Archive for December 16, 2007 - December 22, 2007

 Over the past year, Reading Today Daily has posted roughly 1,000 items pertaining to a wide range of reading-related topics. We hope readers have found these postings informative and interesting.

The IRA Headquarters office wll be closed from December 24 until January 2. Reading Today Daily, too, will be taking a break during this time. The staff of Reading Today Daily wishes our readers a happy and relaxing holiday season. We will return in 2008 ready to continue providing access to interesting articles and useful information.

When Congress decided to appropriate $2 million in fall 2001 to help Washington, DC, kindergartners and first-graders learn to read, city school officials were told the money could be spent only on the Voyager Expanded Learning literacy program, a new product with virtually no track record. They had just picked a different reading curriculum, and “we didn’t want to be guinea pigs,” recalled Mary Gill, then the system’s chief academic officer.

School leaders did not know that the $2 million was an earmark that had been guided into law by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) just after she had received more than $30,000 in campaign contributions at a fundraiser held by Voyager’s founder and chairman. Landrieu, as the ranking Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate’s DC appropriations subcommittee until early this year, was a pivotal figure in school spending and policy issues. With the Voyager earmark, she intruded on a curriculum decision normally made by teachers, principals, administrators and educational advisers. Read more in The Washington Post.

 "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.

“What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools?” asks Stephen J. Dubner, one of the authors of Freakonomics. "We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play—including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, obviously, also indicates the poor performance of the teachers).

“We gathered a group of testing afficionados—W. James Popham, Robert Zemsky, Thomas Toch, Monty Neill, and Gaston Caperton—and put to them the following questions:

•Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more?
•Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?”

Read what these experts have to say in a forum published in The New York Times and moderated by the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

 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.

Spending his days as a substitute teacher isn’t what Bob Ritchie planned to be doing as he approached his 67th birthday. But after retiring from working in 4-H at Purdue University about six years ago, he didn’t want to just sit around. Instead, he now spends nearly every day filling in at McCutcheon High School in Lafayette, Indiana.

“I could count on my hand the number of days I could have been there and wasn’t,” he said. “The other day I didn’t get a call, and I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ ” Attracting and retaining committed substitutes such as Ritchie is a challenge for local schools. Between the number of teachers getting sick, taking personal days and participating in professional development, the demand for substitutes has grown. The pool of subs hasn’t. Read about the shortage in The Journal & Courier online.

What could better motivate students to learn than using rock music to teach? With that in mind, Steven Van Zandt, lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has launched Little Steven's Rock and Roll High School in Washington, DC, a music education program designed to trace the history of rock and highlight its cultural impact. The program, which is being written with help from the National Association of Music Education, aims to teach students about U.S. history through music they appreciate, according to an article by Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post.

Noted music producer Qunicy Jones agrees with this concept. He created the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, a charity that connects students with technology, education, culture, and music.

For further information, read the full article.

 On page 39 of the December/January issue of Reading Today, in an article about the IRA book Inspiring Reading Success, there is a typo in the 800 telephone number for IRA. The correct number is 800-336-7323. We apologize for the error.

As an elementary school principal in Washington, Sheila Ford had to adapt to the haphazard D.C. public school bureaucracy. So when she decided to retire in 2005 and help start a nonprofit organization to train teachers, it didn’t shock her that school officials authorized nearly $3 million for her Teachers Institute on a single day, shortly after she made a half-hour presentation. Nor was she surprised when she picked up the first check—for $1 million—and there was no contract laying out the agreement.

When Ford went back for documentation, she received a single-page expense voucher. “We didn’t know—what should we do with this? What do you call this?” said Richard Spigler, the institute’s chairman. “The issue to us was, it is not a contract. What are we going to do?”

The institute considered giving back the money but ultimately kept it and went ahead training DC schoolteachers in a new method of reading and writing instruction. The organization, which has two employees and operates rent-free out of the attic of a school building, has received more than $5.5 million from the DC schools since mid-2005. Read more in The Washington Post.

