Archive for April 13, 2008 - April 19, 2008

Primary school education in England has been damaged by “prescriptive state nationalization,” which has taken all the fun out of children’s learning, the biggest review of primary education in 40 years has concluded. A mixture of “moral panic,” “policy hysteria,” and “fad theory” has had a devastating effect on primary schools in England, according to the latest reports of the Cambridge University-led Primary Review.

The three reports published today (Friday, April 18, 2008) examining teacher professionalism, training and leadership followed 22 earlier reports that have delivered a damning indictment of the government’s record on primary education.

Children had been reduced to the status of “targets and outputs” in a school system ruled by political “whim,” researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University said. Read the article in The Independent online.

Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt, Germany, to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant “sofa” made of tree stumps and twigs.

The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write, and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path—deep into the woods.

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or “forest kindergartens,” in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren’t required, but bug repellent is a good idea. Read about their adventures in the woods in The Wall Street Journal 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.

In 2000 the Malian government signed on to the United Nations Education for All goals to help 50% more adults become literate by 2015, but eight years on still only 30% of Malian adults can read or write, and the government is yet to outline its strategy to address the problem.

“We have very low literacy rates in all languages here in Mali, and we know we need to make much faster progress,” Oumar Cissé, communications adviser at the Mali Ministry for Women and Children, told IRIN news.

Mali is just one of six countries (alongside Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Afghanistan) in which under 40% of adults are literate, according to UNICEF. Read more about the daunting challenges facing Mali at IRIN News online.

Pilgrim Tours, in conjunction with Shepherd University in West Virginia, is offering a tour of Costa Rica from July 26-August 9 that will include the International Reading Association’s 22nd World Congress on Reading, which will be held July 28-31 just outside San Jose, Costa Rica. The tour leaders are longtime IRA member Larry Kenney and Virginia Hicks.

Up to three credit hours of undergraduate or graduate credit may be earned at a cost of $35 per credit hour. Only five openings remain on the tour.

For further information about the tour, visit the Pilgrim Tours website and contact Tim Nyce at tnyce@pilgrimtours.com.

From April 21–27, teachers’ unions around the world will join together at Global Action Week to campaign for education rights under this year’s theme: “Quality Education to End Exclusion.”

Wondering what would work best in your school or community? Education International’s Activity Report on Global Action Week contains summaries of the activities carried out during Global Action Week 2007 by coalitions of teachers’ unions, student groups, parent associations, NGOs, local and national government representatives, and education activists. Download the report on the Education International website.

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) has announced the recipients of the third annual RIF Program Excellence Honors 2008, sponsored by MetLife Foundation. The 25 honored programs and their volunteers will be recognized by RIF during a celebration in Washington, D.C., June 16–18, for successfully partnering with outside organizations to advance children’s literacy in their communities.

“RIF commends these programs and their community partners for helping children and their families discover the joy of reading,” said Carol H. Rasco, RIF president and CEO. The 25 outstanding programs were selected from a pool of approximately 3,500 RIF programs nationwide including public schools, Indian reservations, sororities, fraternities, libraries, television stations, corporations, and law firms. Children in these programs benefit from having reading role models that included NBA players, teen tutors, and grandparents. For more, including a list of winners, visit the RIF website.

New research in eye movement and miscue analysis, a diagnostic tool to understand the reading process, shows that a reader doesn’t look at every letter or every word, making the “sound it out” strategy ineffective.

Koomi Kim, a new professor in language, literacy and culture at New Mexico State University’s College of Education, conducted a 2007 study with fellow researchers Marge Knox and Joel Brown from the University of Arizona in which the eye movement of young readers was recorded in order to discover what strategies are used while reading and how the reader constructs meaning.

“The myth is that we look at every single word and letter when we read,“ Kim said. “We are finding out that children look at about 70% of the text and adults look at about 60%.” Read about their study in The Las Cruces Sun-News online.

New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.

As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills. Read about the studies in Education Week online.

Less than half of fathers (42%) said they were bedtime story readers, compared with 76% of mothers, according to a poll of more than 2,000 adults conducted for the United Kingdom's National Year of Reading and reported on BBC News. More than half of fathers blamed long work hours and stress.

"Boys need to see their dads enjoying reading if they are to become readers themselves as they grow up," said Honor Wilson-Fletcher, director of the National Year of Reading. "Football programmes, blogs, newspapers, and sports magazines are just as valuable reading as fairy tales."

