Archive for Opinion

Anyone suddenly finding themselves transported back to the 1860s would immediately notice many differences in the way people lived and dressed and in terms of transport, industry and communication. But there would be one institution that would be instantly familiar. The schools, with teachers drilling large classes in the three "Rs," have hardly changed at all.

It is odd to think that in a time of globalization, mass transport, and communication systems, and the inexorable rise of the computer, the education system remains unaffected. It should be remembered that young children have a strong desire to learn. Yet, in our present system in the United Kingdom and in spite of the changes to society, this is not encouraged. Instead, they are given what they most resent; learning is replaced by being taught.

The National Curriculum, with the implacable domination of fact, the countless testing, and the compartmentalization into skills and subjects, runs counter to all that children need. Read more of this opinion piece by Cedric Cullingford, professor at Huddersfield University's School of Education and Professional Development in The Yorkshire Post online.

 “Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card” is, despite that subtitle, a draw-your-own-conclusions sort of documentary. The film, which has its premiere tonight, Monday, June 23, 2008, on HBO, observes the 2005 school year at Frederick Douglass High in Baltimore, a troubled institution that has not fared well in meeting the benchmarks established by No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s education initiative. (Broadcasting at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times; 8 p.m. Central)

But No Child Left Behind occupies relatively little of the two-hour film, which is by veteran documentarians Alan and Susan Raymond. And the standard complaints about the law—for instance that it forces schools to be preoccupied with test taking at the expense of more enriching types of education—don’t seem to interest the Raymonds.

Instead they take lingering looks at Douglass’s teachers and administrators as they work and at its students as they, more often than not, don’t work. Though eventually the Raymonds (just barely) take sides—they seem not to be fans of Mr. Bush’s program—their dismaying film isn’t really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It’s asking whether anything can. Read more of this review in The New York Times online.

When I started kindergarten, aged five, I was already an independent and enthused reader (this makes me sound annoyingly precocious, but I also couldn't tie my shoelaces until I was 12). Of all the exciting things that formal education had to offer, it was the weekly visit to the well-stocked school library that put a spring in my step as I boarded the yellow bus.

On our first class visit, after solemnly absorbing the instructions of the school librarian about how to turn pages and whatnot, my classmates and I were let loose on the stacks. I made a beeline for the looming four-foot shelves that were stocked with Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But just as my chubby little hands grasped a copy of Betsy's Busy Summer, a book featuring an epic watermelon seed-spitting contest, a stern hand clamped down on my shoulder.

"No, Jean," said my teacher, turning me away from the delicious fat volume towards the shelves with thin ones. "The books for you are over there." It was devastating. Read Jean Hanna Edelstein's blog in The Guardian online.

It is the season of commencement speeches. High schools and colleges near and far are celebrating their graduates by hosting celebrity speechmakers. We listen for sound bites from the Bills—Clinton, Cosby, and Gates—along with CEOs and novelists, college presidents, and politicians.

Most of their talks inspire, but many have also adopted an underlying message that links education, graduation, and material success. In our excitement for the graduates, we've put the emphasis in the wrong place.

America's Founding Fathers knew that an educated citizenry was the only means of preserving a true democracy. Democracy is not about "the majority." It's about debate. First adopted by the rational Greeks, democracy is about arguing freely to arrive at the wisest and most sensible conclusion for a community or a country. Rigorous debate—not just sound bites—requires critical thinking; hence the crucial role of education. Read more of this opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor online.

These days the book business has an aura of crisis and gloom, while visits to libraries are surging. Over two billion items are checked out annually, and nearly all libraries offer free Internet access along with many of the amenities of a bookstore.

Truth be told, the book business has always had an aura of crisis and gloom. It’s the Eeyore of industries. But lately, it’s become clear that the book industry really does need to be saved: from itself.

It might start by looking more closely at what libraries do. After all, libraries know that developing a strong book culture involves making it easy for people to discover and sample new books, to acquire books quickly even if they aren’t on the local library’s shelves, and to share their reading experiences with others. One of the most powerful reasons for choosing a book is having another reader recommend it. In short, sharing isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.

Read more of Barbara Fister’s commentary in Library Journal online.

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week’s melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic”— Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description—that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class—fractured families—would have to be faced. But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas—larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes—were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen. Read more of George Will’s opinion piece in The Washington Post online.

I have a confession to make. For the entire 28 years that I taught high school English, I taught to the test. And I'm proud to finally admit it. I know that fessing up to this perceived transgression will reflexively draw clamor from everyone with children in school. That's because teaching to the test is considered tantamount to cheating on your income tax returns. But stay with me here: This type of reaction is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of both curriculum and instruction.

If we’re being honest, teaching to the test is done by almost all other effective teachers. In fact, I did so—along with many other an effective educator—way before teachers were evaluated on the basis of their students’ ability to perform on the standardized tests that now constitute the sine qua non of accountability. That’s because it is eminently sound pedagogy.

Read more of this opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor online.

What is it about literacy education that gets people’s adrenalin going?

