a good school is good for everyone

The report also included a finding that in every country surveyed, girls read better than boys — a gap that has widened since 2000. Also included was a finding that the best school systems are the most equitable — where students do well regardless of social background.
Western Nations React to Poor Education Results
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: December 8, 2010

I believe it.

Educated parents with the money to hire tutors can go a ways towards mitigating the effects of bad curricula and teaching.

I've seen that for years in my district.

I'm curious about the reading gap in countries with highly phonetic languages.

LD enrollment drops

After decades of what seemed to be an inexorable upward path, the number of students classified as learning-disabled declined from year to year over much of the past decade—a change in direction that is spurring debates among experts about the reasons why.

The percentage of 3- to 21-year-old students nationwide classified as having a “specific learning disability” dropped steadily from 6.1 percent in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2 percent in 2007-08, according to the most recent data available, which come from the U.S Department of Education’s 2009 Digest of Education Statistics. In numbers, that’s a drop from about 2.9 million to 2.6 million students.

A learning disability—a processing disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overall cognitive ability—is the largest, by far, of the 13 disability classifications recognized by the main federal special education law. Forty percent of the approximately 6.6 million students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, fall into that category.

The decrease in the category goes hand in hand with a decrease in special education enrollment overall, though that change is not as large. The percentage of all students covered under the IDEA fell from a high of 13.8 percent in the 2004-05 school year to 13.4 percent in 2007-08—from about 6.7 million students to about 6.6 million students. Enrollment in the categories of emotional disturbance and mental retardation also went down, but students in those groups make up a far smaller slice of the IDEA pie. At the same time, though, enrollment of students classified as having an autism spectrum disorder or “other health impairment” rose.

[snip]

About 80 percent of children who are classified as learning-disabled get the label because they’re struggling to read. So, scholars say, the dropping numbers could be linked to improvements in reading instruction overall; the adoption of “response to intervention,” which is an instructional model intended to halt the emergence of reading problems; and a federally backed push toward early intervention with younger students before they’re labeled.

Learning-Disabled Enrollment Dips After Long Climb Up
by Christina A. Samuels
Education Week

momof4 on Westchester County's missing private school

It sounds as if there might be a market in Westchester County for a private school that stressed real phonics, spelling, grammar, composition, high-quality fiction and non-fiction, real (Singapore etc.) math, serious content across all disciplines (CK or Wise Bauer's classical), explicit teaching to mastery, homogeneous grouping by subject, immediate help for struggling students and allowing/encouraging acceleration. With the existing demographics, I'd think kids would soar to great heights with that kind of program (without outside tutoring!) and class sizes could probably be larger than at public schools, with no problems.

That's what I've been wondering. That's why I asked the question about cheap private schools.

Core Knowledge pilot study in NYC

here (pdf file)

6X Greater Literacy Gains for CKR Students than Students at Demographically Similar ComparisonSchools

Compared to peers, kindergarteners taught with the CKR program made more progress in all areas of reading tested: spelling, phonemic awareness, decoding, and comprehension.

Teachers’ Views:

“The Skills Strand is really very good for the students. Their reading levels are higher this year than last year.”

"At first, I felt that many teachers did not know if they agreed with teaching sounds before letter names. But by January, when teachers started to see their children reading, they became believers” became believers."

“The Skills Strand has exceeded my expectations. I think it is the best reading program I have ever used. We are thrilled with the results. I hope it is introduced into more schools. We plan to change the sequence of the Listening Strand.”

“After seeing how well Core Knowledge Skills worked for teaching my children to read, I would have a hard time teaching any other way.”

administrator views:

“This year with Core Knowledge Reading, all of the teachers are communicating more, they discuss the pacing and delivery strategies” pacing and delivery strategies.

“The CK pilot has honed the professional conversation.”

