Who Holds Success Academy Accountable for Child Abuse?

Nadya Miranda. the mother of the first grade child berated by her teacher in the infamous video published by the New York Times, has spoken out for the first time by giving an interview to the Times. In the interview she reports how she has withdrawn her child from the school and how she felt her child had been robbed of her confidence as a learner in her Success Academy classroom. She also expressed her frustration that she only received an apology from the school and the teacher after the video became public and that her child had never received an apology from the teacher, Ms. Dial. Ms. Miranda feels like Success Academy rallied to the defense of the teacher and ignored the impact of the verbal abuse on her child. Please read the article for a sense of the shattered hopes and dreams of Ms. Miranda and her daughter.

One thing that stood out for me in the article was this paragraph at the end of the piece.

Seeking to hold someone accountable for what happened to her daughter, Ms. Miranda went into a Department of Education building in Brooklyn to ask about filing a complaint, but was told that Success was independent from the school district. She said that Ms. Nicholls, the principal, had given her information about how to reach Success’s board of trustees, and that she had sent a letter, but she was not optimistic that she would get a response.

Ms. Miranda went to the public school authority where she was told they could not help her. Her only recourse was to go to the Success Academy Board where she rightly was not hopeful for a response. Why would she expect a response from a board led by CEO Eva Moskowitz, who had already sided with the teacher and not her child in this controversy? I wonder if Ms. Miranda and the other parents who send their children to Success Academy and other supposedly "public" charter schools knew they were giving up their rights to file a complaint with the public school overseers.

So when the question comes down to who holds Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy juggernaut accountable for systemic child abuse, the answer turns out to be Eva Moskowitz and her hand picked board of directors including such enlightened luminaries as former TV anchor person and current teacher basher, Campbell Brown and failed Newark mayoral candidate and current charter school shill, Shavar Jeffries. Talk about leaving the fox in charge of the hen house!

Beneath this tragic story of one child's abuse at the hands of a teacher, lies a broader concern. Who holds charter schools accountable for their actions? In any public school, a publicly elected school board has responsibility and must, by the very fact of being elected, be responsive to that public, however imperfectly at times. In the world of the charter school, apparently, while the public supports them through tax dollars, the public has no voice in what goes on behind those walls financially, instructionally or socially and emotionally.

The great irony, of course, is that while reformers cry for all kinds of accountability measures for traditional public schools and certified public school teachers, there is no such outcry from them about accountability for a supposedly public charter school and its uncertified teachers.

Accountability in Public Schools: The Three-Legged Stool

My uncle was a dairy farmer in North Carolina. In the fifties, before automation hit the dairy industry, I used to watch him drag his old, wooden, three-legged stool from cow to cow and deftly milk each cow with a steady, rhythmic motion, as streams of milk splashed into his milking can. Occasionally, he would allow his "city kid" nephew to sit on the stool and give it a try. In many ways that stool - sturdy, steady and reliable- was the foundation on which my uncle's business was built.

The educational age of accountability, which Hoffman and Pearson in the book Research-Based Practices for Teaching the Common Core (2015), identify as beginning in about 1985, was built on a three-legged foundation as well. The original formulation of accountability called for

• Holding students accountable for learning content and processes
• Holding teachers accountable for student learning
• Holding states and policymakers accountable for providing the resources that would create the opportunity to learn (Hoffman and Pearson, 2015).

Early on in the accountability movement there seemed to be a recognition that there was a quid pro quo to requiring student and teacher accountability. If students and teachers were to be held accountable, then the states must provide the resources to achieve the desired instruction and learning. Somewhere along the way, however, this third leg of the stool has gone missing.

The age of accountability has led in subsequent years to the establishment of state learning standards, later considered to be "watered-down" and replaced by the "more rigorous" Common Core State Standards. As a result of the George W. Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), standardized tests have proliferated as a measure of student accountability, school accountability and finally teacher accountability in the form of value added measures (VAMs), which tied teacher evaluation to student standardized test scores. With Race to the Top (RTTP) the Obama administration doubled down on accountability by tying waivers from the impossible to achieve NCLB strictures and increased test-based teacher accountability to much needed cash bribes grants for schools.

So the first two legs of the stool have received plenty of attention. Standards have been established and revised, then thrown out and replaced. Standardized tests have proliferated, so much so that students are taking these tests yearly starting in third grade and the tests are being tied to promotion and graduation decisions. Most states have passed statutes requiring teacher evaluation be tied, in some degree, to student test scores. Yes, the policymakers have done a bang up job of holding children and teachers mightily accountable. 

As to the policymakers own accountability though--well, not so much. The third leg of the stool has been ignored. Providing the opportunity to learn turns out to be costly. Providing the opportunity to learn turns out to require a full frontal assault on poverty, including wrap around health and counseling services for the 25% of American children living in poverty. Providing the opportunity to learn requires high quality preschool and high quality childcare options for working families. Providing the opportunity to learn means repairing or replacing long ignored, decaying public school buildings. Providing the opportunity to learn means providing enough staff for reasonable class sizes and smaller class sizes for at-risk children. In other words, providing the opportunity to learn costs money and so the policymakers and state leaders have backed off their quid pro quo commitment.

Instead of providing the financial resources needed for good teaching and good learning to take place, policymakers have tried to get the desired results on the cheap by offering "school choice" in the form of vouchers and charter schools. Ignoring for a moment that charter school and voucher programs have shown little ability to improve performance, we should first look at what the whole "school choice" movement is. It is, first and foremost a way for policymakers at the state and national level to avoid taking responsibility for their commitment to provide the opportunities to learn for children. Rather than find the funds to make learning happen in the traditional public schools, they have thrown up their hands and said to charter and private school operators, "Here, you do it."

As my long ago college history professor, Dr. Benjamin Powell, used to tell me, "if you want to understand history, follow the money." The history of recent educational reform is an object lesson. The first two legs of the three-legged accountability stool offer corporations an opportunity to make money and advance their privatization agenda. Entrepreneurs can make money by opening cheap to operate cyber-schools or by opening a chain of charter schools where teachers are underpaid and overworked and children are provided a curriculum aimed at making them compliant worker bees in a corporate dominated society. Publishers can make money by creating "Common Core aligned" textbooks and instructional materials. Test makers can reap huge profits by designing brand new "Common Core aligned" tests that are supposedly holding students and teachers accountable. For the really deft corporations like Pearson, Inc., profits can be made on both ends by supplying the materials and the standardized tests in a perfect little scheme to monopolize the market, maximize profits and control what is taught and learned. Yes, the two legs of the stool involving student accountability and teacher accountability are money makers.

