Among the current slate of policy solutions for educational malaise – the accountability, the school choice, and the union bashing – absent from the list is textbook trashing. Why ignore them? We wrote standards and and grade level expectations; we contracted with the test-making companies to get tests “aligned” and pointing back at teachers, but people overlook the “scientifically-based” textbooks scam.
It turns out that news of the $6 billion Reading First con, which Margaret Spellings announced and defended, produces no significant difference in reading comprehension. But those kids can decode. For 6 billion bucks. They can say the words, but they don’t connect them to a meaning any more than if we’d done nothing. And neither, apparently, does Sec. Spellings.
This should not be surprising. None of it. It’s one more nail in the coffin of Bush administration policies that we need to bury. Forever.
Now, can we please return to studying comprehension instruction?
5 Comments
amen, brother!
I second that Amen, Doug. I am in classrooms every week and students are clapping phonemes, sounding out words, and reading the same passage over 100 times with no attachment to thinking! We can not expect our students to see reading as a meaning-making, problem-solving process if we continue to reinforce and celebrate decoding as the ultimate measure of success-especially early reading success.
The comprehension evidence is decades old and rock solid-young students can and do think critically if given the opportunity and the expectation to do so. Let’s hope that the new administration will see this Reading First study as an opportunity to not take comprehension instruction lightly! Great post!
Amen!! Now, how do get there?
AMEN, and a few more statements from me:
Textbooks should be WAY cheaper.
Textbook companies should offer all electronic options that are even cheaper than that.
And, has anyone else noticed that the best, most engaging teachers use textbooks as a resource instead of a guide?
So, I was in a textbook committee presentation once where the textbook sales rep actually said that their textbook was so complete, so structured, and so “standards-based” that ANYONE could use it to teach a class by following the numbers. Does anyone else here see a problem with this statement?!?! Why don’t we just program the textbook into a robot or a computer and fire all the teachers?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – TEXTBOOKS MUST DIE!
I’m fortunate to work with a principal who believes that the textbook is not the curriculum, so I don’t worry too much about “following” them. It’s frustrating to listen to the sales reps because they seem to have all the answers, just like the books they hawk. But they never have to figure out how to funnel them all into a real classroom.
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