IRA: The old and the new

I'm  just back from IRA in Chicago. I was President in Chicago 30 years earlier. Ira Aaron liked to tell the story that when I gave my Presidential speech only my nine-month old grandson Reuben turned his back on me. Debi had put him down in the aisle and he began to crawl away from the podium.

IRA has been through some hard times lately. Executive directors have come and gone amid rumors and lawyer imposed secrecy. The staff has had an almost 100 % holdover. Income and membership are down.

The new executive director,Marcie Craig Post met informally with past presidents and promised transparency.
She wants to visit us and get our advice. All signs so far are good.

One thing I ohpe we can turn around is the rampant commercialism. The badge holders had PEARSON on them  Pearson is underfire for being one of the corporate sponsors of the political group that's being writing the extreme legislation. . Yetta led a campaign to turn them around to get rid of advertising Pearson.

The opening session began with a commercial with a talking giraff advertising an alphabet phonics prorgram.
A young chorus sang (where did they find so many white kids in one place in|Chicago?)
And then came the major speaker  who reminded me of the spoof they do on Saturday Night LIve of the motivational speaker. Fortunately those of us on stage couldn't make out what he was saying. There is an explosion of protest on the internet on having this self-promoting, anti teacher anti teachers' union speaker .
I assume he came free with his publisher supporting his appearance.

This commercialization of IRA has to stop.

Viva La Aurora

On Monday and Tuesday Yetta and I got our reality fix. Pretty heady stuff.
Imagine going into beautiful  well-kept schools, teeming with
multicolored, multilingual youngsters and meeting with young teachers and their not
much older coaches  who can speak the language of RMI and RMA. Each
came to share with us the case studies they are doing of sixth to
eleventh grade students who read at various levels of proficiency and to talk about their plans to

    engage their students in a range of literacy experiences. The

case studies will be part of a research project being conducted by
Lisa Escarcega, the research director for the district and
Charlotte Butler, the secondary English director who conceived the

idea of turning English classes into literacy workshops using miscue
analysis and retrospective miscue analysis as central tools. It's
Charlotte who hand picked and continues to nurture this remarkable group of
educators. She expects  a lot of them and gives them a lot of support.
 Her Toyota Avalon has its own phone number and she was busy
orchestrating her program on her hands free phone as she drove us to
the schools.

 Each of the teachers we met with was excited about the tools they were
using to understand their students and they asked questions which
stretched our thinking  about what was going on in the heads of these
teen and preteen readers.

A common concern of the bright young literacy experts ( remember I'm 84 so
20, 30 and 40 some things are young to me) are bilingual Spanish

    English students who make few miscues but have weak comprehension.

   On the other hand there was one Korean- American seventh grader who made

    many miscues but produced an impressive retelling.

Aurora Pubic Schools has a policy of spending 10% of its budget on
staff development.

Charlotte  brought together literacy educators from the surrounding
area and  from local universities for a lunch meeting. We were
reminded of the other political reality as they shared their concern
over Colorado's version of the "must read by the end of third grade
law". Local educators have apparently won a victory in that the law
will not make failure mandatory but there seems to still be a
requirement that the test used must involve a hand held device for
recording and reporting scores. And guess which test that would mean?

Our experience in Aurora was a real world demonstration of what should
be happening in American schools everywhere as real professionals use
their knowledge and expertise to work collaboratively to produce confident eager readers.
Instead of course teachers and other educators have had to fight to
protect themselves and their students from the imposition of DIBELS
and worse.

Charlotte will be presenting with Debi Goodman at WLU in St.Louis.in July.

Glorious lingustic imperfection

Last night I had one of my epiphanies. It came to me in the privacy of the commode.

Language is gloriously imperfect. It is a marvelous achievement of our species but it isn't perfect. Though it is rule governed virtually every rule has its exceptions.Why in every language does the same word  have many meanings and why are there many ways of saying the same thing? Why are there homophones, homographs and homonyms,? Language is constantly changing but as language communities become more sophisticated, knowlegeable and educated shouldn't that change be toward a more perfect form? Shouldn't language become more regular and simpler as it matures and changes? Why do strange phenomena such ass the many different forms of be- is am,was were, be, been, being persist? Why do some languages lose future tense  or second person plural. If alphabetic writing is the end product of evolution why do non-alphabetic forms of writing continue in use?

And why is language perception so clearly based on illusion?

 I want to argue that language is imperfect because:

1. It needs to be. If it were perfect it would not serve our needs. It has to be dynamic and easily changed because our need for it is always changing.

2. It can be. By that I mean that our brains are comfortable with all this imperfection. Not only can they make sense of imperfect language, they thrive on it. Our brains are equiped with a set for ambiguity. They thrive on redundancy. Something in the way the human brain uses language requires it to be imperfect, to be malleable, flexible , and recursive.

It is easier to argue my first point than the second because the manner in which the brains represents meaning to itself is not well understood. We all have the experience of knowing what we want to say but not finding the right way of expressing it. I'm avoiding talkng about how the brain "stores " meaning, or ideas or words because I'm not convinced that's what it does. There seems to be some way the brain constructs and organizes what it "knows".

This is not to say that there is no need for language to be consistent in the way it is used. It wouldn't work if we didn't share in the way we used it- if we didn't "play by the rules" But it wouldn't also work if it required each of us to use it precisely and perfectly either. 

I'll have more to say about imperfection. What do you think?

Yetta was a keynote speaker at Central Connecticutt University. last week.
This came today from Lois Bridges:

Here is some good news for you.  The Connecticut Corporations paid $35,000 to have Michelle Rhee speak. They ran full page ads in newspapers and 30 second spots on TV . The talk was free and 75 people showed up. Yetta Goodman spoke two days later at Central Connecticut University because Jesse invited her despite protest from the department saying she was 'old hat.' They charged $60 a person and they did not have enough chairs.  Over 400 teachers came to take notes and learn about a real way to teaching reading."

