Category: Literacy

Reflections on "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops”

While there are many things on which I could comment in this article, I want to focus solely on the image that readers see when they first view it. Take a look at this for a moment, and then think about the implications of this image on school laptop programs, regardless of the discussion following it in the article.

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops – New York Times

So, there are at least two reactions that I could have to this. One reading could be to look at it the way in which it was intended. The second gives me more pause.
The first reactions is, of course, to just look at the headline, read the article, and say, “yup, laptops are a waste of time.” Any kid who is more worried about drinking and Godsmack must be doing something bad with his laptop, right? These kids are having too much fun with this laptop to be “learning” anything (at least, what most of us envision “learning” to be, as associated with school). Also, the young lady in the picture has the look of “Oh, what are they doing now?” Combined, the composition of this pictures suggests lewd and, if not illegal, at least immoral activity going on with these two boys and their laptop escapades.
Granted, the caption of the picture does mention the fact that these students are at lunch, which implies that that should be on free time that they can use in their own way. But does that really matter? Given the headline, it is clear that the rhetorical affect of this image supports the conclusion that laptops are a worthless investment.

The other reaction is to simply, “Yes, you are right. The laptops are a waste of time indeed.” Now, what makes me say that. Well, despite the interview with Mark Warschauer, author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” that shows up on page two of this article — and all the potential positive effects that laptops could have, the article ends on a disappointing note.

But in many other classrooms, there was nary a laptop in sight as teachers read from textbooks and scribbled on chalkboards. Some teachers said they had felt compelled to teach with laptops in the beginning, but stopped because they found they were spending so much time coping with technical glitches that they were unable to finish their lessons.

So, concluding that school hasn’t really changed much in the past 150 to 200 years, and that laptops are bound to have technical glitches that keep them from being used as tools in the classroom, we conclude that they are worthless. Beyond the issues of teacher professional development related to technology that I could talk about (and is mentioned in the article), what I want to suggest here is that part of the problem is that the reason so many computers are broke is because students aren’t expected to take care of them.

Could it be that the reason they are being broken is because the students aren’t taught how to download, install, and update virus and spyware protection? Could the reason that they are being broken is because students are leaving them in their lockers and book bags more than they need them in class? Could the reason that they are being broken stem from the fact that kids try (and succeed) to do everything to subvert filters and locks that they ruin the computers in the process, rather than be put in charge of properly maintaining them?

I feel that this article — as well as the issue of laptops in schools — is being explored from a one-dimensional model of schooling where the teachers/administrators are supposed to prevent all disruptive behavior before it starts and that kids, essentially, don’t have to take responsibility for their learning. These are issues bigger than just professional development and advocating for School 2.0, although those are definitely part of the discussion.
Instead, I think that we need to consider talking to students about how to take care of the technology that is supposed to sustain them in school. We don’t like gum under desks or scribbles in textbooks, and we teach students not to do that (and, if appropriate, discipline them when they break those rules). Is it possible that we are not teaching students the ethos of computer ownership, from taking care of hardware to being a good online citizen? Perhaps that is a side of the issue that we could look into more fully in future research.

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Notes from Ellin Keene’s “The Intricacies of the Mind”

Notes from Ellin Keene’s “The Intricacies of the Mind”

NOTE: Email her for PPT.

Keene, one of the authors of Mosaic of Thought, began by promoting the new edition of the book that will be coming out in May. She has been the director of the Cornerstone Project for the past few years, focusing on the 13 lowest income districts in the country that are located in the largest cities and most remote rural areas. Many of the “ahas” that she will share today come from the four years of work doing professional development in these schools.

She makes the argument that comprehension strategies are about the intellectual development of the mind. She suggests that, “There is limitless capacity to the human intellect.” When she has a teacher, she reflected on how she didn’t really ask her students to be intellectually engaged, perhaps 10%. She thought of herself as a strong teacher with high expectations, working at the pinnacle of her abilities as a teacher. But, the students in these schools would produce 50 to 100 times more, with very little extra pushing. She asks, “How did my expectations as a teacher fall so short?” More over, how could kids from these schools teach me so much more than I thought was possible?”

