Archive for December 09, 2007 - December 15, 2007

 Please note that the deadline for submitting program proposals for the 54th IRA Annual Convention West, which will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, February 21-25, 2009, is fast approaching. Proposals must be submitted by February 15, 2008.

Visit the following page on the IRA website to submit your proposal for this exciting convention.

If you have children attending elementary school in the Eugene or Springfield school districts in Oregon, you should know that their educational experiences may be compromised this year because of recent textbook adoptions in the area of literacy education.

Our local public schools are trying a new approach to literacy: All elementary teachers will teach from a published curriculum that was adopted districtwide for all schools and grade levels. The publisher’s approach will be implemented districtwide to create consistency between schools and among grade levels. Consistency can mean that everyone is on the same page, or that all students—whether they are struggling, mainstream or gifted readers—are receiving the same core instruction.

But what are the effects of a one-type-fits-all curriculum on the children? And what are the implications for teachers who have developed and fine-tuned innovative approaches to reading, writing and social studies? Consider this opinion piece in The Register-Guard by Paul Bodin, who taught for 25 years in the Eugene School District and currently is an adjunct instructor in the colleges of education at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon.

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.

Entry scores for future teachers in Australia are predicted to fall despite criticism they are already too low, as demand for teaching places plummets across the nation. Applications for teaching places had plunged by 30% over two years in Queensland, and Western Australia is unlikely to fill places for the coming year. A leading educator, University of Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire, said teaching wasn’t “attracting enough knowledgeable or intelligent people.” “It’s a crisis. The tertiary entrance ranks are too low. The status of the profession is too low. We need to be talking it up and offering performance pay,” said Professor Wiltshire, who ran the Queensland Government’s curriculum review. Read more about the impending teacher shortage in The Australian online.

The second in the series of "Lessons Learned" reports on new teachers conducted by Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality raises questions about the support given to those who come to the profession through alternate routes. Working Without a Net finds alternate route teachers are especially motivated by the desire to help disadvantaged children, but at the same time they are more disheartened by the conditions they find in the classroom.

Working Without a Net focuses on new teachers in high-needs schools, comparing the perspectives of those from traditional teacher education versus those from three alternate-route programs: Teach for America, Troops to Teachers and The New Teacher Project.

To find out more and download the full report, visit the following page on the Public Agenda website.

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) praised the signing into law of legislation to reauthorize the Head Start program, saying it would help level the playing field for low-income students when they start school. “This makes an already good program better by making it more accountable, more financially solvent, and more focused on meeting the purpose for which it was intended—giving disadvantaged children an equal opportunity.“ Alexander said. He attended the White House ceremony Wednesday, December 12, 2007, at which President Bush signed the measure into law.

In February 2007, Alexander joined Senators Kennedy (D-MA), Enzi (R-WY) and Dodd (D-CT) in introducing legislation to reauthorize the Head Start program. Alexander was the author of a provision in the bill to establish 200 Centers of Excellence around the country to serve as model Head Start programs. This provision helped serve as the basis for a bipartisan compromise after years of debate in which members of Congress were unable to reach final agreement. Read more at The Chattanoogan.com.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)/Subaru Essay Writing Competition offers K-12 teachers the opportunity to share their knowledge on designing science lesson plans and integrating technology into the classroom. Ten winning essay writers will earn a deluxe package to the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, that includes registration fees and general expenses, up to a total of $500.

The deadline for entries is January 2, 2008. For complete contest details, visit the AAAS website.

Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, and Yemen participated in a regional meeting on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) from December 3-6 in Marrakech, Morocco. A 10-year initiative within the United Nations Literacy Decade, LIFE aims to accelerate literacy efforts 35 selected countries by 2015. LIFE was launched in the Arab countries at the first regional LIFE meeting in Sana’a, Yemen, in March 2006. Among other activities, this second meeting reviewed progress and discussed a refined LIFE implementation strategy as well as analyzing innovative approaches to literacy and non-formal education. Two other regional LIFE meetings are planned for early 2008 in the Asia and Pacific Region (Dhaka, January 21-24, 2008) and in the African region (Maputo, January 29-31, 2008). For more information, visit the portal.

