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I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

We should note that there are not many studies out there regarding the use of electronic textbooks, but those that exist show mixed results. A consistent finding is that, given the choice, students prefer traditional textbooks. That's true regardless of their experience with ebooks, so it's not because students are unfamiliar with them (Woody, Daniel & Baker, 2010). Further, some data indicate that reading electronic textbooks, although it leads to comparable comprehension, takes longer (e.g., Dillon, 1992; Woody et al, 2010). Why don't students like electronic textbooks if they like ebooks? The two differ. Ebooks typically often have a narrative structure,  they are usually pretty easy to read, and we read them for pleasure. Textbooks in contrast, have a hierarchical structure, the material is difficult and unfamiliar, and we read them for learning and retention. Students likely interact with textbooks differently than books they read for pleasure.

We need to spend much less time teaching reading as a subject and teaching reading strategies beyond their utility and much more time teaching content or subject matters, such as literature, science, social studies, p.e., art music, foreign languages, technical education, etc. Yes, most kids need to be explicitly taught to decode and yes, to a point reading strategies are useful. Of course, content should be taught as reading and writing intensive. However, literacy is largely representative of someone's background and content knowledge, and knowledge of vocabulary and does not develop or improve without it. As the University of Virginia's own Dan Willingham says, teaching content is teaching reading. (It's also much, much more meaningful and interesting for kids.)

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based. Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers. A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed-at least theoretically-to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, "stories," and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in "informational" texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

The Rhode Island Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today announced grants totaling $1.8 million to expand The Learning Community's nationally-recognized professional development work in reading for free to five area public elementary schools. The Learning Community, one of Rhode Island's highest performing high poverty schools, has received national recognition for its partnership with the Central Falls school district, where reading scores increased through innovative, proven strategies for boosting reading achievement.

The Rhode Island Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today announced grants totaling $1.8 million to expand The Learning Community's nationally-recognized professional development work in reading for free to five area public elementary schools. The Learning Community, one of Rhode Island's highest performing high poverty schools, has received national recognition for its partnership with the Central Falls school district, where reading scores increased through innovative, proven strategies for boosting reading achievement.  

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration's early days, according to a new study to be released Monday. For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of "balanced literacy," an approach that was spread citywide by former Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, beginning in 2003.

Value-added has been getting a lot of media attention lately but, unfortunately, most stories are missing the point.  In Gotham Schools I read about a teacher who got a low score but it was because her score was based on students who were not assigned to her.  In The New York Times I read about three teachers who were rated in the single digits, but it was because they had high performing students and a few of their scores went down.  In The Washington Post I read about a teacher who was fired for getting low value-added on her IMPACT report, but it was because her students had inflated pretest scores because it is possible that the teachers from the year before cheated. Each of these stories makes it sound like there are very fixable flaws in value-added.  Get the student data more accurate, make some kind of curve for teachers of high performing students, get better test security so cheating can't affect the next year's teacher's score.  But the flaws in value-added go WAY beyond that, which is what I've been trying to show in my posts - not just some exceptional scenarios, but how it affects the majority of teachers.

woke up yesterday morning to read Norm Scott's post on Education Notes Online about a new study of the effects of charter schools on achievement in New York City.  The study, by economists Caroline Hoxby and Sonali Murarka, finds a charter school effect of .09 standard deviations per year of treatment in math and .04 standard deviations per year in reading.  I haven't read the study closely yet, but I was struck by Norm's headline:  "Study Shows NO Improvement in NYC Charters Over Public Schools."  The effects that Hoxby and Murarka report are statistically significant, which means that we can reject the claim that they are zero.  But are they big?  That's a surprisingly complicated question. I'm going to argue that the answer hinges on "compared to what?"

On Alexander Russo's This Week in Education blog, I read a really interesting e-mail written by Whitney Tilson who is a founder or president or something or other of DFER. You should read it and then read the comments. The two main points he makes can be encapsulated in the following quotes

Welcome to Part IV of my response to Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda-we're almost to Friday, folks! On Monday, you read about advancing literacy. On Tuesday, you read about extending the school day/ year. Yesterday, you read my thoughts on expanding school choice in Virginia. Today, I'll share my thoughts about McDonnell's ideas for evaluating, retaining, and recruiting teachers.

A few months back I got into an interesting discussion with my high school friends on Facebook about the books we read in our tenth grade advanced English class at Westhill High School in Stamford. My friend Debbie, who's clearly even more of a pack rat than my mother, still had the syllabus, and was able to rattle off impressively long list of books that we'd read and analyzed. When I compared it to the number of books my daughter, a high school sophomore, will get through this year in her advanced English class, it's really quite astounding. But actually, it's not. When I look at the school calendar, the entire month of March is lost to CMT/CAPT testing.  And that's just the actual testing. Much of the month before will be devoted to exercises that prepare students for the tests. Not for reading great works of literature and learning to use critical thinking skills, but rather for learning test taking skills.

"Proponents of the Common Core have likened the struggle to implement it to the Civil Rights Movement. As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of the height of that movement, we must consider how these standards and the related testing are threatening students' rights to education, not upholding them. As one critical example, the Common Core's strict interpretation of "close reading of a text" dismisses the notion that students' own thoughts and experiences, and how they connect to a text, are integral to reading. Rather, student voices are silenced in their own classrooms, and literacy is reduced to the ability to navigate standardized tests."

If you don't have the time or inclination to read Steve Brill's book on education reform, then his bombastic op-ed on the subject is a pretty good alternative. And similarly, if you didn't read Diane Ravitch's 4,400-word review of "Waiting for Superman" in the NYRB, then her 1,000-word response to Brill captures the heart of her argument. Reading them side by side, the conclusion I come to is that Brill protests far too much.

Drawing on a statewide study of Florida middle-school reading coaches, this article examines what constitutes, contributes to, and is associated with high-quality coaches and coaching. Authors find that coaches generally held many of the qualifications recommended by state and national experts and principals and teachers rated their coaches highly on many indicators of quality. However, several common concerns about recruiting, retaining, and supporting high-quality coaches emerged. Estimates from models indicate that a few indicators of coach experience, knowledge, and skills had significant associations with perceived improvements in teaching and higher student achievement, although the magnitude of the latter relationship was quite small. Findings suggest that although possessing strong reading knowledge and instructional expertise may be important for coaching, it may not be sufficient.

If want to read something that will make you gasp out loud, check out the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit filed last week against Michigan's Highland Park School District and the state entities that support it. ACLU sued the district and the state for failing to teach kids in the Detroit-area district to read.

"Michelle Rhee continues her descent into parody. You might have thought that teaching students to read would be a good way to evaluate educational performance, but no. Rhee's StudentsFirst organization has released a report card grading states-on their education policies, not their educational results. In fact, not one of the states StudentsFirst ranks in the top five is in the top half of states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, "the nation's report card," when it comes to eighth grade reading scores, and only one is in the top half when it comes to eighth grade math."

"This is a long post because there is so much about the Pearson company you need to read about and evaluate. Please read to the end, because if you agree with these findings, you need to contact public officials and press them to end the relationship between Pearson and American schools. I did receive a reply to my email above from Susan Aspey, the Vice President for Media Relations at Pearson. It is included at the end of the report. I attach it without comment. It is up to you to decide if the reply satisfactorily addresses the issues I raise in this post."

"As the title of this post says, there are three things you must read if you want to understand the origins of Common Core."

If a children's book were written about ALEC, the group that bills itself as an association of conservative lawmakers and supporters, it might be called "The Very Greedy Octopus." It would read like one of those creepy 19th-century fairly tales that most parents would never, ever read to their young ones-it's just too scary.