For further information, read the full article or visit the National Year of Reading website.

Every day 7,000 high school students drop out of school—and the American high school graduation rate hasn’t budged for almost three decades. In an effort to jump-start those rates, General Colin Powell recently announced the development of 100 dropout prevention summits across the US.

On the heels of that step comes even more hope for reducing the number of dropouts and it includes the needed spawning of more civic engagement among young people. Service learning is an educational technique that combines classroom learning with community service. What’s critical is that it is not only key to getting more students engaged in their communities, but, according to a report released last week by Civic Enterprises, it is also a powerful tool to keep students on track to graduate from high school. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

There has been talk of building a new library in our town. Some think it is what this place needs; others are for sticking with what we have. I’m in the latter camp. It’s true our small-town library has no computers, no interlibrary loan system, no DVD collection. There is no self-service checkout where you scan the bar code on your book, just as at the supermarket.

What our town has is unique: The library is more a reading room than a repository with technological aids; more a literary salon—although a loosely structured one—than a hushed space with little interaction among patrons. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

To continue the discussions initiated at the 5th Annual WE LEARN (Net)Working Gathering and Conference on Women and Literacy, Mev Miller and Kathleen King are editing a book of writings and artwork by adult basic education educators addressing women’s literacy issues. They are inviting practitioners working in adult basic/literacy education—classroom teachers, educators, tutors, administrators, and researchers—to make a proposal for what they would like to contribute to this exciting venture. For more details on the book, visit their website.

Despite struggling with learning throughout her early school years, Lenora (“Lenny”) Somervell of Brasstown, North Carolina was not formally classified as having a learning disability (LD) in reading and math until her freshman year of high school, the tipping point being her struggle mastering Algebra I. At first, she admits to having felt “stupid, defective, and doomed to failure,” but with encouragement from her parents and the help of a special education teacher, Lenny learned more about her specific strengths and weakness. In her junior year she was among a select few students to attend the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) where she has excelled both socially and academically.

In hopes of promoting awareness and improving services for students with LD at NCSSM, Lenny co-founded a campus group called E=LD². The group provides networking opportunities for students (with and without LD) to share study strategies and information about LD, and has offered workshops to help teachers better understand the types of instructional strategies and accommodations that will help all students achieve their potential. The National Center for Learning Disabilities is now honoring Somervell with the 2008 Anne Ford Scholarship Award. Now in its seventh year, this scholarship provides $10,000 toward tuition over four years to a graduating high school senior with LD who will pursue an undergraduate degree at a college or university. Read more about the award in the Anne Ford Scholarship section of the NCLD website.

For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), created to preserve global culture and heritage. Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was “completely incomprehensible and inappropriate” that some of the organization’s “most important and successful collections” were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments. It was unclear who was responsible, he said. “We have launched an inquiry, consulting publications officers of the period, now retired, in order to discover the reasons which led them to take this decision and not to consider other options,” the audit report quotes him as saying. Read more in The Washington Post online.

The National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences has released the report “Findings from the Pilot Teacher Compensation Survey: School Year 2005-06 (NCES 2008-440).” This publication contains summary data from the research and development effort to collect individual salary and demographic data on public school teachers. Seven states participated in this effort: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Data from full-time public school teachers who teach at only one school were included in the analysis. Median salaries and counts for different groupings by experience, age, race, and gender are presented. To view, download and print the report, visit The National Center for Education Statistics website.

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.

At 3:39 p.m., a half-dozen middle school students at Academy Prep, a private school in south St. Petersburg, Florida, tie on aprons. Eggs crack. Pots rattle. Bouillon cubes plunk into hot water. For these kids, today’s cooking lesson is chicken soup and corn bread.

By 3:39 p.m., Pinellas County middle school students are watching the final minutes tick down on a 6-hour, 20-minute school day. But the low-income, minority students in grades 5-8 at Academy Prep start the day two hours before their public school peers, and most stay two hours later. It is a long day. But unlike some public school students, the academy’s 62 students still get full helpings of physical education, music, and social studies. They’re still taking field trips. And they’re enjoying a suite of enrichment activities that would make many middle-class parents swoon: Golf. Dance. Karate with Master Kim.

A 10- to 11-hour day is crucial, says Academy Prep principal Keturah Mills. “We’re concerned about the whole child—academically, spiritually, emotionally. We need that longer day.” Read more about lengthening the school day in The St. Petersburg Times online.