As a staff developer, she wanted to get into schools to work with kids first, so as to better understand what is happening in the classrooms. She related a story of a child, Jamika, with whom she was talking about her reading for the day. Keen asked, “Does your reading make sense?” Jamika replies “None of ‘yall ever tell me what ‘make sense’ means.” How do you help students understand what it means to make meaning from reading.

Ten years ago, at the end of Mosaic of Thought, you could have been left with the idea that the cumulation of comprehension strategies means that you comprehended the text. Not so.

Are we stopping teaching of comprehension strategies? No, absolutely not. However, we understand that using strategies is not enough. We need to ask, “What is the outcome?” In this initiative, we decided to not use the incremental approach that many scripted programs utilize. Instead, we decided to go ahead and lift the bar high and then go higher with the kids. Why? Because, typically comprehension programs in this country answer questions, retell, and learn new vocabulary. We have never defined “comprehension” at a higher level and it is not worthy of our students’ intellectual capacity.

For example, Keene mentioned how one story in a classroom had 69 comprehension questions (more than twice the length of the text itself) without any questions about story structure, character, setting, or any other higher-level aspect of the story. If we expect kids to answer questions, retell, and learn vocabulary only, that is all they will do. There is only one lesson that the students need to pay attention to: what does the teacher want us to know? In this manner, we are never going to get anywhere and, this is harsh, “we deserve what we get” in terms of criticism. When we teach “comprehension” on the ability to answer questions and retell, are we teaching comprehension or testing it?

We need to redefine “comprehension.” We spend the vast majority of time in our classes — when we think we are not testing — testing because we focus on comprehension in this way. Even with the types of projects that we ask students to do, we may not be asking them to think in authentic ways. We need to focus on thinking about a text, not retelling it. Asking insightful questions, and the places that these questions lead students, are the ways to think about comprehension with staying power. Right now, the outcomes of comprehension instruction are severly limiting what our kids are doing as thinkers. Many of the texts that we are using are good for fluency development, but not for comprehension because there was nothing provocative, complex, or meaty about the text.

She asks and argues:

  • Is the text we’re using more appropriate for fluency instruction or comprehension instruction?
  • Do students need comprehension strategy instruction if all they’re expected to do is retell and answer questions?
    • She asks this one fecistiously, mentioning SRA and trying to get from “brown to aqua” as a goal
  • We may need to rethink our ideas about the nature of comprehension.

Are we teaching kids to do all the things that comprehension strategy instruction asks us to do if we are only expecting kids to live up to an out-of-date, low-level definition of comprehension. Kids have intellectual capacity to do so much more. I asked far, far, far too little of students when I was in the classroom and I wonder how far-spread this habit is in our country today, both in the richest and poorest districts.

So, what is it when we “understand?” Defining comprehension from many sources

  • Research in the field, but there isn’t much out there
  • Observing our own comprehension and extrapolating to instruction
  • Observing students in the act of comprehension, giving language to their processes

What if we turn our attention to the kids and have them look at what other kids are doing when they comprehend, when they were on fire with their own learning? What if we articulated the highest level of learning for students? What if instead of starting at the basic levels, we started high and go higher?

A kindergartener in tetheh corner provides one example. This student was trying to understand how the seasons change based on a story the teacher had read, and he had taken three days to read through a book and try to understand an idea. He was fervently studying in a corner, away from the hub-bub of the class. He wanted to dwell with an idea and, in his words, “on purpose think” about how the seasons change. Also, he created a model to help remember what he has discovered, not because he was assigned a project, but because he wanted to generate new knowledge and remember it. Keene also suggests that he was manipulating his own thinking, revising it to incorporate new knowledge and describe how thinking has changed over time. This way, the text becomes vividly real for readers. This student went beyond comprehension to a more personal, meaningful understanding.
We are doing the right thing by teaching comprehension strategies, but we need to take it to the next level. For what purpose? To what ends? By using these strategies, we can define and describe what we have learned and how it changes over time.