Whether it’s a misplaced apostrophe in a student’s essay, or an exam question inviting a feminist interpretation of Othello, the teaching of reading and writing is the subject of fierce debates in the media. The debates have reached such intensity in recent years that public confidence in literacy teachers has been undermined and many believe we have a literacy crisis in our schools.

Literacy crises have been declared at other points in Australian history but the pattern is the same. Claims are made that standards are slipping and young people are leaving school without basic literacy skills. Next come the reports in the press, letters to the editor and discussion on talkback radio as parents, teachers, union officials, leaders of professional organisations and academics respond. The effect is always powerful, with the public assuming that there is a literacy problem and that teachers are to blame.

Not surprisingly, concern about literacy education is not exclusive to Australia. In the United States, George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, with its narrow focus on maths and reading test scores, has provoked deep division in the education community. Read more by Ilana Snyder, associate professor in the faculty of education, Monash University, about the challenges of literacy education in The Age online.

Two studies relating to Philadelphia released in the same week this month highlight the link between high school dropout rates and rates of incarceration. A study by a Washington criminal-justice think tank revealed that Philadelphia has the highest rate of incarceration in the country, while another study, by a Maryland-based nonprofit, reported that only half of Philadelphia’s students graduate from high school.

Educators know that children who attend high-quality preschool education programs are more likely to graduate from high school. We also know that children educated in small classes are more likely to master reading and math skills on schedule and graduate from high school on time. Nonetheless, the city spends about $24,000 per inmate per year, dwarfing the $9,951 a year Philadelphia spends to educate each of its 207,000 public and charter school students. Read more in this commentary by Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers in The Philadelphia Inquirer online.

 Identifying what needs to be fixed in the field of education is easy: the No Child Left Behind Act, currently up for reauthorization but stalled in Congress pending the next election. The elaborate law requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math, to test them again in high school, and to sprinkle in a few science tests along the way. Schools posting consistently poor test scores are supposed to be punished so that they’ll clean up their acts and allow NCLB’s ultimate goal to be achieved in 2014. The act imagines that essentially all students across the country will be “proficient” in that year, meaning that they’ll all pass the battery of standardized tests required by the NCLB. Hence the act’s catchy title.

NCLB was enacted in 2001 with huge bipartisan support, though many Democrats in Congress have since disclaimed if not denounced it, presumably having had some time to read it. The act is at once the Bush administration’s signature piece of education legislation, its most significant domestic policy initiative, and the most intrusive federal education law in our nation’s history. The federal government provides less than 10% of all education funding, yet NCLB drives education policy in every school district in the country. In short, it’s a big deal. It’s also in need of repair. No one—conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican—doubts that. Read more at Slate.com.

Fixing It is a 10-part series on Slate.com offering detailed policy prescriptions for the next president. This article is by Jim Ryan, the academic associate dean and William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau distinguished professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he teaches law and education.

Ten years ago, Ben Macintyre of the London Times predicted that the e-book would change the way people read forever. Ten years later, he's changed his mind. "The death of the traditional book has been predicted, wrongly, from the very start of the digital revolution," he writes. Indeed, he now believes that the e-book and the traditional book may end up not being rivals, "but symbiotic species, sharing the same territory in amicable coexistence."

For further details, read the full article.

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs—students’ declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year—are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy—or an ensemble of literacies—will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision. Read this commentary by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner in The Washington Post online.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has issued its second list of books a lot of very well-read people hope you will read. Initially called the “most recommended” list, the NBCC has decided on a seasonal theme for this quarterly offering, namely “Good Reads: Winter List.” Five hundred critics and authors voted.

Here’s the winter fiction list:

1. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
3. Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
4. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
5. Zeroville by Steve Erickson (Europa Editions)

For more information, visit the NBCC website.

As a school librarian, I wind up reading all sorts of damning reports on students’ lack of reading skills. The latest dire news came from the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent “To Read or Not to Read” study, which warned that “less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14% decline from 20 years earlier.” High school students are faring even worse: Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of “nonreaders” has doubled over a 20-year period, from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004. This multitasking generation, we’re led to believe, can’t focus on any item for longer than nine minutes.

But despite the ominous reports, it’s business as usual for students today, at least the ones I’m talking to. So what gives?

Educators or parents might start by framing the questions differently. Who isn’t having trouble concentrating these days? Who doesn’t find it nearly impossible to stick with a 450-page novel? I suspect that the tipping point in information overload has tipped. Students’ aversion to reading does not necessarily signal a weakness, much less a dislike of reading. For them, and now maybe for me, moving on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage. Read more of this opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor online.

After musing on religion, pride, and the vagaries of old age, radio host Garrison Keillor continues:

... And then there is the grief that old righteous people inflict on the young, such as our public schools. I'm looking at U.S. Department of Education statistics on reading achievement and see that here in Minnesota—proud, progressive Minnesota—on a 500-point test (average score: 225), 27% of 4th graders score below basic proficiency, and black and Hispanic kids score 30-some points lower than whites on average, and the 30%of public school kids who come from households in poverty (who qualify for reduced-price school lunches) score 27 points lower than those who don’t come from poverty.