Principals, teachers and staffers—including custodians—at three Washginton, DC, public schools where students’ test scores rose more than 20% last year received $500,000 in cash awards, delivered by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on December 18. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee doled out the gifts from a federal program to the first winners of the Together Everyone Achieves More, or TEAM, awards. The schools recognized were Barnard, Noyes and Tyler elementary schools.

As word of the awards spread, several teachers tried to calculate how much each would receive out of a single $8,000 check. They were surprised to learn that each one would get that amount. Principals of the three schools received $10,000 each; assistant principals, $9,000. Librarians and guidance counselors at the schools received $4,000. The schools’ support staff members, including cafeteria workers, each received $2,000. Read more in The Washington Post.

 They are bored—so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration. Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don’t know how to study.

They are the nation’s gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don’t serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Read about the problem in Delaware, one of six states that neither mandates gifted instruction nor provides gifted education funding. Go to delawareonline.com.

 Sometime next year, West Middle School in Vernal, Utah, will become the first school in the state shuttered for failing to meet the federal education standards established under No Child Left Behind. The path to this ignominious fate is littered with frequent administration changes; a student exodus to better-performing schools; seemingly unsolvable attendance and behavior problems; and claims of racism on a campus that serves mostly Native American students. The Uintah School Board voted in November to close West after it failed to make adequate yearly progress for the seventh straight year. Read about the downward spiral in The Desert Morning News online.

"Far too many of America's 1,200-plus schools of education are mired in methods that isolate education from the arts and sciences, segregate the theory and practice of teaching, and provide insufficient time and support for future teachers to learn to work in real classrooms," writes Grace Rubenstein on the George Lucas Education Foundation website, Edutopia.org. But reform is happening, she says, and at its heart are "innovations that provide extensive field experience and link theory more closely with practice." For further information, read the full article.

About 50% of primary and 80% of secondary level students drop out of school in Bangladesh, according to a report released last week by the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), a Bangladeshi non-governmental organization (NGO). The report entitled Education Watch 2006 refuted the government’s claim that primary education was free in Bangladesh.

The report said 59% of total spending per child in government primary schools and 71% of spending per child in government-assisted secondary schools came from parents. The report said rich families were able to spend more on their children’s education, resulting in a growing educational gap between rich and poor. Read the article in IRIN News.

Before Bob Jansen can teach English to the adult immigrants in his lowest-level class, he has to show about a quarter of them how to hold a pencil. Adult education teachers like Jansen are finding themselves starting from scratch as uneducated immigrants and refugees from conflict regions of Africa and rural areas of Mexico and Central America flock to the United States.

An estimated 400,000 legal and 350,000 illegal immigrants are unable to read or write even in their native language, according to a July 2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an independent Washington think tank. “It takes a lot of patience to teach this class,” said Jansen, an instructor at the Don Bosco Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Read this article by The Associated Press.

Tom Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has been making trouble again. His latest report asks, “How Well Are American Students Learning?” It upends hitherto highly regarded research based on data from several countries that says more time for instruction and homework has a negative correlation with achievement—in other words, the more teaching at school and more homework at home, the less you learn.

In the holiday spirit of giving, education columnist Jay Mathews of The Washington Post shares some of the ideas he has been gathering for getting beyond the homework standoff. One of them is that elementary students should get only reading homework and nothing else. Read more at washingtonpost.com.

The boys yell as a classmate swings a broom handle wildly in the air. When one boy connects with the tennis ball and runs around the makeshift bases, another reaches under a car in the parking lot to retrieve the ball.

Gym class? Boys blowing off steam after school? No, these boys are participating in the second year of the Boys’ Book Club at Scott Highlands Middle School in Apple Valley, Minnesota. After discussing a book about baseball, they trekked outside and learned how to play stickball.

Across the metro area, schools, libraries and even the juvenile justice system are looking into why boys fall behind girls when it comes to reading test scores and how they might kindle a love of reading in the boys. In some cases, a decreasing number of male teachers has led to situations where female teachers are left searching for books they think boys will like—about gross stuff, action, sports and creepy-crawlies. Read more about their quest at StarTribune.com.

