Making Schools Accountable
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Here’s a great article passed on by a reader.
Making Schools Accountable
by Phyllis Schlafly Jan. 19, 2005
Are taxpayer-subsidized infomercials and payoffs to friendly commentators the federal government’s answer to education problems? The U.S. Education Department’s secret million-dollar taxpayer-financed marketing campaign to sell the No Child Left Behind Act is only a symptom of what’s wrong.
Ronald Reagan used to say that government is not the solution, it’s the problem. But we are in the post-Clinton era, and Clinton told us in Northbrook, Illinois in 1997 to get over “our love of local control of the schools.”
While the national media are currently filled with pictures of horrors all over the world, the biggest tragedy in America rates only local stories. I’m referring to the sad, sad tale of how our public school system promotes millions of kids all the way into high school without ever teaching them how to read.
This situation wasn’t pictured on network television, or even on CNN or Fox, but the Orlando Sentinel gave its customers the bad news on New Year’s Day. Only 32 percent of Florida ninth-graders and only 34 percent of Florida tenth graders can read at grade level.
That means two-thirds of Florida public school students are just marking time in legally-enforced incarceration in government buildings that are euphemistically called schools. Think of all those hours those illiterates have available to create mischief, annoy teachers and other students, and get into trouble.
Why is anyone surprised at the truancy and dropout rates? Wouldn’t you — whether you are a student or a parent — check out of the system if it just baby-sat you for nine school years and never taught you how to read?
This high rate of nonreaders is not new; it obviously has existed for years, and I’ve reported it in this column over and over again. If ninth-graders can’t read, we can infer that they couldn’t read in the eighth grade, or the seventh grade, or the sixth grade, etc., but were just promoted anyway.
What made this a 2005 news story, according to the Sentinel, is that school officials “are panicking,” but not because of the appalling illiteracy rate. It’s because the No Child Left Behind Act is enforcing accountability and the nonreaders are giving entire schools a bad name.
The state of Florida is now giving a letter grade to each school each spring. The school can drop a whole letter (as from a C to a D) and be hit with a financial penalty if poor readers fail to improve two years in a row.
This threat has motivated the schools into serious action, and their solution to this depressing report is predictable. Spend more taxpayers’ money and hire a new set of teachers to teach high schoolers what we already paid elementary school teachers to do.
Orlando school officials have decided to experiment with three new reading approaches: Scholastic’s Read 180, which relies heavily on students using computers and comes with a price tag of $439,000; McGraw-Hill’s SRA Corrective Reading at $130,000; and Strategically Oriented Intensive Reading Instruction at $84,000.
According to the Sentinel, these three methods will be used on different groups of kids because “no one knows exactly what works.” That’s not true; we already know what works: intensive, systematic phonics.
But for years, most public schools have rejected what works in favor of what’s easy: the so-called whole-word method. Instead of teaching first-graders the sounds and syllables of the English language, and how to put them together like building blocks to read big words, schools have taught children to memorize a short list of frequently used words, guess at whole words by looking at the pictures on the page, predict words based on the content of the story, substitute words that seem to fit, and simply skip over words they don’t recognize.
Memorizing, guessing, looking at pictures, predicting, substituting, and skipping, are not reading; they are very bad habits. The child who is trained in those bad habits is guaranteed to be a poor and inaccurate reader.
This whole-word system gets children through the first and second grades when they are given only stories with one-syllable words and mind-numbing repetition, but it is doomed to failure when they are confronted with polysyllabic words in later grades.
Children who are not taught phonics grow up to be adults who can never be hired for anything other than a minimum-wage job. They will never be assimilated into our economy and achieve the American dream.
Children who are not taught phonics grow up to be incompetent voters, like the Palm Beach County voters who spoiled their ballots in 2000 by over-voting for both Al Gore and the Libertarian third-party candidate. Never having been taught to sound out the syllables, they saw “Libertarian” and thought they were selecting “Lieberman” for vice president.