Reading is the key to everything. Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society. That 27% are at serious risk of crippling illiteracy is an outrageous scandal. Read more of Keillor's opinions on phonics and Reading First in The Chicago Tribune online.

“Perfect Peter has just finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” says his mother. “He taught himself to read over the holidays and now he can’t stop.” Perfect Peter is only four. He is also an exception. Teaching children to read and inspiring them with a love of books takes time and patience—something most of us lack.

It takes hours of M for Maisy Mountain, following Floppy the dog through the Oxford Reading Tree series and renditions of The Tiger who Came to Tea. No wonder one fifth of our children in the United Kingdom leave school unable to read and a quarter of the young haven’t read a book in the past year. For many hard-pressed families and schools, reading has become too much like hard work. Which explains why the government has become obsessed with encouraging everyone to pick up a book again.

But does it matter? Isn’t an obsession with books just an out-of-date, middle-class hang-up? Read this opinion piece at Telegraph.co.UK.

"Faced with the daunting challenges posed by the new global economy, the U.S. is squandering one of its greatest assets in the form of its gifted and talented students," writes guest columnist Walt Gardner in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Yet the issue remains curiously absent from public debate among presidential candidates."

Gardner's commentary places some of the blame at the federal level, where billions are spent on programs to bring all students up to minimal proficiency and only "a paltry $9.7 million" was spent in 2006 on the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, the only federal initiative specifically focused on this group of students.

Gardner goes on to discuss the pros and cons of Advanced Placement programs, the potential value of dual enrollment (high school and college), and the importance of professional development for teachers of the gifted. "Despite popular belief, not all gifted students learn by themselves," writes Gardner. "They need inspired instruction and a challenging curriculum specifically geared to their needs."

For further information, read the full article.

Reading First, funded at $1 billion per year, is among the most promising federal efforts to help the poor. Title I, funded at $12 billion per year, is not nearly so effective. That President Bush has just signed into law a 2008 budget that gives the latter an 8.6% increase in funding and the former a 64% decrease confirms the wisdom of Lincoln, who observed, “In republican democracies, public sentiment is everything. With it nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

Notwithstanding Reading First’s success increasing early literacy rates among the poor, public sentiment for the program remains weaker than that of its enemies, who have proved more influential in Congress and more determined than Reading First’s stewards in the administration. Continue reading this opinion piece by Shepard Barbash in The National Review online.

 "Our No. 1 education program is incoherent, unworkable, and doomed," writes Richard Rothstein in The American Prospect. "But the next president still can have a huge impact on improving American schooling." To find out Rothstein's thoughts on how this might best happen, visit the American Prospect website and click on "Current Issue" to find Rothstein's article.

In the old days we asked the village sage, or turned to a weighty reference book to learn something we wanted to know. Now we use the Internet for everything: to look up directions, read news, and to diagnose ourselves with far-fetched diseases. Afternoons can be whiled away meandering through its delightful passages.

Doris Lessing, the stern 88-year-old novelist, does not approve of this practice. Last week she used her Nobel Prize acceptance speech to diss the Internet and, by implication, Google, an innocent search engine that wants nothing more than to be a friend to all humanity. She said we lived in a “fragmenting culture” where it was “common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.”

The Internet had “seduced a whole generation with its inanities,” she claimed. Even reasonable people had become addicted to it, and before they know it, often find “a whole day has passed in blogging, etc.” This time would be better spent reading books. Lessing ended by predicting the death of literature, because a culture that doesn’t value reading cannot produce great writers. Read more of this opinion piece by Jacqueline Maley in The Sydney Morning Herald online.

California has done an impressive job filling schools with at least nominally qualified teachers. The next challenge—a tougher one—is to retain them by vastly changing the way they are trained, evaluated and rewarded.

In 2000, one in seven teachers (42,400 out of 310,000) in California lacked a teaching credential; by this year, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning found, that had dropped to one in 20—about 16,000. And the remaining 5% consists mainly of first– and second–year teachers who are working on credentials at night.

Despite that good news, gaps and inequities remain, and the turnover of young teachers remains high. One in five teachers quits the profession nationwide within four years; in low–income schools, it’s two out of five. Read more of what California is doing in terms of professional development in this editorial in The San Jose Mercury News.

 No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” has instead spawned lowered standards. The law will eventually be reauthorized because doubling down on losing bets is what Washington does. But because NCLB contains incentives for perverse behavior, reauthorization should include legislation empowering states to ignore it. NCLB was passed in 2001 as an extension of the original mistake, President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the first large Washington intrusion into education K through 12.

This expansion of Washington’s role in the quintessential state and local responsibility was problematic, for three reasons. First, most new ideas are dubious, so federalization of policy increases the probability of continentwide mistakes. Second, education is susceptible to pedagogic fads and social engineering fantasies—schools of education incubate them—so it is prone to producing continental regrets. Third, America always is more likely to have a few wise state governments than a wise federal government. Read more of George Will’s opinion piece in The Cincinnati Post.

