Ezrial starts school

I've been tellling the joke for years about the 5 year old who goes off eagerly to kindergarten the first day and comes home that afternoon and goes right into his room, When his Mom says. "How was school?" he says "I'm not going back . I can't read and write and they won't let me talk so there's nothing for me  to do there".

Yesterday was the first day of kindergarten for Ezrial Pearson my five year old great-granddaughter. And to my dismay on her second day of school she said they can't talk in class and theycan;t "talk or act silly" in the cafetorium while eating lunch either. Today the class was punished for talking- and they had to put their heads down on their arms. They had no recess and they had to march around the playground as a group.

There has been no play in this kindergarten- nor is there any play area attached to the classroom. I own a home in this Houston area district which I rent to Shoshana my granddaughter and her husband Justin and there soon to be four children. And I pay taxes to the Klein ISD and the Klenk school.

I have only Ezrial's description of the curriculum. It's all day 8:15 to 3 with no provision for nap. Ezzrial said the teacher scolded some kids who fell asleep. There's only PR on the district website and the principal has not responded to requests for an appointment. Parents are not permitted in the classroom or the cafetorium where all children are required to eat breakfast. She ate her lunch when she came home.

Ezrial is not saying she doesn't want to go to school - yet. She was so looking forward to making new friends but how can she if there is no chance to talk with them.
What do I advise her parents?
Are there any alternatives available to them in the Houston area?
The name of the district is Klein ISD and the school is really Klenk.
Has nothing been learned in three generations?

In a world where millions are being spent by US AID and the World Bank  to include EGRA an admitted knockoff of DIBELS on African Asian and Latin Anerican children comes this wonderful announcement

We just returned from Guatemala. I am thrilled to report that the Ministry of Education purchased and distributed mini-libraries to EVERY public school in Guatemala. Non-fiction and fiction  books were obtained.

We should be  proud as the government has asked the Consejo de Lectura de Guatemala , which all of us supported, to educate the  teachers on how to  use the books.

 

Thank you  for all you have done.

 

Marcie Mondschein

Some history: Many years ago Marcie Mondschein went to Guatemala with her husband Jerry Monschein, a pediatrician, who was there with a medical aid group. Marcie is a reading professional
from Long Island (with a strong g please Longg Island).

Marcie made contacts with educators there and she and Jerry began a continuous connection and commitment to promoting literacy and literacy education in Guatemala.

She solicited the long term support of her local IRA affiliate and anyone else she could convince to join her effort. There have been three main thrusts to her work there:
1.  She assisted local educators in forming the  Consejo de Lectura de Guatemala  the national affiliate of the International Reading Association. This organization will hold its 10th bienniel International Reading Conference which regularly draws over two thousand teachers from all over Guatemala and groups who come by bus from other Central Amrican countries.
2. Marcie has brought other reading educators to work with her and her local colleagues in conducting teacher workshops all over the country. She has literally taken the best professional knowledge to the rural corners of the country.
3. With Jerry she sold crafts she buys in Guatemala at Reading conferences at US reading conferences and usedthe proceeds to put paper back libraries in rural and urban schools all over
the country. They go there at least twice a year, at their own expense. She has brought groups
of Guatemalan educators to the states for confernces.
Yetta and I are proud of having been invited to and attended almost all of the nine conferences of the Consejo,

And what a crowning achievment: to have the govenrment acknowledge this effort with commitment to extending their work.
It has been honor for us to be a part of this wonderful achievement.

Thsnks to Marcie and Jerry for their great contribution to Guatemala and the world of literacy
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo Bravissimo Bravo!

Members of the Reading Hall of Fame issued this  statement calling the "National Council on Teacher Quality an attempt to take control of teacher education, deprofeeionalize teaching and  impose the same discredited reading program that failed and caused a scandal inReading First, Se this statment also in Valerie Strauss's Blog,



A statement from members of the Reading Hall of Fame on the report of the
National Council on Teacher Quality*
As elected members of the Reading Hall of Fame with broad and diverse perspectives on reading and reading instruction we want to raise strong objections to key aspects of the NCTQ report on teacher preparation programs.

 1. NCTQ was founded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundationi to “provide an alternative national voice to existing teacher organizations and to build the case for a comprehensive reform agenda that would challenge the current structure and regulation of the profession.” NCTQ would control the education of teachers by asserting its authority to rate teacher education.ii Teacher education programs are now regulated by state certification and state education agencies and by their university administrators. They also comply with standards of their professional associations. NCTQ seeks to insert itself above these authorities.