The third leg of the stool, however, costs money. Overcoming the debilitating impact of poverty on the opportunity to learn is expensive. There is no money to be made from it. It requires a long, consistent ongoing expenditure of time and money -- perhaps even increased taxes on those getting wealthy from school reform. And so the third leg of the stool is ignored, and without that third leg the entire foundation of reform collapses. And that is why, no matter what accountability and school choice schemes the overzealous reformers come up with, the stool can't support improved educational performance. The stool falls over; the milk is spilt; the children go hungry.

The Importance of Making Mistakes

The vile video of Success Academy teacher, Charlotte Dial, berating a first grader for making a mistake on her math paper, reminds me of something I have been saying to teachers for years. "Value student errors, because those errors are our best window into what a child does not know and, therefore, they tell us what we need to teach next." Because we teachers are human we sometimes fall into the trap of bemoaning student errors. We think, "Gee whiz, I just taught that, but they still didn't get it. What is wrong with them?" The truth is, though, that there is a gap between what is taught and what is learned and student errors give us the information we need to reteach or teach in a different way to fill that gap. I often joke that we should all be grateful that students make errors, since if they got everything right we would be out of a job.

My favorite story about student mistakes comes from my time in the early 1970s when I was teaching geography to 7th graders. This was during the time that the former East Pakistan had won its independence and renamed itself Bangladesh. After a unit on South Asia, instruction in the historical, political, social and religious importance of the region and considerable map study, I gave the students a test. On the test I asked a fill-in-the-blank question, "The former East Pakistan has recently won its independence and been renamed __________." One student, no doubt struggling with the difficult pronunciation and spelling of Bangladesh, answered -- "Balderdash!" I gave full credit for the answer because it was a good effort and because it gave me a great story to tell in the teacher's lounge.

The distinguished literacy researcher and theorist, Ken Goodman, helped change my thinking about student errors. Goodman uses the term "miscue" to describe what happens when a child makes an error in reading. If you have ever played any pool, you will find the description apt. More often than I would like to admit, I miss the center of the cue ball with my cue stick and the ball goes skittering away in a direction I did not intend. On the next shot, I make a slight adjustment and try again, usually with better results. And so it is in reading, when faced with a challenging word, children take their best shot and if they "miscue", we try to help them make adjustments.

Importantly, as we listen to children read, it is not all the words they decode accurately that give us information about their reading, it is the miscues. If a student reads "house" for "apartment", we know that the student is reading to make sense and has simply substituted one type of dwelling for another. This is a "high level" miscue and may not need our intervention. On the other hand if the child reads "money" for "monkey", the miscue would tell us that the student is not reading for meaning and not looking effectively at all the components of the word. This is a more concerning miscue and may help us to determine some next steps in reading instruction.

I think it is useful to think of all student mistakes as "miscues." Most mistakes contain an element of understanding and misunderstanding in them. As we look for ways to help the student clarify and correct, we need to use the part of the error that shows some understanding to correct the misunderstanding. For example, in writing, if a student attempts parallel structure, but provides a faulty execution, we can celebrate that the writer has learned that parallel structure is a powerful tool for the writer and also help the writer refine the use of parallel structure.

Learning is a risky business. If we help students understand that errors are valuable and provide opportunities for continued learning, they are more likely to take risks. If we constantly bemoan errors, children will be less likely to take those risks that lead to learning. Certainly the children in Ms. Dial's Success Academy classroom are unlikely to take any risks.

In the 1990s, I was working in an elementary school as a reading specialist. I will never forget one struggling 2nd grade reader, Danielle,  who was having a terrible time with reading. Slowly, through her hard work and persistence, she improved. At Christmas time she handed me a handmade card with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the front. Inside it read, "Dear Mr. Walsh, Thank you for hleping me rede. Love, Danielle." Best Christmas card I ever got. It also gave me some useful information on a new teaching target for Danielle -- spelling.

Fear and Learning at Success Academy

On Friday, the New York Times ran an article and accompanying video showing a Success Academy teacher berating a young child, ripping up the child's work in the child's face, sending the child to the corner and loudly accusing the child of "confusing everybody" and "infuriating me." On the same day Success Academy CEO, Eva Moskowitz, held a news conference, with the teary-eyed teacher, Charlotte Dial, standing at her side, in which Moskowitz defended the teacher, her schools and her policies, berated the New York Times for coverage bias, and described the incident as an "anomaly."

First of all, let's understand that the incident was anything but an anomaly. The reason an assistant teacher in the room surreptitiously shot the video was because she was concerned about this teacher's "daily harsh treatment of children." Secondly, we need to understand that this type of teaching is rewarded in the Success Academy. Ms. Dial was considered so effective that she was promoted to a position where she could model practice for other teachers. Thirdly, we need to understand that this is a pattern that is repeated over and over in Success Academy schools, where one principal kept an infamous "got to go" list of struggling learners he targeted for removal from the school and where harsh discipline and instructional practices have been well documented.

One thing that surprised me in these articles and in the comments that people left online in response, was how so many people see the teacher's behavior not as the child abuse that it appeared to be to me, but as a necessary part of the discipline practices needed for children to learn. One mother of three Success Academy children said, "I think discipline is necessary." One online commentor said the incident wasn't worth an article in the New York Times and we need to stop "coddling children." Another parent said, "I wish my child could have a math teacher like Ms. Dial."

I agree that discipline is a necessary part of learning. Children learn best in an environment that is calm, consistent and well-ordered. But discipline should not and cannot be equated with fear. Fear does irreparable harm to learning. The Times article quotes Dr. James P. McDonald, professor at NYU, who, after viewing the video said,

Because the child's learning is still a little fragile - as all learning is initially - she made an error. Good classrooms (and schools) are places where errors are regarded as a necessary byproduct of learning. But not here. Making an error in (Ms. Dial's) classroom is a social offense." 

He says that the classroom is likely full of fear and that children will likely not feel safe making mistakes.