In another example, she talked about a student who was reading Little Women because she wanted to be a part of the book club in the classroom. She wanted to engage in discourse about ideas and flesh out our own ideas while understanding the perspectives of others when we argue and challenge them. We surprise ourselves with the clarity of our own thinking, when we have the language to define and describe what we are doing. This is about asking more than “What happened in chapter 4?” and moving into deeper, more thoughtful discussions that happen when kids have to defend their ideas. When their is cognitive dissonance, we learn more about our thinking when we have to engage with one another. Has argument been lost in our schools?

To understand means that we are renaissance learners, that we have to allow ourselves the opportunity to meander through a wide range of topics and interests, texts, and genres so we work to undertand how ideas are related. Part of the problem with lack of engagement in fourth and fifth grade is that students are not allowed to pursue their own varied and interconnected interests. Keene worries about leveling in schools and how it takes away from kids ability to be renaissance learners.

She gave another example of a student in fifth grade who just arrived in the US and didn’t know any English. This teacher read Elsie’s War aloud three times and, as a native of Eastern Europe, this student told the teacher how she wanted, despite her limited English, to read that book. By the end of the period, and with the help with a student near her, she made her way through the book. Did she “read” the book by any objective formula? No. But, she read the book because of the motivation, background knowledge, and help that she received. With this background in place — interest, multiple readings, student collaboration — unreadable books can be read.

When we struggle for insight, we savor and learn from the struggle itself. We take ventures into new learning territory and fight the debilitating influence of judgment. Sometimes our rhetoric with children emphasizes making things quick, fun, and easy. Yet, to struggle for insight is a joy. It is supposed to be hard. Do we have faith and confidence that these students can learn from the struggle itself? Do we help them hear the voice that says “I can’t” and help them combat it? Our emotional connections seek beauty and understanding in the aesthetic journey. We seek to create something luminous, something that matters to others. Humans are hard-wired to leave something that will matter later to others, to leave a legacy. In this era of retelling and answering questions, we are not helping them leave this legacy.

Ultimately, we remember when the experience becomes potently memorable to us.

These “dimensions of understanding” are very much a part of our own experience as learners. Strategies for comprehension are tools for understand, but we also need to think about what else we need to do “to understand”: to engage, to argue, to struggle for insight.

What does this mean for schools and classrooms?

  • Initiation of conversations in study groups, faculty meetings, and classrooms. How would we answer “What does it mean to understand?” How would we answer Jamika’s question?
  • Read shared texts to provide immediate experience in comprehension and provide context to discuss classroom applications.
  • Consider current practices and materials in light of the newly evolving definitions of comprehension — are practices and materials doing what we want them to do?
  • Study children in the moments of understanding and work to define and describe exactly what they are doing.
  • Be aware — what is it that we as human beings are doing when we work to understand?

What does this mean for comprehension strategies?

  • Comprehension strategies are the tools that we use to develop deeper comprehension
  • Comprehension strategies are not an end in and of themselves
    • What do you get by using these strategies?
  • We can teach students to improve comprehension
  • We need to redefine comprehension in order to raise expectations

The more effective comprehension teachers…

  • Are themselves readers and writers, constantly scrutinizing their own reading and learning processes in order to provide the most responsive instruction
  • Don’t follow recipes, scripts, programs, and prescriptions. They understand basic reading theory enough to generate enough instructional options to respond to students’ needs.
  • Use a wide variety of texts in terms of genre and level
  • Setting aside daily time to confer with kids; this is the key instructional venue
  • Create a classroom environment conducive to scholarly oral interactions and long-term study of comprehension strategies and concepts
  • Provide lengthy periods of time for students to read every day