No related posts.
This article has some inherent flaws from an instructional standpoint. However, I am not going to start there, I am going to start with the Orlando Sentinelís horrific news of only 1/3 of the public school students being literate in high school. This is not good! Regardless, we as teachers can teach these students how to read and write and MUST. However, we need a little help too! First, authors such as Ms. Schafly shouldnít infer that these students where passed on from the 1st grade all the way to 9th grade not knowing how to read. How many of these students just came to the country? How many came over after the age of 8? The bottom line is some were and some were not. Research tells up Social Promotion does not work and for the most part this is understood, the problem is RETENTION does not work either folks so you cannot rely on this. We must have intensive intervention programs that help these students learn to read and write. Do you know how difficult it is to teach an English speaking child to read and write when the move into your school on the first of the month and then move out on the 30th? Hudson is not your typical district folks. Transient kids are the most difficult in the world to teach because just as soon as you see progress with a student the parent is moving the child again and no matter how smooth the district makes the transition (with paper work and all, yes rarely happens) the child has to start over with rituals and routines of a new teacher, new classroom and new classmates. My point is donít blame the public schools entirely for the lack of literate readers we have in the public schools system and please donít compare them to the private schools because parents donít move their kids in private schools. When I taught in Houston, Texas, I would start with 20 kids in a class in August and by May the most I ever had from the original 20 was 7. This is not a republican or democratic issue, this is a societal issue, and transient populations hurt our society. I am not saying that families shouldnít move, when I say transient, these kids are moving two, three times in a school year.
Second issue, ?no one knows exactly what works.î I beg to differ; we (teachers) know what works.
-We know that one of the conditions necessary for learning is that children need to be immersed in language.
-We know that motivation for learning comes from within
-We know that parentí expectations have a significant influence on childrenís language development
-Brain based learning tells us that a combination of phonics instruction and whole language is best
So for her, a non-educator, a person who does not teach children to read and write EVERYDAY, to tell the public that intensive systematic phonics instruction is what teaches students to read is outrageous. Balanced Literacy is what helps students to learn to read and write. When teachers use a balanced view of phonics and whole language a student is able to decode words but most important make meaning from the words they decoded. Do we want all readers to sound out ?libertarianî or do we want readers to look at the word, reread the text, comprehend the text to find out they are talking about a political party instead of a Vice-Presidential candidate? I want my daughters and my students to be able to make meaning from the text and if they have to, sound the word out. We teach our students phonics and phonics is important but it is not the only tool you use in teaching students to read. We teach our students to use the three main cueing systems:
Semantic ? students read for meaning, use context clues, use prior knowledge
Syntactic ? students look at patterns of words, sentence structure, grammar
Graphophonic ? association of letters and sounds, phonics, decoding
So anyone can see that phonics is only a piece of the pie, one must have all three cueing systems in place in order to make meaning from text.
Third issue, her reporting of instructional interventions is false. Read 180 does not rely heavily on computers to instruct students. Are computers involved? Yes, but Read 180 is only as good as the teacher delivering the curriculum. Read 180 is expensive ($439,000 is what Orlando paid, one classroom costs in the neighborhood of $30,000) but you can have a READ 180 program for as little as 30,000. READ 180 can be an effective intervention program for middle and high school students. Why? READ 180 delivers a balanced view of literacy. Phonics instruction is combined with meaningful reading.
