kids when it comes to reading. It’s not just the inputs that differ either. National Assessment data show that kids are improving more ...
Here is an FAQ on teaching oral reading fluency. Do all students need work with fluency? No, not all students need work with fluency, but most elementary students do. Some students are so good with fluency that they apparently can read almost any book so well that it sounds like they can understand it. As a population of students goes through school, an increasingly large proportion of them will be fluent at the highest levels. This means that fewer students will need fluency work as time goes on. Our students are getting low scores in reading comprehension. Why aren’t we focusing on that ...
Last week, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco upheld the right of California to administer achievement tests and high school exit exams in English to all students, no matter what their language background. Various education groups had challenged the practice of using English-only testing since federal law requires that second-language students “be assessed in a valid and reliable manner.” As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Marc Coleman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs complained that, “The court dodges the essential issue in the lawsuit, which is: What is the testing supposed to measure?” Mr. Coleman gets an A from ...
Rose Birkhead made a comment on my last post. She liked the idea of the states aiming at the same standards and giving the same reading tests, but she was concerned about testing kids on grade level. Say, I'm a teacher, and one of my students reads horribly, not even close to fourth-grade level. Rose's concern is that having that child take the fourth-grade test will tell me nothing of value about his reading (I won't get any useful insights about how to help him), and what it tells him he probably doesn't want to hear since he already knows ...
I visited schools yesterday that used to DIBEL. You know what I mean, the teachers used to give kids the DIBELS assessments to determine how they were doing in fluency, decoding, and phonemic awareness. DIBELS has been controversial among some reading experts, but I’ve always been supportive of such measures (including PALS, TPRI, Ames-web, etc.). I like that they can be given quickly to provide a snapshot of where kids are. I was disappointed that they dropped the tests and asked why. “Too much time,” they told me, and when I heard their story I could see why. This was a district that like the idea of such testing, but ...
During the past few months, some amazing things have been happening in education policy. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt a single set of education standards in the English Language Arts and Mathematics. Arne Duncan ALSO pledged $350 million towards a new set of tests of those standards. Now that sounds like a national curriculum to me… and national tests to boot—though nobody is using those terms right now. Of course, development efforts like these take years, so those who are philosophically offended by the idea of a national curriculum won’t have to worry, right? Not ...
It’s good to be back from Africa—I guess. Each day (and night), Cyndie and I had fascinating new experiences, sometimes frighteningly so: like the night we were awakened by a lion fight; or the hippo that chased us; or the time we mistakenly found ourselves inconveniently between a bull elephant and what he wanted to eat. Scary stuff. Not that I’m home, I’ve been going to meetings, reading emails and the latest journals, and maybe I was safer with the cheetahs! Just in the past few days I’ve been hearing over and over the kind of anti-research rhetoric that was popular ...
Last week, I posted a blog that described how effective comprehension strategy instruction works. I said that students won’t use strategies forever and that I didn’t believe that strategies eventually morphed into skills (at least not skills that look anything like the strategy). I think strategies work more like true scaffolds; they operate as a temporary support that allows kids to read on their own more effectively, but not in the same way they will need to read on their own later. The problem is that strategies are cumbersome and no one will use them for long. Frankly, when a ...
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