School reform has taken a toll on children starting in kindergarten (even preschool). There’s little doubt that children are being forced to learn to read earlier than ever before. The reading gap likely reflects the developmental differences found in children when they are forced to read too soon. Why are schools doing this? Forcing kindergarteners […]
Technology or Books? The Right Book for Christmas and the Holidays
When I was a child, my aunt and uncle, who lived in Chicago, would always send me a cool present for Christmas. I would eagerly run home from school looking for that package attached to the mailbox. It would be wrapped in brown paper and string. The packaging paper would be removed on Christmas Eve, […]
Common Core Creator Slammed Reading Teachers for Having a Research Gap—How Ironic
Teachers have enough difficulties. Sometimes you find an article so full of hubris and irony it cannot be ignored. Several weeks ago, I criticized a series of reports about reading by journalist Emily Hanford. Hanford claimed teachers didn’t understand reading instruction and that their education schools failed to teach them what they should know. I made […]
The Reading Wars? Who’s Talking About Reading and Class Size?
…extensive research in the reading difficulties of children show that large classes are the basic cause of failure in reading as well as in other subjects. ~Professor Arthur I. Gates, nationally known authority in the field of reading instruction. Elementary School Journal; February 1937. When parents and teachers debate phonics and whole language, they might […]
What’s Better than Grit? Reading Books and a Good Teacher
Angela Duckworth graces the Costco Connection this month talking about the character grit that she says made her who she is today. She wants America to teach children to have grit too, so they will be successful. She has a Grit Scale. HERE. And she runs a character lab. Her grit goals for children include […]
My Blogging Anniversary: How Has School Reform Changed in Five Years?
I recently passed the five-year anniversary of when I started writing my blog. What has changed? In this post, I analyze some of the issues I’ve written about over the years. Then, I thank you for your support. Change or lack of change in education can seem dark and foreboding, but there’s a great deal […]
Does this Summer Reading Program Bypass Librarians, Teachers, and Fun, While Tracking Students?
READS is a summer program for disadvantaged children promoted by the i3 (Investing in Innovation) Fund and The Wallace Foundation. It uses computer algorithms to figure out a student’s interests. Next, it matches them to books. It gives students in kindergarten through fifth grade 10 free books, but there are strings attached. Both the i3 […]
Preparing Teachers to Teach Reading: What Happened?
It’s easier to be ideological if you don’t have children sitting in front of you day after day. When you’re trying an approach and it’s not working, you have to back up and say, ‘I have to try something else.’ You can’t say [students] don’t fit the program. ~Dottie Fowler, a 15-year veteran teacher, 1998 […]
How Did We Learn to Read? Is There a Teacher to Thank?
The debate surrounding how to teach children to read is ongoing. What we tend to forget and ignore is how we learned to read ourselves. I think it’s important to address what helped make us the readers we are today, or what problems we encountered. Perhaps we can recall what worked, and what didn’t, by […]
Worries about Tech and the Chan/Zuckerberg $30 Million Support of “Reach Every Reader”
Reading is essential for learning, yet students across the U.S. are completing elementary school with inadequate reading abilities. So begins the announcement in The Harvard Gazette telling us about the new $30 million grant Chan/Zuckerberg will hand over to Harvard’s School of Education and MIT’s Integrative Learning Initiative (MITili). Learning to read, all of us […]