Archive for November 18, 2007 - November 24, 2007

 Each month, the ReadWriteThink.org Calendar offers quick classroom activities, lesson plans, Web links, and texts pertaining to various reading–related and general interest events. Here is a sampling of the links for January in 2008, a leap year.

January 1: Annie Moore, a 15-year-old Irish girl, is the first immigrant to enter Ellis Island, New York, in 1892.
January 8: Elvis Presley was born in 1935.
January 14: The American Library Association announces the book award winners for 2008.
January 15: Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in 1929.
January 22: The “1984” MacIntosh commercial aired in 1984 during Super Bowl XVIII.
January 28: The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986.

There also are links relating to other noted authors and events, and more. For further information, visit the website. The ReadWriteThink.org is a nonprofit website maintained by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English with support from the Verizon Foundation, and in association with the Thinkfinity consortium. The site provides free lesson plans, interactive student materials, Web resources, and standards for K-12 classroom teachers of reading and the English language arts. Visit the main site.

Barack Obama proposed an $18 billion increase in federal education programs Tuesday, November 21, 2007, accusing Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards of shortchanging public schools. The Illinois senator outlined a broad agenda to expand early childhood education, reduce high school dropout rates and improve substandard schools in impoverished areas. To pay for his proposals, Obama suggested cutting spending on the Iraq war, delaying sending astronauts to the moon by five years, auctioning surplus federal property and closing a tax loophole for chief executives, among other things. He lauded the No Child Left Behind law for its goal of lifting achievement standards, but he said the government had failed to give schools enough money to meet mandates for improvement. Read the article in The Los Angeles Times.

Huddled in a corner of their house in south Sacramento, California, their faces awash in the blue glow of the computer screen, the Yang family is learning the intricacies of English grammar. Seven siblings—ages 5 through 18—read in chorus the sentence on the screen: “Magnetic storms create cool, dark patches on the Sun’s surface. They are sunspots.”

For these Hmong children, in the United States just three years this month, this is a slow yet steady lesson in a new language they must master to succeed. It is a lesson they can practice to perfection in the comfort of their home, learning in unison with squirmy siblings and without the pressure of the regular classroom. Their journey to learn English no longer stops when the school day ends, thanks to an innovative program designed by Luther Burbank High School teacher Larry Ferlazzo, who is the grand prize winner of the International Reading Association’s 2007 Presidential Award for Reading and Technology.

Ferlazzo has provided home computers to these children in hopes that the lessons will reach family members as well. The Yang family was one of the first to pilot a project crafted by Ferlazzo a year and a half ago. The program has since expanded, with computers now in the homes of almost 50 families—including more than 80 Burbank students and nearly 150 students within the Sacramento City Unified School District. The project also provides high-speed Internet access for the families, allowing them to visit a Web site Ferlazzo has created. Read more in The Sacramento Bee.

The hunger of the seemingly healthy and well-groomed students at Moruthane Secondary School, about 80 kilometers south of Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, is at first not apparent, but as the morning progresses they become listless and their concentration lapses. Their teacher, Nigerian national Yemi Ajijedidun, 32, told IRIN, “They are not bad students; they are bright, but they are hungry.” The learners, aged 14 to 16, are enthusiastic about their education, and the packed rudimentary concrete-block classroom, which has a few desks but no electricity, is testament to their desire to learn, but educators acknowledge that the greatest obstacle to learning is hunger. Mountainous Lesotho, surrounded entirely by South Africa, is experiencing one of its worst droughts in three decades. Read the article in IRIN News.

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.

In an episode that has embarrassed the U.S. Department of Education, thousands of flawed testing booklets forced the invalidation of reading scores on an international exam administered without major mishap in 56 other countries. The problem came on a test known as the Program for International Student Assessment that allows students’ proficiency to be compared with that of their international peers. It was administered to 5,600 American 15-year-olds last fall, as well as to students in the 30 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and in 27 less developed countries. Scores are scheduled for release next month. Read the story in The New York Times.

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) were released on Thursday, November 15. Reading scores for fourth graders and eighth graders were generally the same or higher since 2002, when the TUDA began collecting these statistics from volunteer urban public school districts. However, comparing 2007 scores to 2005, only Atlanta and Washington, DC, posted reading gains among both fourth graders and eighth graders.

For further information, visit the NAEP website.

The Verizon Foundation will provide $1.2 million in grants to educational organizations in 17 states to raise awareness of the free educational resources available on Thinkfinity.org and to train teachers to use the comprehensive, Web-based program. Thinkfinity.org is the Verizon Foundation’s free online portal to 55,000 educational resources, including standards-based, grade-specific, K-12 lesson plans, and other student interactive tools and materials for students provided in partnership with 11 of the nation’s leading educational and literacy organizations, including the International Reading Association.

Members of the Conservative party in England have set out plans which they say will ensure children can read by the age of six. Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove said English assessments for 6- and 7-year-olds should be replaced with a standard reading test. But primary school head teachers have warned against formal tests for young children saying exams could put them off reading “for a very long time.” Schools Secretary Ed Balls said the plans were “hastily cobbled together.” A key factor in the Tory plans involves extending the use of “synthetic phonics,” which focuses on teaching the sounds which make up words. Read the article at BBC News.

A central front in the Great Society’s War on Poverty when it was created in 1965, Head Start provides grants to public and private agencies to care for low-income children 5 and under. Over the years, some have questioned its effectiveness in preparing children for school and taken issue with its $6 billion annual budget. The program is fighting for federal funding as President Bush and Congress negotiate a spending bill for many domestic programs. Head Start was also reauthorized this week by Congress for the first time in almost a decade with measures to expand the program to more families. Read the article in The Chicago Tribune’s Web edition.

Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans—particularly young Americans—appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills. That is the message of a new report being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts. In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said, referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging folks to think they might be.” Read more about the report in The New York Times and The Boston Globe.