“There was resistance and suspicion on the teachers part in the beginning but they are ecstatic over the results— the children are reading! “

The finding that professional conversations amongst colleagues were 'honed' is interesting. Stuart Yeh reports the same phenomenon in his book Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment and Test Reform. Sound curriculum and testing programs are as good for the grown-ups as they are for the children.

Thanks go to Erin Johnson for supplying the link.

Brian Mickelthwait explains look-and-say

Not long after teaching me to read, my mother got to know some teachers and found out about the “look-and-say” method for teaching reading, and from then on, whenever education was mentioned, she would complain about this doctrine.

This look-and-say method of “teaching” is to me so absurd that even now I am handicapped when describing it by sheer incredulity.... Instead of looking at letters, you look at entire words, and try to remember what each word, viewed as a single indivisible pattern, says. Look-and-say turns the deciphering of English into a project as daunting as the deciphering of Chinese or Japanese.

To make this daft process easier, you are given incidental clues. A sentence about a pig is shown next to a picture of a pig. If you get stuck at P I G, you guess — guessing being much encouraged — either from the picture or from the face of whoever is reading along with you. Then, while remaining confused about what you just “read” and how you did it, you bash on. The one thing you are not told is that P spells puh, I spells i and G spells guh, which means that P I G spells puh-i-guh pig, and you don’t need to guess about it. The one thing, in other words, that you are not told about, when subjected to the look-and-say method for learning to read is: reading.

On the harm done by "look-and-say": A reaction to Bonnie Macmillan's Why School Children Can't Read (pdf file)

And let us not forget: Thank you Whole Language.

balanced literacy

For some time now, I've wondered exactly what people are actually doing when they teach kids to read via balanced literacy. This video makes clear what "predictable text" is and why knowing the sound of the first letter in a word isn't the same thing as phonics. Watch what happens at the end of the tape (what doesn't happen, I should say) when this little girl encounters the word 'me.'

boys need phonics

There has also been concern about the growing gender divide in achievement, starting in primary schools.

Under the synthetic phonics system, children are taught the sounds that make up words rather than guess at entire words from pictures and story context.

Rhona Johnston, a professor of psychology at Hull University, and Dr Joyce Watson of St Andrews University, studied the results from 300 children originally given training using synthetic phonics when they were five.

The progress of the group at primary schools in Clackmannanshire was compared with 237 children using the more usual analytic phonics approach.

Boys taught using synthetic phonics were able to read words significantly better than girls at the age of seven, with all pupils ahead of the standard for their age.

Boys were 20 months ahead while girls were 14 months more advanced than expected.

At the end of the study, boys' reading comprehension was as good as that of the girls, but their word reading and spelling was better.

[snip]

"Teachers told us they had fewer disciplinary problems and less trouble in the playground because boys were succeeding and had higher self esteem."

Professor Johnston's work has been influential in persuading the Government to re-write its national literacy hour - returning to a system that dates back to Victorian times.

Synthetic phonics fell out of favour in the 1960s and 1970s in favour of progressive 'child-centred' learning that was championed for decades by educationalists in the Labour movement.

Boys do better than girls when taught under traditional reading methods
London Evening Standard
21.03.07

and see: Bonnie Macmillan explains why boys need synthetic phonics more than girls do.

The girl show

factoids:

The National Honor Society says that 64 percent of its members — outstanding high school students — are girls.

[I]n elementary schools, about 79 percent of girls could read at a level deemed “proficient,” compared with 72 percent of boys. Similar gaps were found in middle school and high school.

The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.

Boys are twice as likely to get suspended as girls, and three times as likely to be expelled. Estimates of dropouts vary, but it seems that about one-quarter more boys drop out than girls.

Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.

In federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent.

and:

There is one important exception: Boys still beat out girls at the very top of the curve, especially in math.

In the high school class of 2009, a total of 297 students scored a perfect triple-800 on the S.A.T., 62 percent of them boys, according to Kathleen Steinberg of the College Board. And of the 10,052 who scored an 800 in the math section, 69 percent were boys.