Teaching is attracting better-qualified people than it did just a few years ago, according to a report released December 11, 2007, by the Educational Testing Service. Prospective teachers who took state teacher licensing exams from 2002 to 2005 scored higher on SATs in high school and earned higher grades in college than their counterparts who took the exams in the mid-1990s, the report said.

On the other hand, the report found that those attracted to the profession continued to make up a strikingly homogeneous group—prospective teachers were overwhelmingly white and female—at a time when the proportion of public school students nationwide who are black, Hispanic or other minorities was nearly half and rising.

The finding that the academic qualifications of teachers had risen significantly was encouraging news for federal and state education policymakers after a period of hand-wringing over teacher quality in the nation’s 90,000 public schools. The most successful educational systems in the world, like those in Singapore and Finland, recruit teachers from among the top third of their college graduates. By contrast, some studies over the years have found that the United States recruits from the bottom third. Read the article in The New York Times online.

WGBH Boston Video will debut the first season of public television's highly acclaimed children's literacy series Between the Lions on DVD on January 8, 2008. This set contains all 30 episodes from the show's first season.

Special features include downloadable materials including a guide for kindergarten teachers, reading tips, practice sheets, and more. There are also downloadable family activity guides in English and Spanish. For further information or to order, visit the shopping area of the WGBH website.

How does a local family literacy program continue without the federal dollars that helped create and sustain it for more than a decade? In a word: S-c-r-a-b-b-l-e.

Madison Family Literacy—which helps poor families develop literacy skills and prepare their children for kindergarten—is hoping to raise $50,000 with an all-city/all-campus Scrabble tournament, according to Patricia La Cross, who coordinates the East Madison program based at the Northport/Packer Community Learning Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Federal funding for the Madison effort will end in June, and it is not yet known if more federal money will be available, La Cross said. Rather than waiting until that federal support disappears, La Cross said, the program is looking for new sources of money to maintain its existing level of services to about 100 families a year. Read the story in The Wisconsin State Journal online.

The Canadian Organization for Development through Education (CODE), the John Dau Foundation, and the International Book Bank have collaborated, with the support of the International Reading Association, in a new program called ProjectLoveSudan to send much-needed school supplies to the South Sudan in Africa.

The South Sudan is recovering from a long civil war and is beginning to rebuild its medical and educational facilities. The John Dau Foundation, named after one of the Lost Boys of Sudan and the founder of this charitable organization, is participating in this rebuilding process in his home village in Duk County, South Sudan. Schools are being built and school supplies are in desperate need. School materials such as a student Project Love kit containing a notebook, a pencil, a ruler, and an eraser or a Teacher Kit would be much appreciated in a school that lacks even the basics in educational resources.

Project Love encourages teachers and others to participate in this worthwhile venture by registering their class, school, council, or community/youth organization. You can find further information at the project webpage.

After several years of planning and a series of false starts, a new federal venture to review reading research has hit another bureaucratic hurdle—one that could keep it from ever getting off the ground. A planned announcement last week of the membership of the Commission on Reading Research was put on hold by the National Institute for Literacy while officials sought final approval from the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies that the institute reports to.

“The National Institute for Literacy Interagency Group has not made a formal decision about the formation of a commission to look into reading research,” Samara Yudof, the department’s press secretary, wrote in an e-mail. If such a group is formed, she added, it will have to be screened under the department’s new ethics-review procedures.

That news surprised some observers who have followed plans for the panel over the past several years. “This commission had been developed in a transparent manner; the members had been solicited in a transparent manner,” said Richard Long, the government-relations director for the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association, which recommended several nominees for the panel. “A lot of progress had been made, and it’s unfortunate that things are once again being slowed down.” Read more in Education Week online.