Critics say donors at a recent high-level meeting failed to make firm funding commitments for improving education, particularly in impoverished, fragile and war-torn countries, making it highly unlikely the world will meet ambitious education goals by the 2015 deadline. “I cannot be very optimistic,” Koïchiro Matsuura, director-general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), said at a press conference on December 13 in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, at the close of the three-day meeting of the High-Level Group on Education for All, which brought together education ministers, donors and development partners. While developing countries agreed to allocate 10% of budgets to education, donor countries could not agree to include a specific percentage of budgets for education aid. Read more at IRIN News online.

Deborah Kasson is a coach whose pep talks take place in the classroom, not the locker room. Instead of giving athletes tips on how to win games, she gives teachers advice on how to teach young children the skill of reading as she works as a reading coach at Charles F. Johnson Jr. Elementary School in the Union-Endicott Central School District in Greater Binghamton, New York.

Kasson is part of Reading First, a $6 billion federal initiative that focuses on improving reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade. Teacher response to the program at first was mixed, said Susan Hendery, Reading First coordinator for Binghamton. While some embraced the initiative, “it was a difficult year,” she said. Some teachers voiced concerns that Reading First reduced their flexibility in the classroom.

At the same time, Reading First has strong support. The professional development has been outstanding, said Jessica Bowerman, a special education teacher in second and third grades at Charles F. Johnson. “Sure, it was extra work and challenging, but everybody’s benefiting,” she said. Read more in The Press & Sun-Bulletin online.

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a new version of the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) website, which offers a wide range of teaching and learning resources. The site features lesson plans, primary documents, and other classroom resources across the content areas, including many that pertain specifically to reading and language arts.

For further information, visit the FREE website.

A new report by the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty shows that while the digital divide remains a problem in Minnesota, community technology centers can help bridge the gap. An article by Jessica Mador for Minnesota Public Radio describes how programs such as the one at the Rondo Community Outreach Library in St. Paul help more people become computer literate.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that nationally, more than 70 percent of all adults use the Internet. But those figures vary by race and especially by income. More than 90 percent of people with incomes over $75,000 a year are online, compared with just 55 percent of those making less than $30,000 a year. Community technology centers such as the one at the Rondo Library can help bridge that gap.

For further information, read the full article.

In 1937, 29% of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only 17% said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that 55% of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly 70% of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, 73% of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise. Other studies say no, and the decline in reading has serious consequences for all of us. Read this piece, “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker online.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are “bad educators.” Speaking at the Online Information conference at London’s Olympia, he played down the long-running controversy over the site’s authority. He said young students should be able to reference the online encyclopedia in their work. Wales said the site, which is edited by users, should be seen as a “stepping stone” to other sources. Read more at BBC NEWS online.

Early lessons in the arts provide a strong foundation for a future of learning--including literacy learning, according to a new book from the National Art Education Association (NAEA). The Impact of Early Art Experiences on Literacy Development, written by child development specialists Kathy Danko-McGhee and Ruslan Slutsky, offers thoughtful research and step-by-step art exercises that early childhood educators can use in the classroom.

"It is clear that a pedagogical shift must take place in our homes and schools if we are to meet the literacy needs of today's young learners," say the authors. For further information, visit the NAEA website.

During a three-day rampage in 2003 following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, looters pillaged and burned the Iraqi National Library and Archive, stealing hundreds of rare, centuries-old Islamic documents and texts. Some four years later, the library's recovery is exceeding even the most optimistic predictions, according to an article by Troy McMullen on ABC News.com.

"Today the library is better than before the war," says Saad Eskander, a Baghdad-born ethnic Kurd who has run the archive since 2003. Eskander has managed to keep sectarian divisions out of the library by fostering a sense of national pride among his young employees. "The library is a sympol of hope," he says. Groups from several countries have supplied aid to the archive.

For further information, read the full article.