Interesting article ADMIN, you got me worked up with bringing in the literacy topic! : )
Well the only language I know well is English. Unfortunately, because it is inherited from so many other languages, it has many rules of spelling and pronunciation. My grammar has increased tremendously since I started this blog, but not my spelling. I am a slave to my spell checker. Another language I have studied, and hear spoken every day, is Russian. Now there I have the opposite problem. It is very efficient language in that it has 1 letter per sound. With Russian I can spell it, read it, and even pronounce it, but not understand it all! So the way I learn Russian best is HEAR THE WORD, SEE THE WORD, SOUND IT OUT BY EACH LETTER, REMEMBER A PICTURE TO TRY AND REMEMBER IT, PLACE IT IN CONTEXT OF OTHER WORDS WITH IT, THEN HOPE I REMEMBER IT. So I don’t know where the 3, 1. Semantic, 2. Syntactic, 3. Graphophonic; come into play. Seems the Semantic and Syntactic only come into play if you have a grasp of the grammar. But I’m not the expert. I do have and know of some of my friends children who read at a quite young age. They taught them phonics at home, though this may be simply a matter of parental involvement every day that turned into an advantageous habit for the child.
Admin, definitely, you cannot learn to read with having phonemic awareness. The association of letters and sounds. However, you cannot make meaning from text with just intensive phonics instruction. Context of other words is semantic so you are using the cueing system to learn Russian, kudos to you, what a difficult language to learn?! Any reason you are learning Russian or is it a challenge? We must use both, a balance to teach children to read the debate between phonics and whole language is over that is why I was so surprised by Ms. Schafely comments. Balance is the key, we need both!
Smasini, I would respectfully disagree with your assertion that “research shows that a combination of phonics and whole language works best.” First it was whole language for you in the indoctrinated, brainwashed field of education – the enlighted approach to teacher reading.. Then we learned from real research that whole language is a disaster. So, what did your profession do? They took the position that a combination would be best. Right.
In a study deciding the need of Ritalin by Dr. James Campbell,M.D. for the Oklahoma Public Schools , he lists the Characteristics of Grades 6-12 Non- Readers and concludes:
“These children end up in this predicament because the method of teaching reading in schools is unsound. Children fail to learn phonetic skills because the school does not teach them these skills explicitly or systematically. Furthermore, the schools do not acknowledge these defficiencies or correct them with direct systematic teaching. Instead the child is promoted into higher and higher grades irrespective of the level of reading deficiency or confusion.”
Campbell continues, “Each higher grade requires mor efficiency in reading mechanics and comprehension. Thus the child is put into a double bind: his reading problems are ignored, but the demands on his reading skills continually increase. These children begin to feel that they are dumb and unable to learn. The actions of the schools and teachers convince them that this is true.”
Furthermore, as noted by Dorothy Van Honert, in A Neuropsychological Technique For Training Dyslexics, Journal of Learning disabilities: “There are tremendous implications in all this for the hoary question of phonics versus look-say reading methods. If a child is taught from the very beginning of school to match a visual and auditory symbol (left-brain task), recognize a visual sequence(left brain task),recognize an auditory sequence (left-brain task), match the two (left-brain task),and pronounce the match in the form of a word (left-brain task), he will be using the side of his brain which is uniquely programmed for these jobs. If he is taught, instead, to recognize a word by its visual form or pattern (right-brain task),he will not only be using the side least capable of doing the job of reading, but his teacher will be training him to use the inefficient side and thus discouraging him from lateralizing.”
Smasini, I understand your adherence to the dictates of your profession but Phyllis Schlafly is correct. Teaching a child to read gives that child the opportunity to succeed. We can no longer close our eyes or walk the line of indifference. All of us, parents and teachers, must take a stand and support teaching our children to read by using Intensive, Systematic Phonics. I used it with my daughter from the age of 3 and as a first grader she reads AND COMPREHENDS, at a third grade level. It wasn’t luck, it wasn’t because she is gifted, it wasn’t because of some emotive rational such as environment – it was simply due to intensive systematic phonics.
This article and ensuing discussion brings up a basic point in education that I have questioned for a long time. Why are the methods of today’s government education so different from those of the private schools and how most of us, who join this debate, were taught thirty to forty years ago.