In his book, The Motivated Student: Unlocking the Enthusiasm for Learning (ASCD, 2009), Bob Sullo dedicates the first chapter to eliminating fear in the classroom. He says that "fear remains one of the most widely used strategies for managing student behavior and encouraging academic achievement", but "fear compromises our ability to learn." Learning is risky business. As Dr. McDonald says, learning is fragile. Children will not and cannot take the risks necessary to learn in an atmosphere of fear. Why would any child in a classroom run on fear take the risk of asking a question for clarification? Why would any child raise her hand to answer a question if there was a good chance the answer would be greeted by public ridicule?

The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2010) says that

It is essential that that children have safe, secure environments in which to grow, learn and develop healthy brains and bodies. Science shows that early exposure to circumstances that produce persistent fear and chronic anxiety can have lifelong effects on brain architecture.

I believe that it is safe to say that many of the children who attend Success Academy schools come from neighborhood environments where fear and chronic anxiety are the norm. The Success Academy school, rather than providing a safe haven for these fragile young learners, doubles down on fear and anxiety and introduces it into the learning environment as well.

There is no excuse for using fear to intimidate or motivate children. It is simply unacceptable and abusive and ultimately counterproductive to learning. Success Academy can boast of its high test scores, but any serious educator must ask the question, "At what price this very narrow success?"

I cannot help but notice in the video that this white teacher is belittling a young African American child. I am put in mind of the plantation of the Antebellum south, where instead of ripping up a child's paper, the master meted out forty lashes with the whip.

Want Great Literacy Instruction? Trust the Teacher

In the final chapter of the book, Research-Based Practices for Teaching Common Core Literacy, James V. Hoffman and P. David Pearson take an historical perspective on where trust is placed in the teaching of reading. Summing up more than three-hundred years of literacy education history, the authors conclude that education policy has consistently put its trust in programs rather than in teachers. Hoffman and Pearson believe this has been a mistake of historic proportions. I agree.

Teachers have rarely been given the respect they deserve as the knowledgeable professionals they are; as the persons in the best possible position to make the instructional decisions on the fly that will assist the developing reader to become a literate individual. Throughout education history all sorts of programs have been touted as "teacher proof" systems sure to bring students to literacy if compliant teachers just implement them with fidelity. And so we have seen one program after another: the alphabet-spelling method, the "look-say" method, the Dick and Jane basal readers, phonics driven Direct Instruction (DISTAR), etc., etc., etc. Interestingly, no independent research has ever found one reading program to be superior to another. All have strengths and weaknesses and all seem to serve some children well and others not so well.

The solution to the problem seems obvious to Hoffman and Pearson and to me. We have largely wasted our time investing in programs when we should have been focusing on teachers and this focus on teachers is not about training them to deliver a scripted program faithfully, but is about engaging those teachers in a professional dialogue aimed at delivering the best possible literacy instruction to children. The real answer to the literacy issue in American education is to shift our trust in literacy instruction from programs to people, from teacher proof material to teacher developed instructional plans.

Hoffman and Pearson don't mention it, but there was one brief shining moment when some teachers in some schools across the country took control of literacy education. This was the whole language movement of the 1980's and 90's. I have dealt with what killed the whole language movement in another post here. For now let it suffice to say that whole language lost the war to the interests of corporate education reform. Whole language, which focused on good literature and teacher and student decision making, was an existential threat to the large textbook and reading materials publishers. Imagine if schools shifted from spending money on basals and workbooks to buying real books! To head off the economic threat and to appeal to that group of policy makers who believed phonics instruction to be the one true way, politically motivated, supposedly "scientific" research was touted as proof that phonics worked and whole language didn't.

Hoffman and Pearson see the Common Core State Standards as an opportunity to shift away from placing trust in programs and toward a trust in teachers. The standards state that they "leave room for teachers, curriculum developers and states to determine how these goals should be reached" and the standards authors seem to wish to empower teachers to make decisions on the appropriateness of reading material based on "professional judgement, experience, and knowledge of their student and subject."  But Hoffman and Pearson also see indications that the implementation of the standards shows that they are just another wolf of a scripted program in the sheep's clothing of teacher empowerment. Specifically, the Publisher's Criteria that accompany the Common Core and direct the development of materials to support the Common Core, contains such "highly specific instructional guidance" that it "can quickly erode teacher prerogative."

And so despite the hopeful note sounded by Hoffman and Pearson, it appears that the "chief architects" of the Common Core don't trust teachers either. In my years as a curriculum and instruction supervisor, I like to think that I empowered teachers to teach. I firmly believe that the best instructional decisions are made by an informed, reflective, responsive teacher using her knowledge and experience to guide children into literacy. Not all the teachers who worked with me shared that perspective. I vividly remember one teacher saying to me, "Just give me the book that tells me what to teach and I will do it." I told her there was no such book. I told her I knew what to do based on my teacher education, my professional reading, my experience and my knowledge of the children. I told her to read the professional literature I provided and then watch the children and they would tell her what needed to be taught.

I believed then and I still believe that it is the classroom teacher who is best positioned to make those critical instructional decisions. Programs do not teach children to read. Teachers, in collaboration with those children and the parents of those children, bring children to literacy. If we wish to make real improvements in literacy instruction in this country, we need to stop looking for the "teacher proof" program and start trusting our teachers to design the curriculum and deliver the instruction that will make literacy happen.

The Common Core and the "Stuff" Curriculum of E. D. Hirsch

In many ways, I see the adoption of the Common Core State Standards as the ultimate victory of E. D. Hirsch and his idea of "cultural literacy." I do not think that it is a coincidence that Hirsch advocates for a "core knowledge" curriculum while the standards are called the Common "Core."

I am far from the only one to make that connection. A while ago, Politico came out with its list of  50 "thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter", and there at number 8 was Hirsch side-by-side with the "chief architect" of the Common Core, David Coleman. Over at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Common Core cheerleader, Robert Pondiscio notes that while you won't find Hirsch's name on the Standards "his thumbprints are there, if you care to look." Pondiscio thinks this is a good thing. I don't.

Those Hirschian thumbprints that Pondiscio finds on the Common Core are perhaps most clearly found in the percentages of non-fiction texts that are prescribed at each grade level, and in Common Core "aligned" curriculum such as the Core Knowledge driven curriculum adopted in New York that has first graders studying Mesopotamia and Hammurabi. 