 2. To achieve that end they frame “existing teacher organizations” as vested interests opposed to reform.

3. This attempt to control teacher education follows the attempt to control schools through NCLB and Reading First. Reading first, a major part of NCLB mandated a narrow direct instruction phonics curriculum and method. And it banned whole language. That has been the law since 2001 and it has not improved reading comprehension and it has certainly not improved schools.iii .(Gamse, et al., 2008),

4. NCTQ, with the advice or Reid Lyon and Lousia Moats, key players in Reading First, asserts that the National Reading Panel provided the answers to, “many fundamental educational questions” establishing a single scientific reading method.

5. So with one stroke NCTQ limits the teaching of reading to teaching the “scientific “ reading program, the same one which failed for 13 years in NCLB and it limits teacher education programs to training teachers in this one true method.
And who needs reading research if the fundamental questions are already answered?

6. NCTQ has rated teacher education programs through rating their courses in teaching beginning reading repeating the tactic used in NCLB’s Reading First mandates that there are two approaches to teaching reading: the scientific approach (direct instruction phonics) and everything else.

7. NCTQ’S assertion that “teacher educators choose to train candidates in “whole language” methods rather than scientifically-based reading instruction” indicates that NCTQ’s evaluators had so broad a definition of whole language that it is
anything other than what NCTQ would mandate. After thirteen years they are still claiming that schools are failing because of whole language.

8. NCTQ would deskill teachers: they would be “trained” as technicians with limited knowledge and authority by teacher educators constrained to a single “scientific” method of reading instruction.

9. The texts authored by over 60 members of the Reading Hall of Fame were listed as unacceptable by NCTQ. Few were rated acceptable. The issue is not our texts. It is that anyone or any group can impose their judgment and become arbiters of books or methods.

10. NCTQ ridicules the view that prospective teachers should confront their attitudes toward “race, class, language and culture” in their teacher education programs. This is but one example of the NCTQ view that reading is an autonomous skill that can be taught out of context without regard for who the learners are and what they are asked to read.

11. NCTQ sees “Academic Freedom run amok” in teacher education. Yet the concept was created to protect teachers and other academics from just the sort of political interference in their teaching and research NCTQ is attempting. As professionals in the field of literacy education, we understand, appreciate, and accept the responsibility for improving teacher education. Our teachers need to know much more about the processes and practices of reading, writing, and thinking. To that end, we commit ourselves individually and collectively to promoting broader and deeper knowledge of literacy processes and practices. In contrast, however, to the message of NCTQ, we will accomplish these improvements not by tearing down, but respecting dedicated teachers and by building with them, on the rich knowledge base for literacy that has taken so long to develop.

*This statement represents those members signed below and should not be construed as an official position of the Reading Hall of Fame

Members signing this statement (Affiliation for identification only)
Kenneth S Goodman**     Professor emeritus University of Arizona
James Hoffman Professor     University of Texas
Jane Hanson      Professor Emerita University of Virginia,
         Team member, Central Virginia Writing project
Richard Vacca Professor Emeritus Kent State University
Richard Allington** Professor University of Tennessee
Yetta M Goodman*** Regents Professor emerita University of Arizona
Brian Cambourne Professor Wollongong University Austrailia
David Olson University Professor Emeritus OISE/University of Toronto
Dorothy Watson Professor Emeriita University of Missouri , Columbia
Carl Braun** Professor emeritus University of Calgary, Alberta Canada
Denny Taylor Professor Emerita, Hofstra University
Donald Leu Professor University of Connecticut
Patrick Shannon Professor Pennsylvania Sate University
P. David Pearson Professor University of California, Berkeley
Robert Calfee Professor Emeritus on Recall, Stanford University
Roger Farr ** Chancellors Professor Emeritus, Indiana University
Victoria Rizko** Professor Emerita Vanderbilt University
Victoria Purcell-Gates Professor Emerita, University of British Columbia
Robert Tierney Honorary Professor Sydney University Australia,
                        Professor University of British Columbia
Linda B. Gambrell** Distinguished Professor Clemson University
                                Co-editor, Reading Research Quarterly
Patricia L Anders     Professor University of Arizona
Donna Ogle**         Professor, Natonal Lewis University
Jerome Harste***    Professor Emeritus Indiana University
Taffy Rafael      University Scholar University of Illinois Chicago
Tim Razinski      Professor Kent State University
Peter Johnston     Professor State University of New York at Albany
** Past Presidents of the International Reading association
*** Past President of the National Council of Teachers of English.

i Ravich, Diane says: “NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997… TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-what-is-nctq-and-why-you-should-know/2012/05/23
ii Teacher Prep Review (2003)P 93
iii Calfee,R (In press)Knowledge, Evidence, and Faith: How the Federal Government Used Science to Take Over Public Schools in Goodman,K, R.Calfee and Y Goodman Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies (Routledge 2014)

Chutzpah (revised )

The National Council on Teacher Quality’s plan to take control of teacher education by rating colleges of education unacceptable and then dictating who, how, and what they can teach  in order to become acceptable may be the greatest act of Chutzpah the world has yet know.

