'reading wars' Category
The Science of Reading is “like deja vu all over again”
Yogi Berra was right, It’s like deja vu all over again. Marc Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz links to a dogfight between the Fordham Institute, Robert Slavin, and the federal government over a funding cut to the Reading First program, a major mess. See Gary Stager’s summary of the report by the Inspector Generals’ [...]
The Right Way to Teach
This little bit of personal history is inspired by Alice Mercer’s post about scripted reading instruction, which sounds to me like a relatively simple way for school districts to train teaching personnel instead of promoting real professional learning opportunities. I like Alice’s recommendation: “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, [...]
Reading Teacher Mojo
Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.”
Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk [...]Considering the Source in Reading Programs
Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:
…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are [...]The Might-Work Clearinghouse
Knowing what works in education doesn’t interest me as much as knowing how something works, or what purpose something has. In my experience, the right tool for the job is what matters most, and I’ve noticed that in the last several years we’ve been sold a lot of do-everything programs. They call them comprehensive, which [...]
Scientifically Based Reading Research Wars
A NYT article, In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash inspired dozens of blog posts. Many of them challenge the article’s bias and the author’s uncritical acceptance of the school administration’s claims of efficacy for their program.
Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, defended the Madison schools, saying that the National [...]