To illustrate this point, I use the tale of two children, my children. Our son was born, for lack of a better term, pre-wired. By eighteen months he was starting to crack the phonics code. By 28 months he was reading books and I mean reading, not memorizing what Mom and Dad had read to him before. One funny story was before he was three, a babysitter was making brownies and he started reading her the directions. Then he proceeded to read from her chemistry book which scared her out of the house. The point is he cracked the code and everything else follwed suit.
Since moving here, he has attended the public school ,but we were less than thrilled on the methods of reading and math. For him it did not matter since he long ago figured the concepts of both, plus a private school background from before. Seeing the public “method” we enrolled our other child in private school. It didn’t take long to see the difference in the two systems.
Our second child became very advanced in reading, writing, math, and fundamental science compared to the friends in public school. Due to a variety of reasons our second child began to attend middle school. Even the teachers admit, not only our child, but others from area private schools are well grounded in their fundamentals. These children including ours are simply bored by so-called advanced courses at the middle school.My question is why are these students so advanced?
Well, first of all thier reading programs were based on phonics and they were drilled in grammar from the first grade on. Perfection was demanded to earn an “A”. If you wrote a science paper your grammar and spelling also had to be correct. In math it was drill work on facts and principles. With each section providing building blocks for the next. Work had to be checked by going back through the process . And calculators were not allowed! Want a hear a story from a public school math teacher in the area. He has told me countless times on how the calculator has ruined the students ability to estimate or to proof a problem in logical steps. He has said, take away the calculator and the brightest student turns to mush.
Care to look at US History. At the Middle School one particular eighth grade teacher spends a month talking about diversity. At the private school in fifth grade they spent a month talking about the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention.
At private schools they are taught to think as individuals. In the government schools they are to think as a group with everything from group math to group projects. If you don’t think there are differences in the result of these two systems, then take the words of Nancy Donavan who inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. A question came from I believe, Dick Muenich on how the schools handle students coming from private schools as far as foreign language classes. Ms. Donavan’s reply went along these lines. We handle them the same way we do in their other classes. That is they come in advanced so we make arrangements for them to take courses above their grade level. In two years or so our students catch up.
They catch up because the advanced students have had their progress come to a grinding halt. So why as a parent do I not have true economic freedom to chose the system best for my child? There is a diferrence in teaching,tell me why?
I’ll tell you why ‘spiritofpublicus’. It’s very simple. It’s because in the public school system there isn’t a “need” to advance a child’s skills, only a “want”! And you know what? As long as there is only a “want” and with having the endless supply of funds through the power of taxation – it will never get to the “need” level.
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You see smasini, it is exactly at this point why forced publicly funded education will never rise to the level of competency of 40 years ago or to the level of a private education. The reason private schools do so much better is because they “HAVE TO” in order to survive. Private schools have to stick to the tried and true methods because they simply can’t afford $30,000 per classroom programs. Public schools waste taxpayers money then say “Oops – that didn’t work due to budget constraints”. This is what I mean by “No accountability in public education”. When was the last time you ever heard of a superintendent or a principal being fired because of less than stellar performance of a school? It does happen once in a great while to a teacher, but its a rare day. Do you think Ron Bernth would ever be fired for wasting taxpayers money or over spending? Not in a million years! As long as the school board feels the taxpayer should give more or if Madison thinks the state should fund more, this downward spiral will continue.
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You say the public schools are dealt an extra hardship because of these children that move constantly or because of parents that don’t care. I say “bunk!”, in the grand scheme of things, the number of these children make up a very small percentage of the pie and certainly not enough to move the bar on the graph by any large amount. The reason public education is failing is because of the system they are in. These results are happening because of the mentality of school boards, the administration and the teachers and how they function as a whole, not because of the students or the parents of these students.
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I maintain it isn’t the public schools that makes a community great – its the private ones that a community has. And its a much greater loss to a community when a private one closes. Why? Because people have the freedom to choose whether to support it or not. To me, public education is nothing more than “Semi-controlled communism eating at the roots of our oaks!” In time, given its present course, it will be this country’s downfall.
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