Tuesday Open Thread

Volunteering this morning in my classroom, the teacher was explaining to the kids about many dates in May (Cinco de Mayo, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, etc) AND that they were in the last full month of the school year.  Wow, time has flown.

Looks like, once again, Denny Middle School is going hard core for the SBAC.  From the Seattle Opt-Out Facebook page:

STUDENTS AT DENNY INT'L MIDDLE SCHOOL IN SEATTLE ARE BEING PULLED FROM ART AND OTHER CONTENT AREAS TO PREP FOR THE SBA!! This is unacceptable. Kids shouldn't be pulled from class for this reason--this is an example of testing gone completely amok, with admin backing a plan that infringes on the health and development of students.
Remember, Denny was at the center of the carnival mayhem back in June of 2015, when principal Jeff Clark forbade students who had opted out from participating in the year end fun. Punitive gesture, to say the least. It made Diane Ravitch's blog, where she, too, was outraged.

A look at teaching reading from The Atlantic:

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

On Tuesday, a panel of experts in Washington, D.C., convened by the federally appointed officials who oversee the NAEP concluded that the root of the problem is the way schools teach reading. The current instructional approach, they agreed, is based on assumptions about how children learn that have been disproven by research over the last several decades—research that the education world has largely failed to heed.

The long-standing view has been that the first several years of elementary school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the arts can wait. After all, the argument goes, if kids haven’t learned to read—a task that is theoretically accomplished by third grade—how will they be able to gain knowledge about those subjects through their own reading?

To some extent, it does make sense to focus on reading skills in the early years. One component of reading is, like math, primarily a set of skills: the part that involves decoding, or making connections between sounds and the letters that represent them.

But educators have also treated the other component of reading—comprehension—as a set of skills, when in fact it depends primarily on what readers already know. In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level, standardized tests can test students on what they’ve learned in school. But in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have nothing to do with what they’ve learned in school—life in the Arctic, for example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. The tests then ask questions designed to assess comprehension: What’s the main idea of the passage? What inferences can you make?

Digging deeper:

One of those cognitive scientists spoke on the Tuesday panel: Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills.

Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge.

What to do?

The implication is clear. The best way to boost students’ reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next: for example, Native Americans and Columbus in kindergarten; the colonial era and the American Revolution in first grade; the War of 1812 and the Civil War in second grade, and so on. That approach enables children to make sense of what they’re learning, and the repetition of concepts and vocabulary in different contexts makes it more likely they’ll retain information.

Not to mention that learning content like this can be a lot more engaging for both students and teachers than the endless practice of illusory skills.

Recent research indicates that students actually learn more from reading texts that are considered too difficult for them—in other words, those with more than a handful of words and concepts a student doesn't understand. What struggling students need is guidance from a teacher in how to make sense of texts designed for kids at their respective grade levels—the kinds of texts those kids may otherwise see only on standardized tests, when they have to grapple with them on their own. 

That view was endorsed by Marilyn Jager Adams, a cognitive and developmental psychologist who is a visiting scholar at Brown University. “Giving children easier texts when they’re weaker readers,” she said during the panel discussion, “serves to deny them the very language and information they need to catch up and move on.”
The failure to build children’s knowledge in elementary school helps explain the gap between the reading scores of students from wealthier families and those of their lower-income peers—a gap that has been expanding.

The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.

The NAEP is a valuable educational barometer, but it’s important to understand that while standardized tests can identify a problem, they can’t provide the answer to it.

 What's on your mind?