Literacy Blogs

10 August, 2009

Testing English Learners in English? Good Idea or Not.

Last week, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco upheld the right of California to administer achievement tests and high school exit exams in English to all students, no matter what their language background. Various education groups had challenged the practice of using English-only testing since federal law requires that second-language students “be assessed in a valid and reliable manner.” As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Marc Coleman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs complained that, “The court dodges the essential issue in the lawsuit, which is: What is the testing supposed to measure?” Mr. Coleman gets an A from ...

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03 August, 2009

Why the Purposes of Testing Matter

Rose Birkhead made a comment on my last post. She liked the idea of the states aiming at the same standards and giving the same reading tests, but she was concerned about testing kids on grade level. Say, I'm a teacher, and one of my students reads horribly, not even close to fourth-grade level. Rose's concern is that having that child take the fourth-grade test will tell me nothing of value about his reading (I won't get any useful insights about how to help him), and what it tells him he probably doesn't want to hear since he already knows ...

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02 August, 2009

Yes, Virginia, You Can DIBEL Too Much

I visited schools yesterday that used to DIBEL. You know what I mean, the teachers used to give kids the DIBELS assessments to determine how they were doing in fluency, decoding, and phonemic awareness. DIBELS has been controversial among some reading experts, but I’ve always been supportive of such measures (including PALS, TPRI, Ames-web, etc.). I like that they can be given quickly to provide a snapshot of where kids are. I was disappointed that they dropped the tests and asked why. “Too much time,” they told me, and when I heard their story I could see why. This was a district that like the idea of such testing, but ...

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31 July, 2009

Common Core State Standards: Winners and Losers

During the past few months, some amazing things have been happening in education policy. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt a single set of education standards in the English Language Arts and Mathematics. Arne Duncan ALSO pledged $350 million towards a new set of tests of those standards. Now that sounds like a national curriculum to me… and national tests to boot—though nobody is using those terms right now. Of course, development efforts like these take years, so those who are philosophically offended by the idea of a national curriculum won’t have to worry, right? Not ...

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22 July, 2009

Even Scarier than Wild Animals

It’s good to be back from Africa—I guess. Each day (and night), Cyndie and I had fascinating new experiences, sometimes frighteningly so: like the night we were awakened by a lion fight; or the hippo that chased us; or the time we mistakenly found ourselves inconveniently between a bull elephant and what he wanted to eat. Scary stuff. Not that I’m home, I’ve been going to meetings, reading emails and the latest journals, and maybe I was safer with the cheetahs! Just in the past few days I’ve been hearing over and over the kind of anti-research rhetoric that was popular ...

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30 June, 2009

Why Comprehension Instruction Goes Bad

Last week, I posted a blog that described how effective comprehension strategy instruction works. I said that students won’t use strategies forever and that I didn’t believe that strategies eventually morphed into skills (at least not skills that look anything like the strategy). I think strategies work more like true scaffolds; they operate as a temporary support that allows kids to read on their own more effectively, but not in the same way they will need to read on their own later. The problem is that strategies are cumbersome and no one will use them for long. Frankly, when a ...

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24 June, 2009

Why Teach Comprehension Strategies?

There is no doubt research shows that reading comprehension strategy instruction works. The National Reading Panel said so. Although comprehension studies have been short-term, there are just so many of them (more than 200 such studies).   That doesn’t mean everybody agrees with strategy teaching. Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown have argued strenuously against such teaching. They claim teachers would be better off having kids read text and engaging in a deep discussion of the ideas.   I respect Isabel and Moddy, but how can you ignore so much research? I think the disagreement lies in a basic misconception about the purpose of strategy instruction.   There are three ways to ...

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08 June, 2009

RtI on Steroids, or Why I Believe in the 9-Tier Model

The latest rage in the schools is RtI. Special education money (about 15% of it) can now be used for improving classroom instruction and installing preventative intervention programs. I'm a big fan of this movement for several reasons: First, because the best way to determine if someone has a learning problem is to offer really good teaching and if the struggling continues then you know. Second, special education programs simply haven't worked very well for most kids, and the learning disabilities label has been over applied, and those programs are getting expensive.   But even though I like RtI, I have problems ...

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29 May, 2009

Encouraging Summer Reading

Blast from the Past: So much has changed since this was first posted 12 years ago, so I decided to update this. Then, supporting children’s summer reading was a nice thing to do, but these days it is critically important given how much face-to-face schooling kids have missed. I’ve added a few ideas here and provided a lot of useful link that are all up to date. Send this along to your favorite parents, teachers, and librarians. May 29, 2009 updated June 26, 2021 This is the time of the year when schools often try to reach out to parents to encourage ...

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26 May, 2009

Irish Literacy

What a great week... I just got back from a very pleasing visit to Dublin, Ireland. My Irish friends invited me over to see if I could provide any help to their wonderful "youngballymun" project. Ballymun is an area of Dublin that is economically challenged. Ireland has one of the world's best education systems and among the highest literacy levels, but everything isn't what it should be in Ballymun.   As in major cities all over the U.S., the kids who live in economically-challenged neighborhoods (with the worst housing, the most serious health problems including drug abuse, etc.) do worst in school. ...

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