Our work showed that scores went up in 12 of 13 districts and, Keene thinks in the end, the scores went up because students spent time reading and writing independently. 45 minutes of reading per day in kindergarten with 60 minutes of reading in grades above that (along with 45 minutes of writing). The success rate in terms of dramatically extended the time that they are reading and writing also allowed for teachers to confer with individuals and small groups. In the 13th district, the transiency rate was 160% per year, and it was difficult to overcome the effects of students moving in and out of the district at such an overwhelming rate.

The teachers got it in other districts by giving students time to read and write, understanding theory, and then give them time to work in professional communities.

Notes from Christopher Paul Curtis’ Keynote

Curtis Notes from Christopher Paul Curtis‘ Keynote

These are partial notes, as I was taking lots of pictures at the beginning of the session. Curtis shared some stories about his youth and talked about how some younsters get the “Scarlett B” on their forehead and how he didn’t have one. One story that he shared was when his parents bought a set of encyclopedias and that his sister would read from them to him.

He then went on to discuss how he liked reading as a child, but he didn’t like fiction. He would spend time reading Newsweek, Time, and Mad, among others. SRA brought about some great memories, including attaining the level of “plaid.” He couldn’t find a book that “touched him” as a child because there were no books for, by, or about him — from an African-American perspective. For the level of a book being “touching,” there has to be something about you in the book. Many of the books that he read, didn’t give him the “I know where you are coming from” feeling.

Today, he knows that his books, Jacqueline Woodson’s, and Walter Dean Myers’ offer something to a young child who will know the wonder of reading well before he did. Perhaps some time in the future, an African-American can reference one of these books when asked, “What book touched you as a child.”

He talked about himself as a writer and referened his parents, both of them avid readers. His mother is 82 and still “knocks off one book a night and two packs of cigarettes.” His mother was protective, and he shared a story about how trick-ot-treating was off limits in Flint during his youth. Instead, she would go to different rooms in the house and they would go door-to-door. By the kitchen, the thrill was gone. (He told the story better than I am typing it, of course!).

What makes me work as a writer? In the Watsons Go to Birmingham, he talks about how he modeled Byron off of himself as a young man. He talked about a scene in the book between the son and the mother that verges on child abuse and reflected on how that fits in only because it is contextual and related to the spirit of the times. (NOTE: I find that this makes for an interesting point, given the current issue with censorship in Howell.)

As a writer, you are a powerful person. You can speed things up. You can slow things down. You can also use your imagination. Right now, he is working on what is currently his favorite book. It is called Elijah of Buxton. This is a place in Canada, a site of the Underground Railroad. This was a utopia for the excaped slaves. He adopts the persona of a young boy concerned with his place in the community.

From there, he read from his upcoming book, much to the enjoyment of the audience.

Doug Fisher’s “Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work”

Doug Fisher’s “Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work”

Fisher outlined a program that he and teachers at their high school (he has been on loan from SDSU) use for literacy achievement.

Some Foundations

  • Reading time every day — practice makes permanent as it relates to SSR
  • Rationale for choosing strategies:
    • Is it research based?
    • Is it transferable across content areas?
    • Will these strategies have high utility in college?