I like to think of Hirsch's Core Knowledge as the "stuff" curriculum. For Hirsch, all we need to do is decide what "stuff" to teach and then "stuff" it into kids heads. Hirsch, of course, then creates a list of the stuff all kids should know, and lo and behold, the list reflects a bias toward a particularly conservative Eurocentric view of what we need to know, the literature we need to read and the principles we need to embrace. Hirsch's ideas about education in general and about literacy in particular are clear and simple. And like all easy answers in education they are clearly and simply wrong.

In literacy, Hirsch extends his "stuff" curriculum to reading comprehension. For Hirsch, reading comprehension is simply a matter of knowing enough "stuff." If we stuff kids heads with enough information and vocabulary, they will be able to read and comprehend at high levels. There is a kernel of truth here. Reading comprehension is, of course, highly influenced by prior knowledge. Where Hirsch goes wrong is in over-stating the relationship to the exclusion of everything else we know about reading comprehension.

As Louise Rosenblatt has shown, reading comprehension is a complex transaction between the writer and the mind of the reader. Prior knowledge plays a part in this transaction, but so do the strategies the reader uses to understand a text, the context in which the reading is taking place(a class assignment, personal choice reading, studying for a test), and the qualities of the text itself (textbook, poem, primary document). From literacy researcher P. David Pearson, we know that comprehension strategies (predicting, questioning, summarizing) can be taught to students and applied to reading. We know that students who use strategies skillfully read and comprehend better.

The truth is that today's literacy teachers are preparing readers to comprehend texts that contain information that has not even been thought of yet. As the internet expands, information explodes and the easy availability of information grows. No one can accurately predict what that information might be, but we can all predict that readers of the future will have to be critical consumers of all information because so much of the information they will read will be of dubious reliability.

The Common Core, with its roots in the cultural literacy ideas of E. D. Hirsch, is one of those pieces of information that must be comprehended with a critical eye. Hirsch's simplistic (mis)understanding of reading comprehension is reflected in the Common Core call for "more complex text" and more informational text. As Sandra Stotsky has said in critiquing the Common Core and championing more literature in the schools, this focus on "stuff", may lead to a "reduced capacity for analytical thinking." Analytical and critical thinking must be the goal of a reading curriculum.

Hirsch's ideas on education are regressive. It is small wonder that his ideas have found resonance with Common Core champions. The Common Core itself represents a regressive "back to basics" approach to teaching and learning. Instead of packing kids heads with stuff, we need to equip readers with the skills to deal with an ever changing and growing body of knowledge.

New Jersey Study Commission on Testing: Keep Weighing the Pig

New Jersey's Study Commission on the Use of Student Assessments issued its report this week after a year and a half of deliberations. The commission was ostensibly formed to look into over-testing in New Jersey schools, but anyone who follows New Jersey politics at all will not be surprised that this commission told Governor Christie exactly what he wanted to hear. That is what study commissions in New Jersey are for.

The report is  a densely written 34 pages long and contains 49 recommendations, so to save you some reading time, Russ on Reading has dug into the report to summarize the findings here.

1. Keep weighing the pig every year

In the introduction the commission acknowledges the "anxiety and fear" surrounding the testing issue, but concludes that this is just so much smoke and mirrors. The report says:

... one point must be abundantly clear: the Study Commission firmly believes all students in New Jersey’s public schools who are eligible should be required to take the State standardized assessment (i.e., PARCC)

And why must New Jersey students in grades 3-8 be required to take this test every year?

Doing so will ensure all students are progressing well in their educational endeavors and all public schools are effective for all students. High-quality assessments such as PARCC will hold schools accountable for serving all of their students, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Study Commission believes it will be impossible to effectively close achievement gaps between and among students without accurate and actionable information.

So there we have it. The same old education reform mantra. We need to keep testing because we need to know how students are progressing and to hold schools accountable for serving all students. In other words the Study Commission has bought into the rhetoric of No Child Left Behind, which the federal government left behind a few weeks ago.

This leads me to ask a few questions.

Are standardized tests an effective way to hold schools accountable?

All the evidence would indicate no. According to testing watchdog FairTest, multiple choice, standardized tests "cannot provide meaningful accountability" information.

Are PARCC tests "high quality?"

This is highly debatable. In New Jersey, less than half of the students who took the test in 2015 scored proficient or above. This would indicate that the test is not appropriately rigorous, but just too damn hard. New Jersey typically ranks second or third in educational attainment across the states, yet half of New Jersey's student couldn't pass the test. You can find my full report on the test results here. I have also done an analysis of readability issues with the PARCC here, here and here.

But don't take my word for it. The Gordon Commission report, produced under the sponsorship of ETS of all people, concluded that Common Core tests are currently "far from what is ultimately needed either for accountability or classroom instructional improvement." 

Are standardized tests effective in narrowing the achievement gap?

Of course not. We have twelve years of evidence through NCLB's test and punish policies that the achievement gap is not narrowed by weighing it. Narrowing the achievement gap requires a full frontal attack on inequity. Standardized tests can show us that our society and our educational opportunity are inequitable, but all we really need to do to know that is to look at the neighborhoods in leafy suburbs where kids score well and the long deteriorating neighborhoods in the inner-city where kids struggle to score well.

I have an idea. Instead of yearly testing, let's all just stipulate that the achievement gap exists and that it is in reality an opportunity gap. Then we can do away with all the tests that keep telling us what we already know and focus our attention on things that are likely to reduce the opportunity gap like cleaner, safer schools, wrap around health and wellness programs, and attracting high quality teachers.

2. What we have here is a failure to communicate

The commission seems to believe that the real problem with the testing in New Jersey is a failure to communicate just how wonderful all this testing is and those insidious grumpy pants on social media (including, I suppose, me and other bloggers) who keep spreading nastiness about testing and who fail to grasp the wonderfulness of it all. To that end they make several recommendations for putting new lipstick on the old pig.

The recommendations include creating a shared vision, a proactive communication campaign, a communication team in the NJ Department of Education and a professional email database for the quick dissemination of information. Maybe the NJDOE could enlist the services of a Hollywood public relations firm to make this all baloney look good.

