Archive for April 08, 2007 - April 14, 2007

 Dame Marie Clay, a member of the Reading Hall of Fame and one of the world’s most distinguished researchers of educational literacy, died today at age 81. Her Reading Recovery early intervention program is credited with changing the face of primary school literacy worldwide and is now being widely used in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

A native of Wellington, New Zealand, Dame Marie served as president of the International Reading Association in 1992–93, the only non–North American ever to hold that office. Speaking of her passing, IRA Executive Director Alan Farstrup noted, “Dame Marie was a true friend to all of us and a renowned leader of our profession. Her wise and calm counsel will be sorely missed.”

See the Association’s press release for additional information about Marie Clay’s contributions to the field of literacy. More information may be found in The New Zealand Herald.

  Join Richard Long, IRA Director of Government Relations, in a live audioconference on Tuesday, April 24, at 8:00 p.m. EST as he discusses the House and Senate Education Committees’ work on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act as well as the status of Reading First.

This will be a free service, but registration is limited. Participants are asked to register by April 20 with btierney@reading.org to receive the call-in number and a Power Point set of slides.

South Africa Partners, a nonprofit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Eastern Cape, South Africa, has launched a book project called Masifunde Sonke (Let Us Read Together), which features 25 South African children’s books. For each book sold in the United States, one is donated to an under–resourced school in South Africa. For more information, visit the South Africa Partners or Masifunde Sonke websites.

“Education as a Human Right” is the theme of the 2007 Global Action Week (April 23-29). Global Action Week is organized by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), a UNESCO partner. Educators and other stakeholders are urged to sign up and take part in order to promote Education for All worldwide. “Everyone has the right to education” according to Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. UNESCO promotes the right to education with emphasis on inclusion, lifelong learning and non-discrimination. Learn more at UNESCO’s Education website or the Right to Education website.

Improving literacy and numeracy skills—starting with the very first year in primary school—will pay dividends for the national economy, federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd told reporters at St. Columbus Primary School in Melbourne, Australia. Rudd launched another plank in Labor’s “education revolution” on April 11, shortly after the national education union unveiled its own campaign for better school funding. Productivity growth in the Australian economy is slowing and has been for many years now, Rudd said. “One of the reasons it’s slowing is because as a nation we’ve not invested enough in education, skills and training.” Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald website.

Experts will investigate why children drop out of school in South Africa in order to measure the country’s progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Minister of Education Naledi Pandor approved the appointment of a high–level team of experts April 11, who will start their research in a representative sample of schools and seek input from all stakeholders. The team’s investigation will focus on students from Grade 1 to Grade 12. South Africa, in line with the MDG deadline, hopes to achieve the goal of Education for All (EFA) by 2015. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

The Education Department made big news last July when it released a long-awaited study that compared the test scores of children in more than 7,500 public and private schools. With most other things being equal, public school students often do better and sometimes a lot better than private-schoolers, the research found. But four days later, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stood in the expansive hearing room of the House Education Committee to unveil a $100 million proposal to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to send public school students to private schools. Spellings called the study irrelevant, saying it was small and flawed. Other advocates of vouchers, such as Harvard University researcher Paul Peterson, agreed. Advocates of public schools, including teachers unions, say the Bush administration chose to ignore a study that didn’t support its agenda. Read more of this article from USA Today.

A new pre-doctoral fellowship program is being established by the National Academy of Education to support doctoral research focused on adolescent literacy. The goal of this program, launched with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is to strengthen and stimulate adolescent literacy education by infusing the field with highly talented, well-trained, and motivated researchers and teacher educators. The Adolescent Literacy Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program will encourage more scholars in schools of education and related disciplines to conduct dissertation research focused on improving literacy outcomes for middle and secondary students. Fellows will each receive a stipend of $25,000, to be disbursed over a period of up to two years, to support them in finalizing their dissertation proposals, designing and conducting rigorous research, analyzing their data, and writing up their dissertation research results. Twenty fellows will be accepted for the two-year fellowships. Fellowship applications and further information will be available after June 1, 2007 on the Academy’s website, www.naeducation.org, and applications will be accepted through December 1, 2007. Information is also available by calling (202) 334-2341.

 Literacy: A Path Out of Extremism? was the topic of the International Reading Association’s Global Perspectives Forum April 9 in Washington, DC. A panel of experts considered the notion that though literacy is key to unlocking the potential of the human intellect in order to enrich lives and build better societies, literacy may not be the panacea for all the world’s problems. Panel members were: Arab League Ambassador Dr. Hussein Hassouna; Dr. Samdani Fakir, a visiting professor at the School for International Training in Vermont; Dr. Frank Dall, a senior researcher at George Washington University, and Dr. Timothy Shanahan, current president of IRA and the director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About 50 people participated in the dialogue at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, hosted by the International Reading Association. After the panel discussion, there were three roundtable discussions via telephone conferencing with literacy experts Hellen Inyega in Kenya, Aslam Adeeb in Pakistan, and Bardhyl Musai in Albania. The guest panelists and those participating connected on a variety of levels. An in–depth report on the forum and roundtables will be published by IRA in late spring. Look for it on IRA’s website. For more information about the Global Perspectives series, contact globalperspectives@reading.org.