The Boys Have Fallen Behind
by Nicholas Kristof

The public schools have been completely and totally feminized. Period. There are virtually no guys left inside them and there is virtually no guyness in the air. Suffocating.

I speak as the parent of a high school boy who is happy as a clam attending a BOYS school.

see, e.g.:

Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind
by Richard Whitmire

The Why Chromosome by Thomas S. Dee (boys need men teachers)

boys need phonics more than girls

Progressive Ed's War on Boys by Janet Daley

effect size

Dan Dempsey says:

By Golly .. the insanity just will not stop .. another educational pack of lemmings is ready to follow the "Whole Language" rodents into the sea of ignorance.

Hattie Visible Learning effect sizes:

Phonics = 0.60
Whole Language = 0.06
(1/10 as effective and good for a decade of educational malpractice)

So now we are off to the decade of the twins I trust: "Problem & Project Based Learning"

Nope we don't want any of that effective stuff like Worked Examples, Direct Instruction, or Mastery learning.

Not when Problem Based Learning = 0.15

You know what?

I'm going to start talking about effect size at school board meetings.

Something new and different.

children taking risks

The subject of very young children "taking risks" in school came up the other day, in a comments thread, I think.

Here's where it comes from.^* Whole language. Children being taught to read in a whole language classroom are risk-takers.

I think we can take it on faith no one teaching children to read using a field-tested synthetic phonics program would conceive of his or her students as risk-takers.

There's a reason for that.


^* NCTE links to this group.

palisadesk on "onset" & "rime"

definition from U. of Oregon:

Onset-Rime: The onset is the part of the word before the vowel; not all words have onsets. The rime is the part of the word including the vowel and what follows it.

Catherine wrote:

Diane McGuinness says 'onset' and 'rime' (first letter/rest of the word) is bad, bad, bad....but I have forgotten why.

palisadesk wrote:

I don't recall just what Diane McGuinness said about onset-rime, but I can think of several reasons those advocating a synthetic phonics approach to beginning reading would frown on it.

1) It gives the new reader the wrong idea about what is entailed in "reading" a word. We want the child to learn to process the correspondences from left to right, "all through the word," as the UK folks say. We do not want them to think that we glance at the first letter, then the end of the word, then try putting two parts together, as the default strategy.

With "balanced literacy" children tend to look all over the place for "clues" (Fountas and Pinnell call this "word solving") -- the teacher's face, the pictures, the shape of the word, anything but the letters in sequential order

2)It suggests that rime units are "sounds" to be "learned." There are between 100 and 200 common rime units in short words that beginners can expect to see. But English has only 40-44 spoken phonemes which have about 70 common encodings in beginner vocabulary (forget about "yacht" for now). The memory load of trying to learn hundreds of "sounds" as separate entities is only exceeded by the memory load of trying to "learn" all the Dolch/high frequency words by sight alone. Many kids simply cannot do this and quickly determine that they will never be able to read. A negative mindset from the get-go is definitely a thing to avoid.

3)It trains kids into the look-at-the-first-letter-and-take-a-flying-leap strategy, which backfires once words get beyond one syllable. These kids will go on to read "disappear" as "dinosaur."

That said, once children have learned to decode sequentially, all through the word, phoneme by phoneme, there is some value in having them work with larger units (like rime units) but not in the patterned way onset-rime is usually taught. Some kids get really hung up on sound-by-sound word decoding, and don't easily move on to process larger units of words. So, recognizing that letter-groups like "og" or "ip" are usually spelled the same and sound the same can enhance their fluency.

But, instead of reading and writing onset-rimes with merely initial consonant substitution (man-can-fan), they can read and write words with the target "rime" unit in different positions: fog, soggy, toggled, dogsled, toboggan. This ensures they will continue to look at all the letters of the word, in order. Even Reading Mastery, a synthetic approach if ever there was one, introduces rhyming units and explicitly tells children that these parts that look the same usually are pronounced the same -- ime, lime, chime -- but they don't go on to hammer it as a decoding strategy to be used in lieu of all-through-the-word reading.