Chutzpah is of course the Yiddish for_ how  you say in English- “the nerve” doesn’t quite carry the force of chutzpah -and no, congresswoman- hutz not chutz.

NCTQ  created by Checker Finn’s Thomas Fordham Institute (a right wing think tank) has undertaken to create an "alternative national voice to existing teacher organizations (Unions? Professional Associations?) which is more chutzpah because::One- those groups haven’t had much of a voice and two- NCTQ is itself only the voice of its parent organization. Who exactly does this misbegotten offspring speak for?

And their goal is true chutzpah- nothing less than to change the structure and regulation of teacher education.

Let’s go back a bit for some background on this attempt to control teacher education. Beginning about 1978 a grass roots movement began among teachers, first in Canada and then in a few states. The Canadians began calling it whole language as a contrast to the part language of tests and text books coming across their border. Canadian teachers are relatively well paid and well educated. Their unions do staff development and get involved in curriculum not just working conditions and pay.

By the mid-nineties the whole language movement was starting to get serious.   Enough so that text book publishers began to use real literature and some whole language teachers were moving into middle management in school districts. Educators from New Zealand and Australia were bringing their applications to American teachers.

Starting after the 1996  US election something new happened. War was declared. I don’t mean two sides declared war. I mean suddenly the press was full of something called “The reading Wars.”  And whole language was proclaimed (by who knows? Could it have the Thomas B Fordham Foundation) one side and  phonics its challenger. My personal connection began with an article in Harpers attacking me.

Then I got a call from a Toronto reporter about a science conference in Seattle where a small study in a suburb of Houston was being presented which showed that phonics worked and whole language didn’t? Would I like to comment? Huh? What was going on? Well that study I was to learn was never completed – they got kicked out of the district. It was never peer reviewed but it gained much media attention and it was proclaimed proof of phonics over whole language. And that was an indication of how this strange war was fought.

In California a crisis in reading was declared and whole language was accused of being the cause and a little old lady in tennis shoes somehow got the power to call people into her garage to examine the proposals for state funding for signs of whole language. (I kid you not- Her name was Marian Joseph – could I make that up?)

In Texas saving his state’s children from whole language was part of the George Bush (the younger) move from the governorship of Texas to the White House.

 How wide was the influence if whole language at its peak? Well one little book of mine (What’s whole in whole language) sold a lot of copies. And whole language conferences were getting thousands of teachers. Academic publishers were selling more individual copies of books to teachers than class room orders. And the sale of children’s literature and young adult books was booming. As my Aussie friends put it, it’s the tall poppies that get cut down and whole language was the tall poppy. Hey, I was getting calls from national media regularly back in the late “90s. I even had a chapter in a book about the Bush (2) White House devoted to me based on a phone interview I’d long forgotten. Gertrude Stein was wrong; it does matter what they say about you.

When the Elementary and Secondary education act was reinvented as No Child Left Behind a central component was Reading First which mandated that henceforth all schools that wanted federal money (in other words all schools) had to change the way they taught reading to be based on Scientifically Based Reading Research. That’s a clever phrase because it implies that there is some reading research which is not scientifically based. In Reading First a rather obscure and extreme version of phonics was proclaimed scientific and – the tall poppy- whole language thus become unscientific.

This scientific method was claimed to be scientific because it was claimed to be conformed to the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (under the guidance of Reid Lyon, President Bush’s Reading guru.) And under no circumstances was any trace of that abomination- whole language to be permitted to enter into the reading insruction . In fact Reading First was more easily defined as anti-whole language.

Then in 2000 the war was declared over as mysteriously as it was declared. The National Reading Panel has reviewed the research literature all the way from A to B and proclaimed its decision. Direct instruction phonics was anointed scientific and given the force of law. And the only true believers, principally at the University of Oregon, were essentially put in charge of NCLB funding. And of course in reviewing state proposals they insisted only their books and tests be included.

No one approach to teaching reading had ever been given the force of law before. And it remained ever so until this13th year of NCLB even after the Inspector General charged massive conflicts of interest He recommended the department of Justice investigate. Congress got mad and defunded reading first. But the mandates stayed in the law even after the evaluation commissioned by the DOE found it had failed to improve reading comprehension.