United Through Reading, a free program available to all U.S. service members in Al Asad, Iraq, is designed to help keep them connected with their children and other family members at home. Through the program, the service members are filmed reading a book out loud. They then receive a DVD of the read-aloud, along with a free package to mail it home. Read more about this program in this article from the Marine Corps News website.

 Thinkfinity (formerly MarcoPolo) has been named the best site to download free lessons and materials in Edutopia’s second annual Reader’s Survey. This marks the second consecutive year that the program has received this recognition. ReadWriteThink.org is one of seven Thinkfinity Content Partners and was developed by the International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The website provides educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and English language arts instruction. The site features standards-based lesson plans, interactive student materials, and a literacy calendar. Read more at Edutopia's website.

State education ministers in Australia have agreed on a set of nationally consistent teaching standards and will seek commonwealth approval for their plan later this week. The agreement comes after years of pressure from Prime Minister John Howard for consistency across education systems. State premiers are expected to announce their plans at the meeting of the Council of Australian Governments in Canberra on April 13. Read more at The Australian website.

The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is seeking five school districts to receive an award of $600,000 to implement the highly successful Toyota Family Literacy Program (TFLP). The opportunity builds on Toyota’s commitment to this successful program, which currently serves 45 elementary schools in 15 cities nationwide.

Alan Johnson, education secretary in the United Kingdom, has come under fire for recommending the use of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia for schoolwork. At the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolteachers and Union of Women Teachers (NASWUT) in Belfast on April 11, Johnson praised the Wikipedia as affordable and easy to use. But teachers and the website’s founder, Larry Sanger, criticized Johnson for encouraging pupils to use the website. The general secretary of the NASWUT, Chris Keates, said the union itself had been the victim of scurrilous claims on Wikipedia. Read more at The Guardian website.

Like any parent, Marie Dunleavy wanted the best for her child but, when her first son, Daniel, was born with Down’s syndrome, she faced daily challenges. Finding herself frustrated that she couldn’t find any resources that focused on teaching children with learning disabilities to read, she decided to write her own. Through her own system Daniel, now 11, has a reading age of an older child without special needs. Specialists are finding the books help not only children with Down’s syndrome but also kids with Asperger’s and even dyslexia. Read more of this article from The Scotsman.

  Far greater shares of students are proficient on state reading and mathematics tests than on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and those gaps have grown to unprecedented levels since the No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, concludes a study released April 10. In ten of the twelve states included in the study, the disparity between the share of students proficient on state reading tests and on NAEP, a congressionally mandated program that tests a representative sample of students in every state, grew or remained the same from 2002 to 2006. Read more of this article from Education Week.

State learning standards may help high school teachers focus their coursework, but college faculty say they’re focusing on the wrong things, according to a report that finds a “significant gap” between what high school instructors teach and what college faculty think entering freshmen ought to know. “States tend to have too many standards attempting to tackle too many content topics,” the report says. The report examines science, math, reading and English. Read more of this article from USA Today.

Experts say technology—e-mail, text messaging, electronic banking—and standardized testing are making cursive writing unnecessary. Although cursive is taught in third-grade classrooms in Texas, educators say it’s taking a back seat to core disciplines such as math and reading. But many teachers and experts say students who don’t learn cursive are missing out on valuable lessons. Read more of this article from The Dallas Morning News.

 The next year and a half should bring a flood of data about the effects of the federal Reading First program, but most of those studies are not quite ready to be released, two scholars said recently at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives education committee announced a list of people who will testify at an April 20 hearing on allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the program. Read more of this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government. Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

A link between illiteracy and violence in schools has raised concerns which the Jamaican Ministry of Education and Youth hopes to address through the introduction of more than 100 special educators. According to Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson, results from the grade four literacy test and the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) are showing that there is a serious problem with illiteracy in primary schools across the country, and it is correlated to the growing problem of violence in schools. Read more of this article from the Jamaican Gleaner.

The body responsible for developing tutorial materials for the Australian federal government’s $21 million literacy program has dismissed criticism it was repeating the errors of discredited “whole language” methods for teaching reading. The general manager of curriculum projects at the Curriculum Council questioned whether the critics had examined the kit produced for the reading voucher program. Read more about the controversy in this article from The Australian.

Columbus, Ohio’s public schools will replace 183 reading-intervention teachers next year with math and science specialists to try and bolster proficiency test scores in those subjects. Eliminating the so-called “safety-net” reading teachers, most of whom were placed in elementary schools to work with children reading below grade level, could have unintended negative effects on students’ proficiency in other areas, said Timothy Shanahan, president of the International Reading Association. Read more of this article from the Akron Beacon Journal.

The publisher of the new Harry Potter novel has strict rules for libraries handling the book this summer. Among them: Libraries must limit the number of employees who handle the books before the July 21 release and provide names and contact information for each branch manager, according to the contract from Scholastic Inc. Read more about the contract that libraries must sign, which the publisher says is required to honor author J.K. Rowling’s wishes of preserving a “magical moment” for children, in this article from The Arizona Republic.

Since 2000, the Chinese central government has allocated 8 million yuan ($1.03 million) a year to eradicating illiteracy, with additional funding coming from local governments. There have also been huge efforts to ensure basic education is made available to all. Read more about China’s efforts to eliminate illiteracy, including the awarding of UNESCO literacy prizes, in this article from the China Economic Net website.