3.  If there is too much testing, it must be the school districts' fault.

The Study Commission seems to not understand what all the fuss is about over-testing, since the Statewide assessments are only done once a year and are mandated by State and federal law. So, if there is over-testing, as many people who testified before the commission complained there was, then it must be the fault of the local districts. To that end the Study Commission recommends that school districts "conduct a thorough inventory of their own assessment systems." School districts are encouraged to make sure their own testing regimes are efficient and used effectively to improve student learning. 

I am sure the districts are grateful for the encouragement and waiting with bated breath for the monies that will support said inventory.


4. Using standardized tests to measure teacher accountability is honky dory.

In the area of teacher accountability and standardized tests, the Commission finds that "the positive and encouraging results of the educator evaluation system thus far, indicate that the system is working." The Study Commission dismisses educator concerns about using test scores for teacher evaluation by saying that much of the concern should be mitigated by the fact that the vast majority of teachers in the first year of the evaluation design were rated as "effective" or "highly effective" and that the ratings were pretty much the same whether student growth scores were used or not.

Once again the Study Commission thinks the biggest problem is a failure to communicate well. If only the NJDOE could get all the good news out about teacher evaluation, people would be embracing it. The Commission calls for professional learning efforts and greater transparency about how teacher evaluations are calculated. They further recommend that the NJDOE "encourage" school districts to use the information for teacher improvement, "particularly of novice and struggling teachers."

The Study Commission might have spent some time looking at all the evidence that shows how the use of standardized test scores in any proportion as a part of a teacher's evaluation is simply unsupportable. They might have read the work of Audrey Amrein- Beardsley (Vamboozled and Rethinking Value Added Models in Education) or looked at the white paper from the American Statistical Association calling into question any significant use of standardized tests as a measure of teacher effectiveness. They might have then said that these measures should be removed entirely from formal teacher evaluation, but that is not the message the Governor wanted to hear.

5. Lots of professional development will help fix the problem

Again, all this noise about standardized testing is simply a matter of misunderstanding. Professional development for teachers, developed under the NJDOE in conjunction with other statewide associations and advocacy groups, will raise the assessment literacy of the teachers in the state and help them to see how useful these standardized tests are. I can see the teachers lining up for these sessions now.

No amount of professional development will change the fact that standardized tests are not very useful for making instructional decisions about individual children because the information is not timely nor does it provide enough detail on individual students. Standardized tests have their place in long range school district curriculum planning, but we don't need yearly tests to get this information.

There is some good news for parents and educators in the report.


1. Special populations of students need special treatment in testing situations.

The Study Commission clearly heard the concerns of parents and teachers of students with special needs and ELL students. They recognize that these students need special accommodations when it comes to standardized testing. They make six recommendations in this area that boil down to acknowledging there is an issue, suggesting the NJDOE do something about it in collaboration with school districts and calling on the NJDOE to talk to the federal Department of Education who insists all these special populations take these tests, to see if more flexibility can be provided in testing these special populations.

These recommendations lack specificity, but the acknowledgment of the issue in the face of stupid federal rules is welcome. It is truly cruel and unusual punishment to insist that all students, no matter what their learning challenges take these tests.

2. Varied Assessments

The report acknowledges that a broad array of assessments is necessary for every school district including formative assessments, end of unit assessments, interim assessments and state assessments. The effective use of the first three is a best practice. Teachers use formative assessment daily through their observation of student learning to adjust teaching and provide small group and individual support when needed. End of unit assessments are designed by teachers and actually test what has been taught to see if it has been learned. Interim assessments may be used to provide a sense of student reading level (benchmark) or student performance against a level of expected performance as measured on a rubric.

All three of these types of assessments provide teachers and administrators with real actionable feedback to help them work with real actual kids. The results of these assessments are timely and they inform instruction. The fourth type of assessment, standardized tests, simply does not provide this feedback and should be used sparingly.

So, there is my quick take on the Study Commission report. Blogger, parent and teacher Marie Corfield has launched a more detailed report here. I suggest you check out what Marie has to say on each of the recommendations. Meanwhile, I know we all can't wait for the glossy, "YEAH, PARCC". public relations campaign that will be coming from the NJDOE. The best way for parents to respond to the publicity barrage will be to simply have their children opt out of the tests. Opting out brings the whole scheme crashing down on itself and impacts the quality of a child's education not at all.

The Homework Problem

                                Homework! Oh homework!
                                I hate you! You stink!
                                I wish I could wash you away in the sink.
                                        (from Homework, Oh Homework, by Jack Prelutsky)

Sunday’s New York Times carried an article by Vicki Abeles, producer director of the documentary Race to Nowhere, entitled Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick? The article discusses the negative impact on students, both privileged and poor, of the drive for academic success. This opinion piece followed on the heels of an article earlier in the week that reported on the efforts of the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District in New Jersey to deal with the issue of student stress. The Superintendent of the West Windsor Schools, David Aderhold, reported to parents that the schools were in crisis due to the overwhelming feelings of stress students were experiencing. Among many other causes, both articles cited homework as one of the major stressors and both articles suggested that controlling the amount of homework could help in reducing that stress.

Homework is as much a part of the American school culture as the three-ring binder, the text book and the football team. Since seemingly the beginning of time, teachers have assigned homework and students have complained about it. Watch any Our Gang comedy from the 1930’s and you will see that children have always gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid homework. But whether the concern is over-stressed kids or homework resistant kids, homework keeps being assigned, keeps being completed or avoided or copied by kids and keeps being expected by parents. Should it be?

Teachers I have spoken to have argued that homework is necessary for reinforcement of information taught in school, or to prepare for a lesson that is to be given the next day, or to extend learning that has taken place in class or because there is not enough time to cover all the material during class. Some teachers have told me that it is important to assign homework to elementary students so they are prepared for the homework they will get in middle and high school. Other teachers have told me they assign homework because parents expect it.

I must say that I don’t find any of those reasons to be compelling ones for assigning homework, but what does the research say? Do students really benefit from homework? And if they do, what kind do they need?

Harris Cooper, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Duke University and author of The Battle Over Homework, has done the most extensive and compelling research in homework. His findings can be summarized as follows:

·         When homework and in-class study were compared, in-class study proved superior.

·         Homework had no academic impact on the achievement of children in the elementary grades.