After Obama was elected he didn’t want  to rehash old stuff.   NCLB and Reading First have been carried forward in limbo since Congess has yet to determine its future. And so states are still mandated to teach  the scientifically and legally established method.

Thirteen years after the reading wars were declared over we have a clearly failed  program.  Hundreds of schools have been closed. Whole city systems of education have collapsed. And there is no evidence that the promise that all students would be reading proficiently has been achieved. In fact the situation is far worse than it was when this absurdity began. And surely they can’t still blame whole language?

I just attended the Whole Language Umbrella’s  national conference on Long Island and there were less than 200 there. Really good people, though a number had taken early retirement. There are a few schools out there still carrying themselves whole language, quietly. And there are a whole lot of aging teachers who quietly keep on keeping on.

Now when this all began remember it was needed because that awful whole language was in wide use and was keeping kids from learning to read.

And so here is the ultimate Chutzpah – the reason for this colossal failure was that teacher educators where really PUSHING WHOLE LANGUAGE. Those incompetent teacher educators are more concerned with “issues of race, class, language and culture” and they think their job is to prepare teachers “for each candidate to develop his or her own unique philosophy of teaching, no matter how thin the ground is underneath” rather than to ‘train’ them.’But now these and many other questions are largely settled. Leaving the practice of teaching up to individual discretion denies novices access to what is actually known about how children learn best.” What is actually known about how children learn best is when they have a knowledgeable teacher who is a professional “kid-watcher”and can tailor instruction to the learner.

After all  that, NCTQ still has the chutzpah to blame their lack of success on whole language. Here’s what they say:

“Nowhere has this approach proved more damaging than in the coursework elementary teacher candidates must take in reading instruction. It is commonly assumed that teacher educators choose to train candidates in “whole language” methods rather than scientifically-based reading instruction.  Actually, little such training occurs, as whole language is not an instructional method that a teacher might be trained to apply, but merely a theory (flawed at that) based on the premise that learning to read is a “natural” process. The whole-language approach tracks nicely with a philosophy of teacher education in which technical training is disparaged.”(NCTQ p 93)

NCTQ spent  a few years on trial runs and now they are ready for their main event  And what an event. They have bullied teacher education programs to send their course syllabi to their reviewers. And with a little resistance many public programs had to comply (a Missouri Judge just ruled the President of the University of Missouri was right in saying they were not being sent because they are the intellectual property of their writers.)

NCTQ raters took special interest in the syllabi used in beginning reading courses and the text books their student were required  to read. And guess what? They hired Reid Lyon and Louisa Moats as consultants. And on their advice they found five true elements of reading as determined by  the National Reading panel( as interpreted by these consultants) could be used to rate reading courses on whether they taught (correctly) the five truths about reading. They were fair. Programs got 20% for each one. And then Louisa Moats was kind enough to recommend three highly qualified associates of hers to do the ratings.  One of them has been in charge of delivering EGRA the knock off of DIBELS to Liberia. Of course any mention of whole language was an automatic disqualifier.

The raters went to work rating the books the course syllabi required- what a mess and almost none were using books written by the real authorities.(Guess who?) Imagine over 60 of the book authors were members of the Reading Hall of Fame and only a few of them had written acceptable books.

And of course the raters found that although phonics gets the most time in the reading syllabi they looked at – it isn’t the right phonics .

Despite having inflicted untold harm on schools, teachers and a generation of American children the same discredited “scientific reading program” would be the only training students preparing to be teachers would get if NCTQ has its way.

What chutzpah!

It’s taken me a while to figure out though, why they still are blaming ’whole language’ for the failure of their own program. It’s because no one could teach reading through the absurd decodable books they mandated and the DIBLES test which makes school failures out of five year olds their first week of kindergarten. Everybody smuggled in a few good kids books, let the kids write in journals, or recognized when a kid in their class was being mislabeled by the DIBELS nonsense test. To those who chose to control what teachers could teach this was a lack of fidelity to the program and due to their whole language teacher education programs.

The answer to this Chutzpah is to realize that it is really them against us. They are the advocates of “true  scientifically based anti whole language.” And we are the researchers who built a base of knowledge, the teacher educators who have devoted their lives to preparing professional teachers, and the courageous teachers who have taught the researchers and teacher educators as they were being taught. And of course the children who would be deprived of their right to literacy and learning if those who seek to “ regulate” teacher education and deprofessionalize teachers are successful.