Literacy Strategies

  • Seven literacy strategies that teachers use in every class, all day, from K-12, that all the staff members agreed to:
    • Writing to learn
      • Not process writing like in ELA
      • Helps clarify students’ thinking and used as a daily assessment
      • Kids are only expected to write 6.5 minutes each day, on average, in high school content area classes
    • Read aloud/shared reading
      • These happen in every class, every day (5-7 minutes in a block of 90 minutes, and the teachers shares/models his/her thinking). Comprehension modeling happens in every classroom and kids can apply these ideas to all their other classes.
      • Good selections
      • Connected to the class
      • Access to the text?
      • Four categories of read alouds
        • Comprehension only
        • Vocabulary — thinking through it and getting contextual clues to solve word parts and meaning or access other resources. Thus, we should never tell students to “skip it” when they come across a difficult word. We would never model skipping; we model solving.
        • Text structures — teachers noticed and explained when they noticed certain text structures like cause and effect, problem and solution, etc. This works for both informational texts and narratives, too.
        • Text features — what do you add as a writer to improve comprehension? Graphics, titles, headers, fonts, etc.
    • Anticipatory activities (building background)
      • KWL
        • In 1998 when this began, high school teachers didn’t really know about this strategy. Fisher talked about a teacher who did the KWL for his students and thought that “the students don’t know anything.” He talked about how this is a shift in teachers’ thinking, not just implementing a strategy.
      • Discovery
      • Anticipation guides
      • Questions
      • Quick writes
      • Discrepant events
      • Demonstrations
    • Vocabulary development
      • General words used in everyday language with agreed meaning across contexts
      • Specialized (academic) vvocabulary are words with multiple meanings in different content areas
      • Technical, discipline-specific vocabulary that is dependent to field of study (photosynthesis)
    • Reciprocal teaching
      • Built by a class to class habit
    • Graphic organizers — students must do this work. Teachers shouldn’t just make a Venn Diagram and then expect students to fill it out.
      • Concept maps
      • Diagrams
      • Text structure charts (cause/effect, temporal sequence, problem/solution)
      • Students’ #1 choice — most helpful for remembering information
    • Cornell note-taking
      • Every class uses this note-taking structure with a major column, minor column, summary space at the bottom of the page
      • Note-taking is the single greatest predictor of college success
      • They teach this starting in kindergarten

Model of Instruction
One of the things that is very absent from school is a “gradual release of responsibility” from teacher to student.

  • Focus lesson – “I do it”
  • Guided Instruction – “We do it”
  • Collaborative – “You do it together”
  • Independent – “You do it alone”

We can not have the “do it yourself” model where teachers give a few instructions and turn kids loose. We also need to consider time for kids to collaborate with one another so that they can consolidate what they are learning. We need to increase the amount of time that students are using academic language with one another. Fisher gave a great example of learning how to work with his cell phone and how the sales person led him through “guided instruction” so that he could learn how to do it. Everything that I have learned how to do, he explained, has come from this gradual release model.

He is worried that reading strategies are becoming “curricularized” for large chunks of time (for a four week unit, for instance). He talked about how a student read “Stone Fox,” and how the kids had been predicting “everything, man.” The student will necer mobilize predicting on his own because it has always been a teacher-driven aspect of his learning.

You have to do this work with interesting and engaging text. For instance, see Phineas Gage.

Jim Burke’s “Teaching: The First Ten Minutes”

Jim Burke’s “Teaching: The First Ten Minutes”
Presentation at MRA 2007

Jim Burke began by inviting participants to think about the actions that students must engage in to be successful in their core academic work. He then talked about how students need to continue a number of academic skills in classes that have traditionally not been heavily focused on those skills. for instance in health.

He showed us a matrix of “academic essentials” that he invites students to use as they analyze texts. He discussed how this matrix can be used as a kind of mental weightlifting in which students push beyond what they initially are able to do into harder tasks. They move beyond what they are typically able to do in order to build up mental muscle.

Then, he shared a “time use evaluation” model, asking us to think about how we divide up our class periods and how many “teaching moves” we make in a period. The goal for the first ten minutes, then, is to consider what you do, how you do it, and why so that the initial class time is purposeful and focused. We don’t want to do “drive by literacy instruction,” where we are so focused on checking off the standards that we forget what good teaching consists of. It is not a model of responsive instruction. Burke suggests that kids work well with about three instructional moves per class.