Louise Rosenblatt  a decade or two older than us, used to wag her finger at us and say " You young people....
We "old hats" appreciate the work you young people are doing to keep the flame of holistic scientific wisdom brightly shining. What goes around comes around- which is what my linguistic friend Pete Friies would call formulaic language as is "old hat"

Frame us as you will: we've miles to go before we sleep- and  books to write and battles to be fought- vebal ones=that is.  And who is this Rhee lady?

Ken Goodman

The living history of my Declaration of Professional Conscience

Decades ago I wrote The Declaration of Professional Conscience  for Teachers.

It was , of course, a declaration of my own conscience in which I stated what I believed a truly professional teacher could agree with . I hoped it could be the basis for teachers sharing with colleagues, their students the parents of heir students, and their administrators. It was away of saying, "I am a professional. I know what I am doing and why I am doing it."

I believed then that in the North America and in many other parts of the world, including third world countries a generation of dedicated and extremely well prepared professional teachers was emerging who were capable of bringing their students to a higher level of literacy, knowledge and sell-confidence than ever before.

At the same time I have always been aware that there are strong forces in our societies that do not believe in public education They would like to control and limit access to literacy and they would prefer to deprofessionalize teachers. 

Over the years the declaration has been republished from time time. At one time every elementary teacher in Venezuela got a Spanish translation.

And recently with the support of Richard Owen it has been widely distributed and found  a place in the 

new political awareness of teachers and their response to the unprecedented attack on teachers and their unions in Wisconsin and other states. Hundreds of teachers have signed the decalration on Richard Owens's website,. http://www.change.org/petitions/a-declaration-of-professional-conscience-for-teachers

And several schools have declared themselves Professional Conscience Schools.

Bess Altwerger , with Rick Meyer, has done much to promote the declaration as a device for gaining respect for teachers in her remarkable work in organizing the Save our Schools march on Washington and the on-going movement that has resulted.

Perhaps some day we will have a secretary of education who understands that it is only through dedicated, professional teachers that American schools can achieve the goal of educating all of our children to the highest degree of their needs, abilities and aspirations. Then maybe the declaration will hang on the door or wall of the Secretary's office. Or maybe not.

Global warming? Whose knowledge counts?

Cherry Blossoms are a month early in DC. In Tucson this morning it may have dropped below freezing. Our citrus are loaded with opening blossoms and I have delicate camelias in full bloom in my court yard. Not to mention two azalea bonsais ready to bloom.
All last week our high daily tempertures were above 80

And still there are decision makers who doubt that global warming is a proven phenomenon

Here is anther example of the disdain in the political world for knowledge, scholarship,or just plain truth.
I'm editing a book for the Reading Hall of Fame based on presentations at several professional conferences during 2011. The chapters document that the same disdain for authority in mandating reading policy is happening all over the world. The World Bank and USAID is funding the EGRA( Distarr) in African , Asian  and Latin American languages. Expensive testing in many countries shows that kids can't read nonsense either in colonial languages or in their own native tongue.Duh!

In France, Germany and Portugal the same pedagogy of the absurd as in the English speaking countries is being  being imposed as part of a widespread attempt to privatize education.

On the other hand perhaps the forces of absurdity may have over reached. They have come to believe their own lies to the point where they are making clear to teachers and and public workers all over  that they have to enter the political arena. Remember it was the Wisconsin teachers occupying their state capitol that precipitated the occupy movement across America.

As my sister used to quote Alice :the world is getting curiouser and curiouser

Retention is a terrible punishment

March 7

Remember that big kid in fifth grade who was 12 years old and used to beat up all the 10 year olds? One of the many dumb ideas that keeps being reborn as the solution to the problems of schooling is that non-achieving kids should be retained in the same grade for an additional year or years.

The latest rendition is the law being perpetrated in Arizona and many other states which condemns children who  haven't met the criteria for reading achievement to repeat third grade until they do.

One of the earliest educational research studies done in 1909 by Ayres was called "Laggards in our Schools" . It grew out of concern for the cost of keeping children in the same grade sometimes for years. Since then many studies have shown that punishing non-achievers by making them stay in the same grade causes more problems than it solves.

Among the problems of retaining kids is the bullying by sullen, over-age over size kids who pick on little classmates in response to their own humiliation.

David Berliner pointed out in an interview on NPR this week that the retainees may do a bit better on tests because they are a year older but the money spent on keeping them in the same grade could be better spent on doing something different for them instead of having them repeat what didn't work the year before.

The dumb idea is often defended against the concept of social promotion- keeping students with their age group through school. We need to understand that as kids grow older their differences in every sense do not decrease they increase.

One misconception so common it is laughable is that all kids showed be "working at grade level". Grade level is an artifact of norm reference testing. It is the average score reached by all children in a given grade taking the test. So by definition half of all kids are above and half are below grade l.

Schools need to deal with this diversity.  Dewey said it clearly : we can make the kids adjust to school . Or we can adjust the school to them.  As a teacher I knew I couldn't win them all- some kids have real problems schools can't solve alone. But every failure was my failure too. What is the point of punishing kids for not learning? Even worse is punishing inner city kids who have never had one teacher for a whole year for the failures of their system. Or the smart kids who do ok on the tests but don't do the dumb work sheets and get failing grades.

 And retention is the a terrible punishment. It humiliates. A nine year old who reads at the level of some six year olds is still bigger, more physically developed, and with more mature interests. He or she will do better with age peers. The research has consistently shown that.

This is one more example of not honoring the knowledge of professionals and imposing political decisions on both professional teachers and unfortunate students.

Let's make the politicians wear the dunce caps for another bad old idea