·         Homework had some positive impact on academic achievement (as measured by tests) of children in middle school as long as the homework was no more than 90 minutes a night.

·         Homework had the most impact on academic achievement (as measured by tests) in the high school.

·         Homework probably works best when the material is not too complex or unfamiliar.

·         It is better to distribute homework material across several assignments rather than have homework concentrate only on the material covered on that day.

Author and lecturer Alfie Kohn is perhaps America’s chief critic of homework. He finds Harris’ findings on the academic benefits of homework less than compelling. In his 2006 book, The Homework Myth, Kohn looks at Cooper’s research and concludes, 

Taken as a whole, current research might be characterized as inconclusive… a careful examination of the data raises serious doubts about whether meaningful learning is enhanced by homework for most students.

Kohn spends an entire chapter on the idea of homework as reinforcement, the number one reason teachers say they assign homework. Reinforcement assignments are not effective for students who do not already understand the concept, so they may end up reinforcing incorrect understandings. Reinforcement assignments are also ineffective for students who have already mastered the material. In other words, for a large number of students in any class, a reinforcement assignment is either wasting time or reinforcing bad habits. Kohn says it would be better to have the reinforcement work take place in the classroom where the teacher can clear up misconceptions and provide new challenges for students who have mastered the material.

With the work of Cooper and Kohn in mind, I think most of what is assigned in today’s schools as homework should happen in the classroom. I think of the art class as an appropriate model. When students attend an art class, they receive some instruction in technique and then they try those techniques out, right there in class in front of the teacher. In that art class the teacher sees the evidence of the student’s understanding and application of the skill and provides immediate formative feedback. I believe this should be the model for all classrooms. The classroom should be a workshop where students learn, apply and receive timely feedback on their work. This model works for all disciplines and virtually eliminates the need for reinforcement homework.

And eliminating the need for homework is a valuable thing because homework has so many negative impacts on children. As the articles cited at the beginning of this post highlight, one negative aspect is stress, stress on children and stress on families. Another negative aspect of homework is the impact on student perceptions of school and learning. Kids see homework as an intrusion on their “free-time” and I do not think that judgment is unreasonable. Homework may also lead to cheating. When I did a study of cheating at the high school where I worked 10 years ago, I found that one major cause of cheating was students feeling over-burdened by homework that they did not find particularly useful or engaging.

Should we do away with homework entirely? Probably not. But as teachers we need to think closely about our reasons for assigning homework and what the likely benefits will be of any given assignment. We need to decide if the time spent on assigning, completing, grading and reviewing homework, is worth the educational gains made. We need to decide if those gains might better be achieved by having the kids do the work under our watchful eye. If we assign homework because there is too much curriculum to cover, we need to reflect on whether we are trying to cover too much. If we are assigning homework so that students are prepared for the next class, we need to examine if that is an effective practice or if it is better to provide the background information in class. 

If we do assign homework, we should be sure assignments are focused on integrating concepts across more than one class, that the homework is readily doable for the students to whom it is assigned and that students get helpful feedback on their work. It should also be brief and assigned perhaps once or twice a week and never on weekends and holidays. For me, the best homework assignments would be those where students get the opportunity to explore a topic of their own interest or read a book or magazine of their own choice.

Maybe the homework that would be best for children is not homework assigned from school, but real “home” work. Time at home to spend interacting with family and friends and time to explore personal passions.

The Best Education Books of 2015

Here is my year-end list of books that every well-informed educator and public education advocate should read. The list is not all-inclusive; it includes only books that came to my attention and it certainly reflects my personal tastes and biases.  I think, however, you will find these books important, informative and written with heart, passion, style, intelligence and commitment.

Please support these authors and the often small publishing houses who get these books made.

In Praise of American Educators: And How they Can Become Even Better, by Dr. Richard Dufour, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Former teacher and principal, Rick DuFour, offers both a spirited defense of public school teachers against the slings and arrows of corporate education reformers and a prescription for the continuing improvement of the profession. DuFour's concept of the professional learning community was very influential in my own administrative work over the last 10 years. His faith in teachers and in teacher's ability to improve their own practice through a culture of collaboration seems to me to be a major contribution to the field of teaching and learning.

In his current book, DuFour takes on every criticism of the American public school teacher and shows conclusively through thoroughgoing documentation and evidence, that teachers are not the problem and that indeed the current generation of American educators is the best we have ever seen. After analyzing all the "schools are failing" rhetoric in detail, DuFour concludes that "a fair and balanced analysis of the evidence can only lead to the conclusion that American schools and the educators within them are not failing, and are, in fact, achieving some of the best result's in our nation's history."

DuDour then takes on every proposed reform measure for improving schools (charter, vouchers, test-based accountability, value added measures, merit pay and school closures) and shows how they will not lead to improved learning and how all are doing damage to student learning and the teaching profession. Real improvement is possible, according to DuFour, if we change the scope and frequency of testing, pay the college costs for high performing high school students who enter the teaching profession, establish career ladders with increasing responsibilities and compensation for teachers, establish clear guidelines for what teachers should know and be able to do, provide universal early childhood education, support career and technical education, and ensure that teachers are provided with time for collaboration.

It is through this concept of teacher collaboration and the development of a collaborative culture in schools that DuFour believes real and ongoing improvement can be made. The rest of the book lays out how teachers and their leaders can establish a collaborative structure that leads to improved student learning. In DuFour's collaborative professional learning communities, student learning improves through teachers learning from teachers, through viable curriculum developed and delivered by teachers and through assessment that informs and improves instructional practice.

Rick DuFour's vision of the American school is one that rejects quick education reformer fixes and focuses on the professional educators in the schools collaborating to improve student learning. It is a vision that I believe all of this "greatest generation of educators" can embrace.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, by P.L. Thomas. New York, NY: Garn Press.

Many of you may know P. L. Thomas from his own fine blog, the becoming radical, where Thomas holds forth in his own unique and winning way on issues of public education, pedagogy, literature and social justice. His book, Beware the Roadbuilders, is must reading for anyone interested in these same topics. You can find my full review of the book here. The "roadbuilders" of the title are the education reformers; those plutocrats, politicians and pundits who have seized on urban education as the "civil rights issue of our time." 