 Congressional leaders have finally acknowledged what most observers have known for months: The No Child Left Behind Act, the signature domestic legislation of the Bush administration, will not be reauthorized in the foreseeable future. And it should not be, at least not until the law’s blatant loopholes are addressed. The truth that no one in power seems willing to admit is that the federal law encourages statistical manipulations that make reports of academic progress suspect and, in some cases, virtually meaningless. Read what John Merrow, a Peabody Award-winning television journalist for PBS’ “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” has to say in Education Week.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has done a great service by trying to monitor how much young people and adults are reading. Although I certainly agree with NEA on the importance of reading—especially extended reading of challenging and worthwhile text, and I suspect that NEA is right—students and adults are doing less of such reading these days, I do have some disagreements with them. The report, To Read or Not To Read, is available on the NEA website.

There is a temptation to dismiss books with titles like How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read as a joke or a marketing ploy, a clever publisher’s gimmick designed to position a product in the marketplace. You see a book with a title like that and assume someone is having a laugh or has produced one of those bluffer’s guides, a kind of Cliffs Notes-style fake book for the would-be pretentious. What you might not expect is a serious—if witty—examination of the act of reading itself, the habits of readers and the reflexive guilt of nonreaders. It is a postmodern attack on the oppressive canon of “great” work, designed to liberate those of us who feel intimidated by the great gray wall of books we’ll never know. Read this piece about how to engage creatively with what you do read in The Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

J.K. Rowling is suing the publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon, which began life as a popular Potter blog, and wants a court to rule that she has the sole right to profit from the “descriptions, character details, and plot points” of the Potter tales. Now, a federal judge has issued an injunction against RDR Books to prevent them from completing the typesetting, selling the books, or even marketing it on Amazon.com. Read Nate Anderson’s take on the lawsuit at Ars Technica.

Violence and verbal abuse against teachers at a new high; English schools outperforming Scottish ones; tens of thousands of pupils in Scotland failing to master basic literacy and numeracy skills by the age of 14: just a few of the headlines in the Scottish press this year. Whatever has happened to our reputation in education, and the respect we had for teaching and for learning?

For as long as I can remember, a Scottish education was held to be one of the finest in the world. We seemed to recognize earlier than most that learning was not simply a refining grace, but a vital ladder to a better life. And through that recognition, our teachers enjoyed a standing and regard that seemed timeless and unassailable. How did we let slip this prize and end up with a system beset with decline? It now battles with a relentless change and convulsion that has turned much of a teacher’s life into mesmerizing form-filling over targets, budgets and quotas. Read Bill Jamieson’s opinion piece in The Scotsman.

 As lawmakers consider renewal of the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind law, teachers are complaining that it places too much emphasis on testing. Actually, the problem is the lack of a universal test and the unachievable perfection demanded by the law. The 2002 bipartisan legislation calls for all students to be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. But the notion that all students will reach proficiency is simply folly—what University of California Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller calls “well-intentioned pie-in-the-sky.” In almost any social science experiment, perfection is unattainable unless the bar is set too low. If every student succeeds, we haven’t demanded enough of our students. Read more of this opinion piece by Daniel Borenstein in The Contra Costa Times.

"It's time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.," writes Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert in the October 9 edition of The New York Times. He quotes Daniel Koretz of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who recently said, "We've now had four or five different waves of educational reform that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That's really what No Child Left Behind is."

Herbert's column notes that many schools and states may be tempted to take shortcuts in attempts to ensure that test scores rise. He also quotes a new study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association as saying that "improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of these tests."

For further information, read the full article.

  In this New York Times opinion piece, Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and the assistant secretary of education for research from 1991 to 1993, says that the main goal of NCLB—that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014—is simply unattainable. She argues that the federal government “should supply unbiased information about student academic performance to states and local districts. It should then be the responsibility of states and local districts to improve performance.”

A former senior Labor policy adviser has attacked the vision for school education unveiled by Australian state and territory governments as “dangerous drivel” and a “retrograde step that will dumb down school curriculum across Australia.” Ken Wiltshire, professor of public policy at the University of Queensland, told The Australian that the Future of Schooling report showed Labor education policy was still driven by the teachers’ unions. According to the report released this week, “the judgment of teachers is paramount,” with external state exams and national tests supplementing the teachers’ assessment. “External assessment should be what drives the whole national school curriculum. School-based assessment is subsidiary,” he said. Read about the controversy.

  Slate, the online magazine, has published an opinion piece by Robert Gordon calling for the reauthorization of NCLB. Gordon writes, “Congress should fix the unintended consequences of NCLB. But lawmakers should not undo the central consequence the law intended and the critics dislike: the demand that schools do better by the kids they fail.”