Some examples that he shared came from the Academic Workout series that he has created for First Choice Publishers. One example is a “types of questions” overhead. The four types of questions that readers can ask of texts are:

  • Right there — factual questions that use the same wording from the passage
  • Think and search – interpretive questions that require searching and skimming
  • Author and you – answers to these questions are not directly in the texts and require inferential thinking
  • On your own – answers here are based on your own experience

As a lesson, he would have the overhead up for students at the beginning of class and give them three minutes to take notes on the types of questions. Then, he shows a model and works with the class to generate a question about that text at each level. Finally, he moves from the first ten minutes into the rest of the lesson where students would do their own independent reading and develop their own questions. Through this process, students develop academic language.

For another example, Burke showed an image from Cameron Clapp’s website and asks students to create a list of nouns, verbs, and adjectives describing what is going on, and then develops that into a full paragraph. He gives another example of a painting of a soldier with a number of elements that inspire thought and discussion. Questions could include:

  • Who is this? Where is he?
  • Why is he carrying a gun different from the bullets he has over his shoulder?
  • Why is he wearing three dog tags?

He begins his teaching with the idea in mind, “What do I need to do to help kids be successful?” He gives another example of a structured conversation that happens in the first ten minutes that can then help students structure the next task. For instance, having students talk about a text before they begin writing an essay. He then moved in to possible examples based on his current teaching with Crime and Punishment.

Possible Beginnings for Your Class

  • Open with a question: “What is a crime?”
  • Post a quotation: “THe past is not dead; it’s not even the past” William Faulkner
  • Visual: painting, photo, ad, video, infographic
  • Text: Nietzsche, poem, article, excerpt
    • Bring one powerful paragraph back over and over again through the course of a unit so students can track their thoughts and opinions about it over time
  • Opinionaire: “When is an action a crime?”
  • 4Rs: Read, retell, respond, relate
  • Mini-Lesson: summarizing, questioning, compare/contrast writing
  • Discussion: share and compare
  • Generate: types and examples of punsihment
  • Priming the mind: questions to consider and background
  • Write: compare similarities and differences
  • Quiz: explain a line from the chapter
    • Reflective reading quiz: generate five words about tone, character, etc and choose the best word to describe tone/character/etc and why it’s the best
    • This embeds the language of testing (“choose the one that best describes”) in the context of an authentic lesson

He also mentioned the Linda Darling-Hammond article about making homework purposeful, such that students want to do homework so they can come to class engaged and ready to work. Other research:

  • Nystrand in RTE (2005): Nothing has more significant benefits in comprehension and engagement than structured use of classroom conversation
    • The average teacher only allows for one minute of conversation in class per week, although even that one minute makes a difference
  • Wilhelm (2006): talks about organizing your class around an inquiry. Rather than just reading Romeo and Juliet, ask “What makes a good relationship?”
  • Reading Next (2004): teaching for meaning, not just to get through things

Spelling correction made on March 27, 2022

Visions of Online Learning

Are we, as educators, approaching this in the right way?

To deal with the growth, the University of California is launching an extensive effort to make sure applicants’ online high school courses are on par with traditional classroom instruction.

More students across US logging on to online classrooms – The Boston Globe

To be honest, I am not sure that I want online courses to be “on par” with traditional classroom instruction. While I do not want to get in a finger-pointing, name-calling game, the fact of the matter is that “traditional classroom instruction” is becoming more and more a relic of education’s past, not a model to emulate.

Moreover, what is it about the “online experience” that makes it an online experience? If it is simply listening to video versions of lecture and completing the same homework assignments that have been given year after year with Word or Excel instead of a pencil, paper, and calculator, then we are going about it all wrong.

Shouldn’t, instead, the purposes of online learning be to engage students in reading and writing tasks that require multimedia authoring, collaboration with others with whom we typically would not or could not work, and engagement with materials that are fresh, relevant, and contextually useful to one’s own inquiry?