But this book is much more than an anti-reform polemic. This is a book for people who love literature and love finding the lessons in literature that help us understand our own lives and the world we live in. In Roadbuilders, Thomas leads us on one reader's journey into critical understanding. It is a journey informed by personal experience and shaped through the reading of great literature. I encourage you to join Thomas on his journey.


The Prize: Whose in Charge of America's Schools, by Dale Russakoff. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

The Prize is the great cautionary tale of all cautionary tales for education reformers. Russakoff, a long-time Washington Post reporter, tells the story of Facebook entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg's 100 million dollar gift to the public schools of Newark, NJ. This gift was so extraordinary that it was announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sharing the stage with Zuckerberg.

In the end this 100 million failed to make any appreciable differences in the lives of the students of the Newark Public Schools. The reason it did not is a story laced with hubris, arrogance and lack of understanding of the issues. Essentially each of the players wanted to use the money for his own political agenda, Zuckerberg to experiment with teacher merit pay, Christie to damage the teacher unions, and Booker to open more charter schools and advance his own political career. The leaders of the project failed because they ignored the people who would be most impacted by the money: the teachers, students and community members of Newark. This was a failure of top down reform. Reform driven by carpetbaggers from outside the city, including Christie's hand-picked superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson.

Russakoff does not make the same mistake as the reformers. She goes out and talks to teachers, students and parents in the community and it is their stories that make this book rise above the level of expose' to the level of great reporting and great sociological insight. If Zuckerberg, Christie and Booker had had a little of this insight, this tragic waste of resources might have been avoided.

Preparing the Nation's Teachers to Teach: A Manifesto in Defense of "Teacher Educators Like Me", by Curt Dudley-Maring. New York, NY: Garn Press.

Curt Dudley-Maring is one angry teacher educator. In this book, he takes on the reform minded National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) for defaming the work of teacher educators everywhere through their sloppy and politically driven research on teacher education programs. Dudley-Maring does not let his justifiable anger interfere with a well-reasoned argument, however. In this brief book he systematically deconstructs NCTQ's criticisms of teacher education, while exposing the market driven ideology that underlies their efforts to discredit schools of education.

Dudley-Maring was a hero of mine long before he wrote this book. He is a long-time advocate of "meaning-based reading instruction" and I first came to know his work in this context. Dudley-Maring sees a clear connection between NCTQ's ratings of teacher education and the reformer take on reading instruction in simplistic behaviorist terms where phonics instruction takes center stage to the exclusion of all the other complex factors that make up skillful reading. For my money his section on "A meaning-based perspective on reading" is well worth the price of the book.

The reader comes away from this book with an understanding that teaching and learning, and especially teaching and learning to read, is a much more complicated and sophisticated intellectual enterprise than NCTQ evaluators, driven by a behaviorist ideology, could ever know or imagine. The book is a rousing defense of teachers and those who educate teachers.


The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers, by Jennifer Serravallo. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

This one is for my readers who teach reading to children in grades K-8. Jen Serravallo, teacher, parent, consultant, has written what is simply the most useful, most comprehensive, best informed handbook for teaching reading imaginable. I wrote a full review of the book that you can read here. If you work with children and literacy you simply must have this book on your shelf. I gave it to my elementary teacher daughter for Christmas.

This book is informed by the best current research in literacy education; it is comprehensive in addressing all aspects of literacy learning K-8, and it is practical, offering specific targeted lessons based on student needs. I can see the classroom teachers reaching for this book everyday while planning their literacy lessons or when looking for just the right instructional approach for a student who is struggling.

So there you have my list. Please feel free to add your own favorites in the comment section. Right now I am reading a book that just arrived in the mail yesterday, A Teacher's Tale, by fellow blogger and defender of the profession John Thompson. It is an early favorite for next year's "Best of" list.

I look forward to still more rewarding reading in 2016. Happy New Reading Year!

The Least of Russ on Reading 2015

This is my second annual year-end compilation of blog posts that attracted very little attention the first time around, but that I think are worthy of a second chance at life. It has been a year of extremes for this blog, with some posts attracting thousands upon thousands of readers and others, like the ones collected here, not so much. So while others in the media present their "Best of..." and "Worst of ... lists, I offer "The Least of Russ on Reading 2015." I hope you find something interesting or informative here that you might have missed the first time around.

From Complex Text to Considerate Text

The Common Core calls for children to read more complex text, I call for writers to write more "considerate" text to aid readers in comprehending text book writing.

Do Children Really Shift from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn?

A common fallacy is that the early grades are for learning to read and after 3rd grade kids shift to reading to learn. I argue that kids are reading to learn from the very beginning of reading instruction and if we don't understand this, we will not provide the instruction they need.

You've Got to Be Taught

Racism is not a natural human condition, but one that is taught. In this post I discuss how if racism is taught in the home, tolerance can be taught in the schools.

Getting the Schools All Children Deserve

If we believe that children's lives matter, than we must recognize that all children deserve to attend clean, safe, well-resourced and fully staffed schools.

A Holiday Gift of Poetry 2015

This is the third holiday season for Russ on Reading and the third opportunity to share some poetry for the holidays. This year, as with every year, I am convinced that the world would be a better place if the people of the world read and shared more poetry. I am also reminded that all cultures and all religious traditions have their poetry and that much of that poetry speaks to what is universal in all of us.

A huge thank you to all of my readers. Thank you for reading and sharing my work. I am pleased to be able to share the work of these great poets with you. Have a peaceful and joyous holiday.

Holidays
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;--
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;--a fairy tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

The Boy at the Window
By Richard Wilbur

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. 

Burning of the Old Year

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds,

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems,

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn't,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn't do

circle after the blazing dies.

     from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, OR: Far Corner Books, 1995)

Meaningful Work in the Literacy Classroom

In my last post I discussed the concept of meaningful work and how it is essential to the recruitment,
development and retention of teachers. In this post I would like to address how meaningful work is essential to student learning. As teachers we have every right to demand the autonomy, complexity and rewards that are necessary to making our work meaningful. At the same time, we have the professional obligation to provide meaningful work for our students, so that we may help activate student motivation to learn and the students may optimize their learning.