Three years ago, teachers and other employees at Meadowcliff Elementary in southwest Little Rock, Arkansas, were offered pay bonuses for boosting test scores. Shortly after that, principal Karen Carter noticed some unusual events. Increasingly, cafeteria workers sat with students to chat about school work. Even more startling, the janitor began taking his breaks in the cafeteria reading a book, just to serve as a role model. And when test scores at the end of the year showed improvement, teachers whooped for joy: The better each of their students did, the bigger their bonuses. The janitor and other support staff also were rewarded for the school’s overall gains. Such is the power of “merit pay,” long opposed by teachers and their unions. Read the opinion piece at usatoday.com.

  America’s business community was an early advocate of reform and a prime mover in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which required the states to improve public schooling for all students. In an editorial, The New York Times supports efforts by the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation’s largest companies, to make sure Congress maintains a “transparent accountability system” in the NCLB law.

As students of all ages return to the classroom this fall, the wireless world is changing the nature and possibilities of their education. Teachers who are using blogs, social-networking sites, and video-sharing sites in school settings are giving young people the opportunity to tune their thinking and writing to a larger audience. When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection—or around the world, for that matter—can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product. Read more of this column from The Christian Science Monitor.

  With House hearings on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act beginning today, The Washington Post asked educators, lawmakers and others for their views of the legislation and what might improve it. Read the responses from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, NEA President Reg Weaver, and others.

Forget all the talk about poor teaching standards or a “dumbing down”of the school curriculum and exams. The real reason why Britain’s schoolchildren are not making as much progress as they could is because their classrooms are too bright. A paper to be presented today (September 6) to the British Educational Research Association conference warns that classrooms that are too light can cause headaches for pupils, making it less easy to concentrate in class. The main offender, one researcher says, is the kind of fluorescent lighting installed in more than 80% of classrooms. Read the article at The Independent online.

A visitor well versed in Southern stereotypes might be disappointed to discover that the indigenous people of Spartanburg, South Carolina, harbor a passion not for a benighted Confederacy, but for literature. In fact, few places in the nation are doing more to advance literacy than this historic textile-mill town, where books are free and reading is rewarded. Read more about the free book program in this article from The Orlando Sentinel, by columnist Kathleen Parker.

 With reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda as Congress returns from its recess, lawmakers must confront the fact that the law is causing many concerned parents to abandon public schools that are not failing. Susan Goodkin, the executive director of the California Learning Strategies Center, an education think tank, and David G. Gold, a lecturer and consultant on strategic issues in negotiation, write in today’s Washington Post that NCLB has created “a fundamental educational approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys their interest in learning.” Read more of their column.

  If Congress would do what we did at a recent brain and learning conference in Boston—ask 50 teachers from 25 states if the No Child Left Behind Act is working—it would not reauthorize the act in its current form. More than two–thirds of those 50 teachers, with an average of 23 years experience among them teaching in rural and urban communities and in rich and poor schools, said the legislation has only acted to hinder educational achievement. “Children are not being supported to advance,” said one, “they’re being dragged along or held back.” What is the problem? Actually, there are five. Read what veteran teachers Kathy Hirsh–Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have to say at projo.com, The Providence Journal’s website.

Business leaders in England feel educational standards have not improved since 1997, despite official data showing record exam and test results, a report says. More than half of those surveyed thought education and skills had not improved, the Institute of Directors (IoD), a business lobby, found in a survey of 500 members. The IoD report also claimed record investment had not led to exam results improving any faster than before. The government said record investment had improved standards in schools. Read about the debate at BBC News.

 Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008. Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md. The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Read an interview with Perstein, and an excerpt from her book, in USA Today.

As the seventh and final installment in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series hits bookstore shelves, Daniel Nexon of The New Republic writes that the series “functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs.” Read more of Nexon’s column, available for free from the CBS News website.

Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson says he has always liked the comma, but finds that its use is shrinking. He writes that “the comma’s sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can’t-wait-a-minute nature of modern life.” Read his column on how the comma’s fading popularity is also social commentary.

 They all voted for it, but that was then. Democratic presidential candidates came out swinging Monday, not at each other but at the No Child Left Behind law. They spoke at the annual convention of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. Read more of this article from The Washington Post. In a related story, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen argues that it requires more than money to fix our school systems. And the Washington Post's editors have urged Congress to talk about strengthening, not abandoning, the federal school accountability law.

Garrison Keillor doesn’t see much that he likes among many of the candidates running for president. But he finds that a trip to the library, “one of the nobler expressions of democracy,” can cheer him up. Read more of Keillor’s view of the library as a temple of freedom in this article from The Salt Lake Tribune.

 At the core of today’s debates over school accountability lies a contentious question: Does the federal No Child Left Behind Act represent a historic advance for civil rights, or a giant step backward for the children it purports to help? Disagreement is especially acute among advocates for English-language learners. These students pose a fundamental challenge for the No Child Left Behind accountability scheme, owing to the near-total absence of valid and reliable assessments of their academic achievement. James Crawford, the president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy, looks at these issues in this opinion piece from Education Week.