Research by the Clackmannanshire authors found that only children who could decode at the phoneme level could use larger units to read by analogy, which is what fluent young readers do when confronted with a new (short) word -- if they can sound out "late," they can read the name "Nate" even if they haven't seen it before. Generally, fluent readers have internalized common patterns to automaticity -- but they initially learned those patterns in a sound-by-sound, letter-by-letter way. There is research on how many times a beginner will "sound out" a word before it becomes an automatic response, but the results show extreme variability -- from 5 reps or fewer to many thousands. Most kids are in the middle, sounding out words dozens of times before recognizing them "at sight."

Some very successful remedial programs for children with reading disabilities emphasize teaching students to use analogy to read, especially for multi-syllable words. Maureen Lovett developed her PHAST program as part of the NICHD-funded reading research, and it teaches kids a self-talk strategy for decoding by analogy, but this is after they have already learned the phoneme/grapheme correspondences and how to blend them into words. She has data to show this is a very successful approach. This is also the general approach taken by the Benchmark School, a private school for kids with reading disabilities, which also has excellent evidence of success.

Both these programs however teach rime units differently than the "balanced literacy" initial substitution method, where all-through-the-word decoding is *not* emphasized.

For more information on these alternatives, you can Google Maureen Lovett and PHAST and/or Irene Gaskins and Benchmark School. The latter has written an excellent book about strategies to help struggling readers. It deals with multiple areas -- not only decoding, but organizational skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary, written expression and so forth. I give it three thumbs up.

Sarah on balanced literacy vs phonics

You can't balance whole language and phonics because they are opposites. "Balanced literacy" as taught to my 1st grader meant (in part) "if you don't know a word, look at the first letter and guess." Phonics is "if you don't know a word, sound it out." Those two points of view contradict each other and cannot be "balanced."

A friend here described her child's experience with balanced literacy.

It was exactly as Sarah says: the kids were supposed to guess what the unknown words were, using context.

But - and here's something I hadn't heard before - every day the kids would read the same authentic book and guess the same words.

I can only guess that that happened because no matter what curriculum they're using, teachers know that kids need repetition in order to learn. So instead of giving the kids repetition via decodable books, like the Bob Books, they gave them repetition via the same authentic children's book.

But I don't know.

testable hypothesis

Elizabeth wrote:

Here is a quote from Sally Shaywitz's "Overcoming Dyslexia, A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level" p. 261:

"In one Tallahassee, Florida, elementary school where such a program [scientifically proven prevention and early intervention programs] was implemented, the percentage of struggling readers dropped eightfold--from 31.8 percent to 3.7 percent."

I would guess 1% using Webster's Speller and teaching both spelling and phonics at the same time, its focus on spelling and syllables is very helpful for my struggling students.

BTW, that's a great motto, "Education not remediation." Every smart students learn more when taught explicitly.

palisadesk answered:

The Shaywitz example that Elizabeth quotes is a fairly representative one. Schools that use effective instructional methods and materials significantly reduce their "struggling reader" populations, usually to a 1-digit %ile. There are many examples; most however are school-based. We don't see scaled-up replications of this type of success on a district basis.

The 1% that Elizabeth cites is reasonably the percent of children who would still flounder even after intensive 1:1 teaching with effective methods and materials over a significant period of time. However, it would not be likely to represent what could be achieved in general education classrooms at our current level of knowledge and operational constraints.

Students with severe disabilities must be taken on a case-by-case basis, as their learning needs are highly specific; in other cases, important variables are not always under school control -- for instance, students with high levels of absenteeism and/or frequent changes of residence. You can have the best-ever teaching, but the student has to actually be there and participate in order to benefit.