This is not to say that there is not a place for some traditional “content” in online learning. However, my experience as an online instructor was one where I simply monitored students as they were supposed to work independently through a prescribed set of curriculum. One of our coordinators called it the “nag and brag” version of online teaching, only to touch base with students when they did something wrong, fell behind, or did a great job on something.

This, to me, is the failure of our current paradigm about online learning. We do not need to replicate traditional classroom experiences. Instead, we need to think about what it means to engage with content and collaborate with others in ways that will both catch the attention of and expand the abilities of our students.

I hope that Michigan, as the first state to adopt an online learning component, is able to move beyond the traditional visions and be, instead, visionary. Perhaps we are moving in the right direction.

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Notes on Timothy Shanahan’s “The Role of Research in US Reading Policy”

Here are notes from a talk today:

Timothy Shanahan, Current President of the International Reading Association

Tim Shanahan is a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the director of the UIC Center for Literacy. He has played a leadership role at the federal level in making connections between literacy research and educational policy. Dr. Shanahan served on the National Reading Panel, chaired the National Literacy Panel on Language and Minority Children and Youth, and chairs the National Early Literacy Panel. His research interests include: the relationship between reading and writing, the assessment of reading ability, family literacy, and school improvement. Dr. Shanahan has published numerous research articles and written and/or edited several books including Teachers Thinking, Teachers Knowing (1994) and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research (1992).

Notes from the session, “The Role of Research in US Reading Policy”:

  • Understanding reading in the context of US policy; having become a combatant in the “reading wars”
    • I had been invited to be a part of the National Reading Panel and served on it for two years trying to synthesize research through a meta-study
    • The real upswing of all this is that it led to $5 billion infused into reading education
  • An Ideological History Lesson
    • Governmental role in education
      • 1600s: MA, CT, and NH establish public schools for religious reasons
      • 1788: US Constitution ratified, no mention of education
      • 1791: Amendment X for state’s rights
      • 1791: 7 states make constitutional provision for public education (e.g., establish school boards)
      • 1800s: Freedmans‘ act for curriculum for freed slaves
        • First time that feds intervened in local schools at such a large and systematic level
      • 1900s: Increased centralization, immigration
      • 1950s and 60s: ESEA and focus on science and technology
      • Current: More centralized curriculum
  • Current forces in education
    • Explosive growth in informational technology
    • Internationalization of economic markets
    • Changes in the relationship of literacy attainment and well being
  • Current changes in the economy
    • Growth of service sector and decline of manufacturing
    • Transformation of low education blue collar work into skilled labor
    • Free trade movember of low-paying jobs and workers
    • Outsourcing of middle-income jobs and immigration of high-income workers
  • Changes have led to:
    • More jobs that require reading
    • Increased correlation of reading achievement and economic success
  • Current status of education
    • Since “A Nation at Risk,” US education is continually in “reform” mode
    • From 1971 to 1994, there has been no improvement in reading for 4th graders
    • Cost of education has risen in real terms
    • Public dissatisfaction is still there because the fundamental problems have not changed
    • Educators have not been sure footed (neither convinced of the need for reform nor clear on how to make things work better)
      • Where are the experts at the table in most of these debates?
  • What’s the Point?
    • The politicians aren’t crazy — reading has to improve
    • Their “solutions” are frequently wrong, but they deserve credit for making serious attempts to solve a real problem
    • They are deeply frustrated by educators who don’t seem to recognize the problem (or who want to respond with the union shop kinds of solutions)
  • Context for NCLB
    • Low NAEP scores and the reading wars in the 1990s
      • As it got bigger and bigger, politicians decided to do something that they hadn’t done in education before: appoint an expert panel
        • I had become a member of the National Reading Panel
          • They didn’t want our opinions; they didn’t want opinions, they wanted a determination of fact
          • We can’t make recommendations except for recommendations on more research
          • Can’t tell how well we thought things would work, or not
    • Changes during the Clinton administration
      • focusing Title I money on poorest schools
        • This hadn’t happened before, and the dollars were focused a little bit more on poor districts
      • Reading Excellence Act (SBRR)
        • Some direct money is given to states for reading education, given on a grant basis, although this was done before the NRP was finished
        • Every state was able to decide what they wanted to call; “research” and there were no standards on it at all
      • Pushing adoption of proven curriculum
      • Move from professional development to volunteers
        • Big fight on money for teachers vs. volunteer tutors
  • National Reading Panel
    • Appointment process began in 1997
      • How do you build authority and trust?
      • Took 300 nominations and the Secretary of Education created the panel
    • Open meetings with transcripts
    • Public hearings around the country
    • Explicit methodology: replicable searcher, pre-established inclusion criteria, research had to be consistent with questions, meta-analysis
      • Some things we were not able to find conclusive evidence about things, so we didn’t include it
    • Findings on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, professional development
    • Controversy
      • There was a very real chance that this would have all ended up on a shelf, but we had a new president come in and he made it the cornerstone of federal literacy policy
  • No Child Left Behind
    • 2001 reauthorization of ESEA
    • More Title I funding, but more accountability
    • Reading First ($1 billion a year for K-3 PD, curricula, materials)
    • This allows Congress a way out of the unholy bargain. We can control quality without being a part of local decision making since the NRP did it
      • Congress keeps its hands clean of the controversy
  • Results of all of this…
    • Higher 4th grade achievement on both the NAEP and the NAEP trend items (reduction of achievement gap, sizable gains, highest trend performance ever)
      • What’s indisputable is that 4th graders are reading better now than they were 12 years ago, despite how you spin the politics on how the gains have been made and by whom
      • With all the state and federal focus on K-3, there has been some improvement at 4th grade. But…
    • No improvement for older students
      • 8th graders are not moving up, so we are losing the gains between 4th and 8th grade
      • What you see in the whole body of ed research is that Reading Recovery, Head Start, and other programs is that we know how to raise achievement early but that we don’t know how to sustain it
        • For instance, the difference between kindergarten full and half days had their gains erased by the end of first grade because all the same students did all the typical first grade curriculum.
      • We need to reform the system at all levels from the ground up. We need to keep all day kindergarten and then do PD for teachers in first grade to work with these higher achieving students.
  • NCLB/RF Problems
    • Accountability of goals of NCLB are unreachable and fail to reward success
    • The costs of testing are burgeoning in terms of lower morale, corruption, mistrust, etc.
    • States are encouraged to reduce standards
    • Peculiar corruption of Reading First
    • Subtle shift of NRP to WWC
    • Problems with the newer panels (NELP, NLP)
  • What is needed to make research-based policy work?
    • Substantial public support for research
    • Open way of determining specific research priorities
    • Benefits for researchers who choose to do this work
    • Is this likely? No:
      • We don’t see evidence so public support for research.
      • The feds are maintaining power over priorities.
      • There is no real infrastructure for carrying out recommendations for policy into practice.
      • There is likely to be evidence soon of the effectiveness of the Reading First policy.
      • There is no increase in university commitment.
  • Question and answer session
    • Shifts in thinking: Clinton and the Democrats wanted national testing in the 1990s, but the conservatives didn’t want to lose local control; now it is vice versa because all the states have their own standards.
    • Reading First: There is survey data to show that Reading First teachers actually feel better now that they “know how to teach reading” and have books in their classrooms. Part of the reason for this success is the Reading Excellence Act.
    • What is dividing the field is not methods, but thinking about the social and cultural aspects of what counts as evidence.
      • What grad students need to do is set aside the rhetoric of whether things are “good” or “bad,” and look at the field as a whole. It doesn’t mean that there are times when different questions demand different kinds of evidence, especially as it relates to policy.
      • There are people in medicine who do anthropology, but they don’t move into the policy debate.

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