  Federal education officials plan to release a report that concludes that many states hold students to relatively low education standards in order to make the federal grade. (Schools that don’t make “adequate yearly progress” risk being flagged as underperforming.) Education experts Frederick Hess and Eva Baker raise their hands with ideas on how states can score better results. Read more about their views in this article from USA Today.

"Even though the public school system is far from perfect, public education remains the primary pillar supporting American democracy," writes William L. Bainbridge in a recent issue of the Florida Times-Union. Noting that the roots of America's public schools can be traced back to Plato, Bainbridge maintains that public schools remain vital to democracy's goal of producing citizens "from all of society who are prepared to succeed as contributing adults." For further information, read the full article.

  In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times writes that while the basic tenets of No Child Left Behind “should remain intact, and even be strengthened, the law needs an overhaul to deserve reauthorization this year.” The newspaper supports changes requiring yearly improvement for every student, an increased emphasis on effective teachers, and better testing. Read the editorial from the Los Angeles Times.

 In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) urges reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. He writes, “We know the law has flaws, but we also know that with common-sense changes and adequate resources, we can improve it by building on what we’ve learned. We owe it to America’s children, parents and teachers to reinforce our commitment, not abandon it.” Read more of Senator Kennedy’s column in The Washington Post.

 Virginia Sens. John W. Warner and James Webb have introduced legislation to protect schools from Bush administration threats to withhold millions of dollars in aid in a clash over federal testing rules. The bipartisan measure addresses a controversy that has swelled in Virginia and other states over testing requirements for students with limited English skills. Read about the proposal in this article from The Washington Post. In addition, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher voices his support for one of the Virginia school administrators caught in the middle of the dispute in this column.

 The No Child Left Behind Act puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. That’s the position taken by David C. Berliner, the Regents’ professor of education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, and a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and Sharon L. Nichols, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They state that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. Read more of their opinions in this commentary from Education Week.

“Today’s schools are charged with ensuring that all students, regardless of family incomes or circumstances, regardless of language barriers or disabilities, meet higher state-determined learning standards,” says Jay Haugen, superintendent of School District 197 in Minnesota. Writing in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Haugen adds, “We applaud this because education is the door to a successful life and a successful nation. But we have not been given resources adequate to meet these mandates.” In his commentary, Haugen points out that increasingly costly state and federal mandates require increasing investments in education. For further information, read the full article.

W. Stephen Wilson teaches mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. Last fall he conducted an experiment on the students in his Calculus I course. Wilson administered the same final exam to last fall’s students that he used for the same course in the fall of 1989. The surprise: The 1989 students did much better than their 2006 counterparts. Every day much ink is spilled discussing the failure of America’s schools. Most of this discussion centers on the children who never learn basic skills, those who never graduate high school. But the crisis goes much deeper. Continue reading this opinion piece at The New York Sun online.

“If there is one useful thing that has resulted from No Child Left Behind, it’s that for the first time, the [U.S.] government requires schools to track and publish test scores broken down by racial and ethnic group. And the numbers show something interesting: White kids, on average, score about the same in all subjects no matter what school they attend. Education researchers have found that it’s not race or ethnicity at all that best predict how a child will perform on a test: it’s socioeconomic status.” Read more of this reporter’s encounters with her neighborhood school at The Washington Post website.

English is now solidly entrenched in Japan, not only on TV but in stores, restaurants, magazines and so on, according to Marshall R. Childs, a Temple University teacher of English as a second language who has lived in Japan for two decades. English is not entrenched as a separate second language to be used according to its own conventions, he says. Instead, it ihas become a significant vocabulary that adds to the richness of Japanese. Read his commentary at Daily Yomiuri online.

Early childhood development and adult literacy are often discussed as separate topics, yet their interrelatedness is of utmost importance. Recent evidence exposes two disturbing findings. One: Nearly 9 million adult Canadians lack the literacy skills necessary to cope with everyday life. Two: Among developed countries, Canada is last in spending on early learning and child-care services. High literacy skills can equip a population to compete for quality jobs, to earn more, be healthier, build safer communities and to take an active role in civic life. Two leading educational experts in Canada call for more leadersip in early childhood education. Read their opinions at The Toronto Star website.

New Zealand needs an education system that puts students at the heart of learning, says Gillian Heald, former principal of Rangi Ruru Girls’ School in Christchurch and now a guardian of Secondary Futures and co-director of Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti. The problem is that students have to fit the system rather than the system meeting the needs of the student. This mass education approach was designed last century to weed out those “not suited” to higher education, and provide industry with an army of cheap, unskilled labor, she says. Mass education will not develop the highly skilled, adaptable and creative workers and citizens New Zealand will need if it is to thrive in the future. Read more of her perspective at in the Canterbury Press article at stuff.com.

A Toronto Star columnist says Canada should develop a long-range plan like China’s that aims at making China a more advanced economy in the next 15 or 20 years. In Canada’s case, David Crane says, that means thinking hard about how to ensure a decent life in the face of a much tougher global economic environment. Canada will need a highly literate, creative populace with strong learning skills and the ability to adapt. Crane cites two studies — one about readiness to learn in 5-year-olds and another about the link between the literacy skills of teens and their early reading ability. Early childhood development sets the trajectories for adult learning and health, he says. Read more at the Toronto Star website.

