Why the Obama Education Reform Won't Work

The problems that beset America since the “new millennium” had been silently growing beneath the surface for some time without adequate response. For example, we all share the memory of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, but it is important to remember that radical Islamic terrorism did not begin then. It had been growing for years. Maybe it had only seemed like a bad cold, but the 2001 attacks signaled a change in our situation. Evidently, the cold had morphed into a bad case of double pneumonia.

Similarly, our current financial crisis didn’t just blow up in October. This one had been percolating for some time, and the Secretary Treasury was scrambling to keep the lid on it. It turns out these markets had been destabilized years ago and it was just a matter of time until they toppled. The economic train only came off the tracks recently, but that train has been careening recklessly at high speed for a long time, so its recent crash should not have been so surprising.

I wonder if we haven’t been suffering from our own case of the education sniffles or if our literacy train hasn’t foolishly been picking up speed with curves ahead?

In 2000, the U.S. census together with the subsequent National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) may have been our ignored canaries in the coal mine. These reports revealed what may be the most important literacy statistics of recent times.

For the first time in U.S. educational history, increases in numbers of years of schooling have not led to gains in literacy attainment. Additional schooling seems no longer be a potent stimulant to reading achievement.

In the past, when school years lengthened from 110 days to 180, or when school enrollment became compulsory, or when schools allowed African-Americans to attend, the result has been concurrent improvements in school completion and in literacy.

Now we are accomplishing levels of educational attainment never before reached in our long history, but literacy levels remain stagnant. Average Americans earn more than a high school diploma now, but they can’t read any better than their older brothers or sisters who got by with less time in school.

Many educational reform efforts depend on the idea of increasing the amount of schooling. Think of the high school dropout prevention initiatives of groups like the Alliance for Excellent Education or the efforts to expand college access put forth by President-Elect Obama. In the past, such investments would have presaged higher literacy levels, but the problem that is being ignored is that something has changed in high school and post-high school education that has cut the effectiveness of such schooling.

What happened?

There are many possibilities, but I think the most likely is that schooling no longer requires sufficient amounts of demanding reading. The students are there, they take classes, they might even learn some information, but they don’t get stretched in reading like they once did. A couple of years ago, American College Testing reported that the best predictor of post-high school success was the amount of challenging reading that students engaged in their academic courses in high school.

The impending crisis is this: we will beggar ourselves trying to provide our kids with more years of education, but it will not pay off for them in terms of better economic success despite our big investment. The additional education we can buy for our children now appears to be both expensive and a pale imitation of the potent variety that we would have bought them in the past. It is not enough to expand college access or high school completion; we need to ensure that this added teaching leads to added literacy or the game won’t be worth the candle.

Content Area Reading

Last week, Cyndie Shanahan (my wife) and I gave speeches at the Arkansas Reading Association. Despite the challenging economy, we had the opportunity to meet with a lot of teachers. It was great. Cyndie talked about teaching middle school and high school students the reading that they need to know in a history or science class and I talked about reading comprehension and covered some of the same kind of ground she did in literature towards the end of my talk.

As promised our two powerpoints are here if you want them. They both have some useful classroom tools in them and Cyndie's has some terrific weblinks that sure make her points.

http://timothyshanahan8.googlepages.com/arkansas

How do I select an effective phonemic awareness program?

Is there really such a thing as an effective program? Your question would be like asking a plumber, “How do I select an effective wrench?” It’s not the wrench that’s effective, it’s the plumber with a wrench, and it is the same idea with teachers and instructional programs.

However, I get your point. You aren’t looking for an “effective program,” as much as for a program that has the potential of being effective if used properly by a teacher who knows her stuff. The National Reading Panel (NRP) reviewed 52 studies that showed that explicit teaching of phonemic awareness to kindergartners and first-graders helped them in learning to read. The idea is that if young children can hear the separable sounds within words, they will make a faster start in learning to decode. Phonemic awareness instruction should teach kids to hear the sounds, and phonics instruction then builds on that knowledge. These days most core programs try to include phonemic awareness teaching.

The purpose of teaching phonemic awareness is to ensure children can hear all separable sounds within words, and that they be able to hold these sounds in memory and do things with them (like separate them or delete them). If a student can fully segment words with proficiency (that is, he or she can break words into all of their separate sounds with ease), then everything that need be accomplished with a phonemic awareness program has been accomplished and you can move on. The issue in evaluating and selecting a program is will it provide enough quality support that students should be able to master that set of skills.

Towards that end, one thing I would look for in a phonemic awareness program would be the inclusion of phonological awareness instruction. Phonemic awareness is part of a larger collection of auditory skills dealing with language sounds (phonological awareness). Phonemic awareness, the awareness of the individual phonemes or the smallest meaningful sounds in the language, is the most sophisticated of these skills. Before children develop these sophisticated phonemic skills, they go through a continuum of skills development that allows them to first to isolate or separate words, syllables, rhymes and simple beginning sounds (onsets). Some young children struggle to learn to hear individual sounds; a program that includes instruction in these precursor skills, can allow these kids to make faster progress (and teachers can skip this part of the program for kids who have already learned these earlier developing skills). The inclusion of lessons aimed at these grosser and earlier-developing skills is a good fall-back position.

Furthermore, I would look for a program that provides about 18 hours of explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness (approximately 64 15-minute lessons, for example—but this can be organized lots of different ways). Programs may provide more than this amount of teaching, but not less. The reason I say this is because the NRP review found that about 14-18 hours of instruction led to optimum amounts of learning; some kids needed more than this, of course, and some needed less. It is essential to have a program that will provide at least enough support that the average student will be able to accomplish the instructional goals by going through all of the activities (and you might need additional support for students who make slowere progress).

The sequence of instruction of an effective program should be (1) separation of words and syllables, (2) rhyming, (3) separation of onsets and rimes (e.g., b-ig, c-an); (4) the segmentation and blending of the individual sounds. Letter names should be taught throughout this sequence, and it is reasonable to mix phonemic awareness with phonics by teaching students the sounds associated with the various letters.

A sound program will offer both whole class lessons and small group instruction (groups of three work very well for this). This small group instruction is for the kids who don’t make sufficient progress in the large group and it should increase these children’s interaction with the teacher (making it easier to see the teacher’s mouth and to hear the sounds and to respond more frequently). Of course, if teachers are going to adjust instruction successfully, by giving some kids extra help in small group, then it is important that the program provide a sound assessment, so teachers can gauge the children’s progress.

Remember, this teaching is for 5- and 6-year-olds and it is important that it be appropriate to young children. This means simple language in the explanations, attractive illustrations, varied activities, and brief, but frequent, lessons tailored to the short attention spans of youngsters in this age group. Programs should only try to teach one or two skills at a time (don’t overwhelm the children). These lessons should be fun, and can incorporate singing, clapping, stomping, and other movements. It is important to have children use concrete representations of the letter sounds (i.e., clapping, markers, letter cards). Take a hard look at a program to determine if teachers could use it easily and if children would understand both what they are supposed to do in the various activities and what they are supposed to learn from them.