http://thecornerstoneforteachers.blogspot.com/2009/01/cornerstone-accolades-january-2009.html

See you on Twitter!

The economic part is important, especially at the public universities. They’d yelp from the rafters if these ed programs were reined in sensibly.

I don’t think upper divisions enjoy looking down on the ed schools. My sense is that scholars wish the ed schools were more rigorous and had a stronger seriousness of purpose. Having said that, they love a real, solid education scholar [and there are lots of them - they're just tough to find].

The reason no one will give, though? That the current climate of education debate has rendered it nearly impossible to criticize the martyrdom of teachers and admins – or curricula and the other parts of the school day. There’s a reason why the most successful critical measures in local public education are almost always bond/infrastructure initiatives. Even then it’s hard, but there’s a little less taboo there.

There’s plenty more to it, obviously, so I won’t hijack the interesting literacy debate going on in this thread. And, unfortunately, the issue will still be there tomorrow for us to discuss.

Why is it so hard to get people to accept and act on this point, Matt?

The only explanations I can come up with are: One. Ed students are cash cows for colleges and universities. Since Ed departments are low on the academic totem pole, those at the upper levels of the pole don’t really care and are glad to have the Ed departments to look down on.

Two. The fog of standardized achievement tests protects El Hi personnel and maintains the status quo irrespective of personnel characteristics or instructional program characteristics. Worse, no one examines instructional programs and if they do, they don’t know what to look for.

Have you got a better explanation?

Wow! You’ve got every right to be crabby–outraged in fact–if that’s how you spent your week. Determining if a kid can read should have been over and done with by the third grade at the latest.

Betcha the test you constructed is confounded with background information matters that goes beyond reading and that makes the test a measure of general ability, not reading expertise.

If that’s not the kind of test you constructed, tell us more about it. But that’s the kind of tests that prevail in alleged “reading tests” at the high school level. The test you constructed possibly broke out of the tradition.

You can call me Matt. I’m glad that you’ve had a great deal of success with the methods you’ve developed. It’s encouraging. Hopefully we can streamline and make more efficient those practices so they might be applied more broadly.

Relax.

Scoring in the 90th percentile of the GRE or LSAT shows that you’re a capable reader – an attribute I’d value in a literacy teacher.

My point is not that we are all intellectual islands, unable to learn anything the same way; my point is that learning comes easier for some than others. We label this ability intelligence. For those of us who are quite intelligent, the process is transparent because we grasp it quickly and easily. For those who are less intelligent or have disabilities, the process has to be made more explicit in order for them to grasp it. Skimming, chunking, and all these techniques are something we picked up easily and without too much effort, so we don’t notice them. They’re automatic. But children who struggle have to be taught these things.

I’ve spent years learning how to break down stuff that I find quite simple so that others can understand it. The way I do it is not the be all and end all one true way. But it is working in my classroom and producing measurable results (I assess reading levels regularly), so why you would throw cheap shots at a method that actually teaches at risk students to read — what you say I should be doing — is a bit mystifying.

PS. I never took the GRE, but scored in the 90th percentile on the LSAT. Am I verbal enough to teach high school English?

The point is not whether a teacher uses “the right method”. The point is whether the student learns to read. If a student fails, it doesn’t matter what the teacher did – it wasn’t good enough. (Yes, I realize that some kids will fail no matter what the teacher does. Not all problems are solvable.)

We’re never going to have decent education as long as we let teachers use “but I taught using {method name}” as an excuse, regardless of the method.

I don’t care what method a teacher uses, even the “Harold Hill” method. I do care whether the student leads to read.

That was an awfully spicy comment given your handle. I’ll parse it.

“…my method achieves actual measurable results with students across a wide spectrum of backgrounds and abilities (including those who are mentally retarded).”

allen touched on this – it’s precisely that commonality, rather than egocentrism, on which my point rests. I don’t know if you’re a practitioner of DI, but Engelmann’s results with both gifted and mentally retarded [if I remember correctly?] groups, including measurement of longer-term information retention, are impressive suggestions that we all have a bit more in common re: cognition than we realize.

“I learned to read easily, too, but I’m not egocentric enough to assume everybody is just like me.”

I’d argue that I’m kind enough and compassionate enough to assume – and truly believe – that the vast majority of us have a great deal in common. The tremendous, demonstrable success across widely-varying populations that DI has shown would suggest, at worst, that I’m not entirely wrong.