 While the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation requires that all students achieve proficiency on challenging standards by 2014, a new paper by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder concludes that there is no date by which all (or even nearly all) students in any subgroup can reach this goal. The authors say that no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. Even the highest scoring countries in the world cannot meet this standard, they say. The paper was presented at a symposium at Columbia University. For further information, read the full report.

Bill Moyers, president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and a veteran journalist, delivered a speech on October 27 to the Council of Great City Schools covering issues ranging from urban education to the federal deficit. Read the full speech on the TomPaine.com website.

“In a direct challenge to the English at their most reactionary, the Scottish Qualifications Authority has declared that it will accept text-messaging short forms in school examinations. The dark riders of archaism will protest and the backwoods will howl. . . . But the champions of reason are massing north of the border and need our support.” You are invited to join the debate at The Guardian (U.K.).

Geoffrey Cronin believes that the successes achieved by Reading First far outweigh the charges of corruption and conflict of interest that have been leveled against the program in the wake of the recent Inspector General’s report — charges he attributes to “whining publishers and peddlers who couldn’t pass muster as defined by the administration and Congress [and] set out to discredit the process instead.”

But Cronin may not be the neutral observer he appears to be. In identifying himself as “chairman and CEO of Edvocacy Research, a public charity,” he neglects to mention his own role in promoting specific programs and tools to teachers, school districts, and education agencies.

Find Cronin’s essay in The Washington Times

In a recent edition of the Toronto Star, columnist Linwood Barclay takes satirical aim at the Harper government’s decision to cut funding for adult literacy programs in Canada.

A university press and library adviser argues that Google's Book Search presents no threat to copyright holders, and deserves support because of the boon it offers to students and researchers.

Good schools gave them good grades. But they rarely read, their vocabularies are anemic, and few of them write at the level needed for college work, says a journalism professor in this opinion piece about today's college students.

Colorado's commissioner of education argues in an editorial that the literacy skills of children in the United States lag those of other nations, including poorer ones, because of deficiencies in teacher education.

Experts argue that while schools are a factor, there are other influences that must be addressed before the achievement gap can be closed.

An editorial argues that greater federal support for adolescent literacy is needed.

A newspaper editor and ESL volunteer argues that learning English is necessary for success in the United States, and well-meaning advocates who help create monolingual enclaves will confine new immigrants to a "linguistic ghetto" from which they will find it hard to escape.

Ignoring the wishes of parents and the advice of education experts, an ever-increasing number of school districts are moving to eliminate bilingual education in American public schools. Their motive? To boost scores on standardized tests. Columnist Dominic Maceri offers a critique of their reasoning in The Korea Times.

Inclusion is now a global value and is enshrined in United Nations declarations and government policy. So why doesn’t it work? Exeter University senior lecturer Phil Bayliss takes a critical look at “a school process that borders on a form of abuse.” Read his essay in the The Times Educational Supplement (UK).

Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator Nicholas Kristof wants to remove “bureaucratic barriers” that make it unnecessarily difficult for highly-skilled professionals in other fields to become teachers. Find Kristof’s essay in The Detroit News.

As the world celebrates Global Education Week, developing countries will be reflecting on how the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have negatively impacted on education programs. Emphasis on universal primary education has steered badly needed funds away from other education priorities, including adult literacy and women’s literacy. An editorial in The Standard (Kenya) outlines the case against IMF.

“Like sin with its many wiles, grammar defies all attempts to eliminate it,” says columnist and TESOL educator Marshall R. Childs. Look for his essay in The Daily Yomiuri (Japan).

“The evidence is clear: Reading comprehension depends largely on knowledge.”

So argues best-selling author E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in his new book, Building Knowledge: The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for All Children. Read a review and a series of related essays in the Spring 2006 issue of American Educator.

A proposal to use a phonics-based approach to reading instruction with children at the very start of their formal schooling runs counter to established evidence about early learning. So says the author of this opinion column in The Independent (UK).

A study shows that middle-school students in West Virginia don't read for pleasure much, and an editorial suggests reasons, warns of consequences, and urges action.

Why are graduates of U.S. schools unable to read and think as well as we might like them to? Newsweek columnist George Will is not shy about stating his opinion. In a column posted at msnbc.msn.com, Will defends the thesis that “The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education.”

The Reading Today Daily staff saw an e-mail recently from a person who was concerned about a new ad campaign being launched by Audible.com, a leading supplier of audiobooks. The campaign is based on posters that say “Don't Read,” a parody of the American Library Association’s well-known READ posters.

The e-mailer wondered if teachers, librarians, and others who dedicate their lives to reading would be offended. She was concerned enough to talk to an executive at Audible.com, who assured her the literacy community would get the joke. But she still wasn’t sure, and asked her colleagues how they felt. “Am I just being too sensitive?” she asked.