So hard data on what is the lowest percentage of students who we can expect will still lag *far* behind despite our best efforts is not available. What we do know is that the number of "struggling" students is far too high.

From intensive work with students at all ability levels, I believe it's a testable hypothesis that 99% could be taught foundation skills in reading, writing and math that are commensurate with their level of receptive language comprehension and cognitive functioning. Some cases would be extremely labor-intensive, and this becomes a time and resources issue. Public schools realistically do not have enough instructional time to be as successful with some high-needs cases as private services can be. I can think of cases where children have needed 4-6 hours a day of intensive therapy in several areas to make significant progress. Schools are not set up to provide this, and perhaps it's a separate question: should allowances be provided to parents of such children to purchase the needed services using special education funding? Should the school district contract these out?

We are talking about a small number (percentage-wise) of students, but their needs are real and not easily met.

Getting all students reading at the K-2 level is realistic for most schools. It is, however, only a step in the process. Children who master decoding and spelling early on may be strugglers later. That is why careful progress monitoring of all students is needed.

children with large vocabularies

Phonics is considered a "bottom up" approach where students "decode" the meaning of a text. The advantage of phonics, especially for students who come to schools with large vocabularies, is that once students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children's literature.

The Reading Wars: Phonics vs Whole Language: Phonics

by Jon Reyhner, a phonics skeptic

That certainly explains why my district, heavily populated by small children possessing large vocabularies, would be dumping Open Court for Fountas and Pinnell.

missed the memo

End of the reading wars.

In the past seven years, a new view of reading instruction has taken hold in school districts nationwide.

The issue these days isn't whether "phonics" or "whole language" is the better approach for beginning readers, but how to blend those philosophies and other elements in a reading program tailored to the individual child.

For a growing group of educators, the reading wars, waged so ferociously in the 1980s and '90s, are past. Or at least passe.

"I think more schools are moving toward a balanced literacy program," said Tina Chekan, co-principal and literacy coach at Propel McKeesport, a charter elementary school. Propel also operates elementary schools in Homestead, Kennedy and Turtle Creek.

"There's not one program that fits all," she said. "We know that our students are on varying ability levels. We work to really focus on the individual."

[snip]

Some educators now downplay the significance of the reading wars, calling them the over-publicized rants of academic extremists. Dr. Roller, of the International Reading Association, considers the wars a dead issue.

"I wish somebody would hold a big funeral service and bury this casket," she said.

I don't think that's going to happen. 

miscue analysis

at D-Ed Reckoning

Invaluable.

Check out this conclusion contained near the end of a 31-page case study of a 5th grade boy's reading:

John’s comprehension at his current fifth grade level is excellent when he is relieved of the task of recognizing words.

what is synthetic phonics?

What is Synthetic Phonics?

• Starts before children are introduced to reading scheme books, before any sight word recognition is established

• Teaches letter sounds very rapidly, explicitly showing children how to sound and blend letters in all positions of words right from the start

• Words are not pronounced for children prior to them

• Sounding and blending is taught in the first few weeks of formal sounding and blending them
schooling


What is Analytic Phonics?

• Children start out by recognising whole words.

• The sounds for the letters of the alphabet are taught in the context of alliterative words, often one week for each letter, e.g. gate, green, girl, glove etc

• Letter sounds are then taught at the end of words

• When letter sounds are taught in the middle of words, CVC words are introduced

• Sounding and blending is introduced when CVC words are taught

• It gradually progresses to teaching blends and digraphs, e.g. clip, coat, fast

What are the benefits of synthetic phonics teaching? (pdf file)
Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson
powerpoint presentation on their Clackmannanshire study:
A seven year study of the effects of synthetic phonics teaching on reading and spelling attainment
and see: the Jim Rose report (UK)
Q&A: synthetic phonics

Skills taught in isolation: a good thing.


preventing the tragedy of content isolation