I’d be slightly inclined to credit the Cuban figures just because, due to the inevitable economic lunar landscape that results from a communist dictatorship, they just don’t have the money to indulge in the sorts of educational frippery that we here in the U.S. enjoy.

Poverty may, at least in the case of public education, tend to focus the mind on education there being too little money to engage in self-indulgent, educational flights of fancy.

Sadly I don’t.

As for your lesson design, if you want to teach your students how to identify verbs then that’s a first stab at a lesson. I suspect though that if K plans to teach the metaphysical poets, K’s students can already identify verbs reliably. It would therefore make sense to design the exercises around skills such as identifying themes in metaphysical poems, or teaching archaic vocabulary, rather than getting them to identify verbs and apostrophes. Also, in your course outline, you haven’t taught how to identify the metaphysical conceit, so I am doubtful that students would be able to underline it?

(I picked the metaphysical poets as an example because they strike me as a demanding reading comprehension task, if I am miles off-base here, feel free to substitute whatever you or K do want to teach your more skilled students to comprehend).

Cuba claims to have a literacy rate of 99.8%.

Maybe we ought to see how they teach reading in Cuba.

Of course, the US claims to have a 99% literacy rate, too
(both numbers from the CIA world factbook). If we have a
99% literacy rate here, I’m not going to get too worked up
over the last 0.8%.

One other possibility, though, is that both numbers are bogus.

-Mark Roulo

> I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that there is no performance requirement for teachers.

Because there are no performance requirements for teachers?

> However, I feel entirely accountable for my students’ literacy – my school (along with many others) uses quarterly benchmark assessments to gauge progress in reading as well as math, and we meet with supervisors to analyze the data.

I’m glad you feel a sense of personal responsibility but as you say, there are terrible teachers and one can assume that they aren’t burdened with a sense of personal responsibility. Does your sense of professional responsibility extend to a desire that fellow practitioners demonstrate some minimal level of competence?

Now that we’ve agreed that there’s a range of professional competence is it important to you to know where you stand on that range? Would it be worthwhile to know with some reasonable degree of certainty who the best practitioner was in your state?

With regard to the assessments and progress indicators used in your school, that’s purely a local measure. In the next district over, or even in the next school over, the same measurements could mean a great deal or nothing or might not be used at all. The best reading instructor in the state could be working in a classroom a mile and a half down the road and you have no way of finding that person. Or, you could be that instructor and no one else would be able to find you.

In any case, as I observed up the thread, Cuba claims a 99.8% literacy rate. Shouldn’t that revelation excite the interest of anyone who teaches reading professionally? You can bet if there’s a Cuban baseball player who’s hitting .400 that there aren’t many pro coaches who don’t know about him.

What is the verb in this sentence? Batter. Who batters? God batters. What does god batter? My heart. Now, underline the apostrophes once, the metaphysical conceit twice.

If I taught the metaphysical poets this way I’m pretty sure my students would attempt to murder me in my sleep.

This depends on what you mean by DI, and by how advanced your students are. For example, there are at least 3 DI programs that goes beyond basic decoding and comprehension, “Language for Learning”, “Language for Thinking” and “Reasoning and Writing”.
http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/sra/languageforlearning.htm
http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/sra/languageforthinking.htm
http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/sra/reasoningwriting.htm

The developer of DI has also produce a rubric for identifying authentic DI programs, available at http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/rubric.pdf. This rubric could also be used as a rubric for designing DI programmes, combined of course with proper field-testing. Eg if you want to improve the literary skills of your students who can already decode and comprehend well, so they can decode and comprehend the metaphysical poets (or whatever is a massively difficult skill for reading and comprehension), then you can use this rubric to figure out how to teach “comprehending the metaphysical poets” to students who normally would have trouble comprehending them.

Furthermore, I was under the impression that capable professionals in all fields could exchange whatever opinions and observations they had, in the name of discussion, without incurring a “penalty” for their supposed silliness. I don’t claim to have scads of data, but I am in the classroom with live students every day and while my observations may not dictate all the choices I make day to day (one student’s struggle might not necessitate a changed curriculum), that doesn’t change the validity of the observation. Observations are what they are. It is then up to us to interpret them and determine courses of action – which may be silly – but the observations themselves are not inherently silly.

And I don’t mean you have to go to Cuba to observe how reading ought to be taught either.

The basic problem is that in so many venues the way reading is taught is an academic exercise for the professionals. Since there’s no performance requirement as condition of employment, i.e. if you stink at the teaching of reading as measured by the percentage of kids who escape your grasp illiterate you’re history, reading instruction can be treated as a consequence-free thought experiment.

There’s also no penalty for the exchange of silly observations about kids who can read a passage but not understand it. Other professionals, similarly insulated from the usual penalty for incompetence, nod sagely in agreement.

Fortunately, President-elect Obama plans to go boldly where no politician has gone before by opening the funding taps a bit wider to public education.

This will help solve the problem of too little whining about the funding levels for public education since the one thing that inevitably attends any funding increase is an increase in the amount of whining about how little is being spent.

If you want to know how DI students feel about reading (and learning in general), take a look at the chart “Comparison of Achievement Outcomes” at http://mathematicallycorrect.com/honestft.htm. Not only does DI do a superior job of building basic and cognitive skills, but the kids have a more positive view of learning as seen on the affective scale.