Well, we think that might be possible. We understand that it's a bit jarring to see an organization telling people “Don't Read.” But it’s hard to believe that people are so suggestible that on seeing the posters they’ll drop any printed matter and wait, zombielike, for another ad campaign to tell them what to do next. We suspect and hope that the folks at Audible.com don’t really want people not to read. What we suspect and hope they’re really doing is trying to get people to see how much quality literature is available in audio form. There’s a ton of it out there, as a matter of fact. And “spoken-word” literature, as it’s sometimes known, has an added dimension. A skillful reader can add a great deal of meaning and emotion, as popular radio shows such as Off the Shelf and Selected Shorts demonstrate. And in our experience, people who hear a piece of literature read aloud often decide they need to own the printed version after all. And really, when you think about it, stories have only been written down for a few thousand years, but they’ve been spoken for what is almost certainly tens of thousands of years. We're hard-wired to pay attention to them. That’s something the educational community can use. Teachers read to rapt students every day—there’s a tradition there.

So we’ve decided not to grab up pitchforks and torches and go running over to Audible.com’s headquarters, should such exist in the brick-and-mortar world. We’re going to hope that people’s interest will be piqued enough to give it a try, and maybe start listening to literature, or nonfiction, or whatever spoken-word content their hearts desire as they work in the garden or do laundry. We're reminded of a fellow we saw reading the paper one morning. He had it spread out on his steering wheel. Of his car. As he went down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in congested traffic that was moving about 35 miles an hour. We hope he’s still around. And we hope he sees the posters.

So it may be paradoxical, but we sort of hope the “READ” and “DON'T READ” campaigns are both successful, because we think that audiobooks could very well help more than they hurt. We browsed around at the Audible.com website, and happened to see the list of Top 10 downloads in British literature. Number two was The Canterbury Tales. Number one was Brave New World. We had to smile at that.

From the first sentence,

“The abandonment by teachers of the traditional method of teaching reading, known as phonics, precipitated the greatest educational catastrophe of the past 50 years,”

to the last,

“The villains are the education establishment: the professors of education, the teacher training institutions . . . ,”

you’ll never find a better example of an editorial disguising itself as a news item than this one, from The Telegraph (UK).

Over time, schools in the United States have evolved from academic centers into "public child-rearing institutions, something closer in that respect to the Israeli kibbutz, or commune," says Noel Epstein in an article in the November 27 issue of the Washington Post.

Schools now run before-school programs and provide after-school care. They share responsibility for keeping kids off drugs, instilling ethical behavior, curbing AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, preventing student suicide, and much more. In effect, says Epstein, they are "hybrid institutions that are raising many of our children, not just educating them."

For more information, read the full article.

When the British government announced last week that it was extending the principle of a compulsory curriculum to babies and toddlers, the plan was met with wide and vocal opposition. But an editorial in The Independent (UK) argues that “the detractors really should wait to see what is proposed before rushing into print with their objections.”

Michigan's National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in reading spur a call for all stakeholders to do more to promote what the editorial writers emphasize is a key skill.

Five letters to the editor of The New York Times express different views on the best ways to improve outcomes for underachieving students.

In a recent address to address to the national conference of the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) in Canberra, Australian educator Brian Caldwell challenged his audience to move beyond 19th-century distinctions between “public” and “private” schools:

“The era of public education defined as a system of schools built, owned and operated by the state, free of a private contribution except where it is voluntary, is over.... Henceforth, ‘public’ should be defined in terms of a set of public values that include quality, access and choice, with a commitment to high levels of achievement for all students in all settings, with all schools together, regardless of ownership, contributing to the public good in terms of the wellbeing of the individual and the nation.”

Read more of Caldwell’s address at The Age (Australia).

If we’re serious about improving quality of instruction, says Australian educator Ross Farrelly, we have to abandon the “myth” that teachers are altruistic individuals, motivated purely by the love of teaching, and start paying them according to merit. Read his essay in The Age (Australia).

Before you buy the Harry Potter book, warns commentator Cristopher Bantick, you had better be sure that your child can read. According to Bantick, “30 per cent of students lack basic literacy skills before they reach year 9 level, when they should be able to read Harry Potter easily.” He’s also quite willing to fix blame for the crisis, accusing reading teachers of “an abrogation of responsibility to instruct children adequately.” Read his essay in The Age (Australia).

Bowing to a variety of pressure groups, today's textbooks don't have enough literary value to persuade students that reading is worthwhile, argues a teacher in a USA Today editorial.

Correspondent Janet Daley offers her “better idea” for addressing the academic perfomance gap that’s getting so much attention in the British press. Daley’s essay appears at Times Online (U.K.).

Struck by a survey on how education reporters go about their jobs, a staff writer for the Washington Post considers what should be changed.

Tanzanian publisher Walter Bgoya offers an insider’s critique of the state of the publishing industry in Africa, which, he charges, suffers from a legacy of past colonialism and current exploitation by “foreign multinationals and their joint ventures.” Read Bgoya’s essay at the Global Campaign for Education website.