As Malcolm Gladwell has discussed in his 2009 book, Outliers, meaningful work is one major component of achieving success in life. It is meaningful work that drives people to master a complex craft, whether it be in the arts, as with The Beatles and the hours upon hours of practice they got in Hamburg, Germany strip clubs before they hit it big; or in the sciences, as with Bill Gates, who spent thousands and thousands of hours writing computer programs before he achieved success with Microsoft; or in sports, where Michael Jordan couldn’t even make his high school basketball team and yet through hard practice went on to become the greatest player of all time. To learn something well takes time and commitment (and yes, talent. But many talented people have not achieved greatness).

How do we get this type of commitment to hard work from our students? One possible answer is by providing them with meaningful work. The work that The Beatles, Bill Gates and Michael Jordan did was personally meaningful to them, so they were willing to make the commitment and put in the effort. What can teachers learn from this?

In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Gladwell defined meaningful work this way:

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

So meaningful work involves autonomy, complexity and direct relationship between effort and reward. It may seem a daunting task to provide every individual in our class with meaningful work as Gladwell defines it. But let’s take a close look at this through the discipline that I know best – literacy.

By definition, literacy is meaningful work. Whether we are reading or listening, writing or speaking, we are in the business of making meaning or communicating meaning. Too often, however, the way we teach these skills obscures the meaningfulness of the work. What would a meaningful approach to literacy instruction look like? A look at Gladwell’s three elements of meaningful work might be helpful.

Autonomy

In order to provide students with autonomy in reading and writing, we need to insure that students get a considerable element of choice in their reading and writing. In reading this means time is given over in class to independent reading. Students need to be encouraged to explore their passions through reading and teachers need to be knowledgeable about a broad range of reading choices and student interests to guide children toward reading they may be passionate about. As students read independently, teachers are available to assist students over bumpy patches, confer with students about their understanding of what they are reading and suggest other books on similar topics.

As a 9^th grader in Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in 1961, I, along with everyone else in my English class, was assigned to read Silas Marner, by George Eliot. I am sure Silas Marner is a great book, but as a fourteen year-old mainly interested in baseball and girls, I hated that book. I could not make sense of it and eventually gave up reading it and tried to fake my way through the class and the subsequent test. The back of the edition of Silas Marner I was given, however, contained a short novel by John Steinbeck, The Pearl. Sitting in class one day trying to avoid being called upon, I stumbled across The Pearl, and started reading. I loved it. I was transported from my classroom to coastal Mexico and I was transfixed by the graceful sentences wrought by Mr. Steinbeck. I read it during class, on the bus on the way home from school, and finished it that night in bed. I quickly became a Steinbeck aficionado and by the end of high school had read virtually everything he had written (Steinbeck wrote a lot of short novels that I found great for book reports). My choice to read Steinbeck unleashed a previously untapped passion to read. If we are to develop life-long readers, we are going to have to provide students with some choice.

In writing, autonomy means providing children with choice in their topics, real purposes for writing and genuine audiences to receive the writing. Students often aren’t very good at identifying the topics they are passionate about and that is where the teacher comes in, helping children identify a passion, a concern, an area of expertise and helping them find their voice to communicate about these things. I think of the book Black Ants and Buddhists, by teacher Mary Cowhey, that shows how an entire classroom of children was activated to read, write and think critically about issues of social justice through a discussion of a troop of ants that invaded the classroom one day. Kids feel passionately about many things, rather than assigning writing topics, we would do better to help students find those topics of passion and guide them to write about them.

What about the skills you ask? What about grammar? What about spelling? What about vocabulary? I would argue that when kids are reading deeply and writing thoughtfully based on a level of autonomy in the classroom, we can teach any of the skills within that context, either through directly instructing through mini-lessons or through individual conferences.

Complexity

Both reading and writing are, of course, complex processes. The trick here is applying Gladwell’s complexity principle to teaching and learning. Students are capable of complex work and complex thought, but this complexity must be mediated by a teacher. Where we want students to be working is in their “zone of proximal development”, that is, at a level of thinking that is just above where they can function easily and comfortably, but not so far above their level that they cannot make meaning of the material. Writing provides an ideal medium for this type of instruction, since when children are writing on their own chosen topics and are writing for their own chosen reasons, the work is uniquely individualized and children are working in their zone. Teachers can then work with students to move that zone forward through conferences where suggestions for extending, refining and reorganizing thought can be conducted.

Reading creates some different kinds of challenges when it comes to complexity. If a text is too complex for a particular reader, meaning will be lost and the reader may lose interest. On the other hand, if the child is particularly interested in a topic, she may struggle through a “too difficult” text through shear will. As the teacher our job is to advise students on reading choices, let them try reading things we may think are too difficult sometimes, and support their growing understanding of the texts, again through conferences or mini-lessons.

We will also want to provide the students with exposure to complex texts through read-alouds. Since most children have a listening comprehension about two years above their reading level and since the teacher can provide mediation of the text while reading aloud, high quality challenging books should be chosen for classroom read-alouds. By asking students to grapple with more complex texts in the safety of the read-aloud environment, we can help insure both growth in reading comprehension and an interest in reading more difficult text.

Relationship between effort and reward

In the business world, the relationship between effort and reward is pretty clear: You work hard and well and you make more money. In school this relationship is more complex. A few education reformers have actually tried paying students for attending school and working hard with disappointing (for them) results. When we think in terms of effort and reward for school students we might think of grades, and hard work should, I suppose, be rewarded with good grades, although you will find many who say that grades should be based solely on achievement and not include effort.

To me, money or grades are false rewards. I would prefer to de-emphasize the grade as the reward and focus the rewards on what all real readers and real writers want – an audience for their thoughts and ideas. A writer wants to know what a reader thinks of the work. A reader wants to share thoughts on the reading with others and hear what others think. So as teachers we must read our students’ writing and listen to our students talk about their reading and provide genuine feedback that acknowledges what the student has done well and constructively suggests what the student needs to focus on next. We need to reward our students with respect for their efforts by being a knowledgeable audience for their efforts. I don’t think any monetary rewards or stickers can ever replace a few moments of rapt attention from the teacher. Students respond to teachers who are good listeners. Reward your students with the gift of your attention.

If this all sounds to you like a recommendation for a reader’s/writer’s workshop approach to literacy instruction, you would be correct. The workshop structure provides the opportunity for independent reading, personal choice writing, targeted mini-lessons and teacher conferring that will make the hard work of learning to read and write well meaningful work.