Half of Florida's Children Fail Reading Test

I wonder if a day will ever come when the research establishment will begin to question the theoretical assumptions of Constructivism as a sound basis for the practice of teaching and learning.

The sooner we dispense with the day-dreaming and sentimentality that pervades American education, the better off we're all going to be.
 
So Mr. Deez
I noted your Sarc but
I decided to look up expenditures per student in fla and see if that was an indicator of success

As near as I can tell Fla spent slightly over 9k per student in 09 which ranked it 36th.

To compare Washington DC spent 13k. Their student test scores? 47 % passed reading

hmmmmm perhaps DC needs to lower their standards.
 
Who needs to read good when you can get everything you need to know from TV and that is provided to us by the now remaining 4 major companies.
 
You know why this is absolutely amazing to me, personally? Because I was reading quite well by the time I was five years old. When I was in fourth grade, I tested out at a 12th grade level. And why? Because my father, very patiently and from an early age, taught me how to read.

Before first grade I moved to Spain. I recently reconnected via Facebook with the guy who was my best friend there for three years, through the end of third grade. He said, "the thing I remember most about you is that you were reading entire books when I first met you."

He was right. I WAS reading everything by that point.

I would think that with just a minimum level of parental involvement, most kids can be taught to read pretty well. But, in my experience, it starts early.
 
Reading tests vary from state to state so comparissons are worthless. FWIW, many states are making their tests harder. This naturally leads to lower scores. When scores in Texas start coming out for this year, they will likely be lower because they just made the test harder. I'm sure that people will point to this as a sign on the school system getting worse when nothing has really changed other than the questions they are asking the kids.

One of the major factors that is changing education right now is the number of students with a terrible vocabulary. Most "reading tests" are actually measuring reading comprehension. Having a poor vocabulary makes passing a reading comprehension test impossible for way too many students. We simply have too many students that are never read to or talked to from the time they are born to make up the gap in school. We have soooo many students that can perfectly read a paragraph but not be able to answer questions that ask them to infer. It's next to impossible to infer when you don't know the meaning of 13 words in a paragraph.

Here is research conducted over many decades that all points to the same problems with vocabulary. The only difference now is that we are getting more and more of the lower students in our schools from day one.

First-grade children from higher SES groups know about twice as many words as lower SES children (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).

High school seniors near the top of their class know about four times as many words as their lower-performing classmates (Smith, 1941).

High performing third graders had vocabularies about equal to the lowest-performing twelfth graders (Smith, 1941).

This summs things up nicely in regards to reading and vocabulary:
The end result is that enriched environments promote vocabulary development. Good readers read more, which in turn helps them become even better readers with even larger vocabularies. Poor readers read less, which contributes to their becoming poorer readers with more limited vocabularies. In effect, “the rich readers get richer and the poor readers get poorer.”
 
I purposely put that in there because people are so convinced that education is so vastly different today than in the past. You can find research from 2010 that states the exact same thing. Nothing has changed. The children that aren't talked to fail to develop an adequate vocabulary then become poor readers. The only difference is the number of kids raised by sponge bob rather than mom and dad is worse than ever.
 
People that are genuinely interested in the future of education should read The Early Catastrophe - The 30 million word gap by age three. It shows just how much of a child's educational trajectory is determined by age three. Much of this research is what pushed me into early childhood education.

Quote from the findings:

We were awestruck at how well our measures of accomplishments at age 3 predicted measures of language skill at age 9-10. From our preschool data we had been confident that the rate of vocabulary growth would predict later performance in school; we saw that it did. For the 29 children observed when they were 1-2 years old, the rate of vocabulary growth at age 3 was strongly associated with scores at age 9-10 on both the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) of receptive vocabulary (r = .58) and the Test of Language Development-2: Intermediate (TOLD) (r = .74) and its subtests (listening, speaking, semantics, syntax).

The results of this have been repeated in other studies over and over again. But, the school system gets these kids at five when much of their trajectory has already been established. We are literally playing catch up from the first day they walk in the door as kindergarteners. Truly changing the education system in America will have much more to do with homes and families than schools.
 
Coelacanth-
Have you taught in more than one area? The only district that I have taught in requires "explicitly teaching concepts and skills" with a "gradual release of control" from teacher to student. Everybody in a particular grade level in the district will be teaching the same thing at the same time with constant assessments to measure progress. Interventions are then planned where students are taught even more explicitly than before. Seems like a more balanced approach would be more beneficial for both of us.

Edit to add that everything in your second post is spot on.
 
We do CSCOPE, and we're supposed to design our lessons according to the 5E instruction model which is a component of CSCOPE. The key E is the Explore phase, which is intended to be the experiential, student-directed phase of the plan.

In the CSCOPE literature, the term "facilitator" has replaced "teacher".

But then I could talk for days about CSCOPE.
 
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Coelacanth. Do you think the self-directed learning approach is (to some degree) a factor in the student achievement gender gap (fewer males graduating from high school, attending college, etc.)?
 
I've spent some time in public schools and it would be an eye-opener for people making pronouncements about education and educators to do the same. Sadly enough, not every kid or neighborhood is easy to teach. Get into a school with sweet, cooperative suburban kids and you just have to be amazed at how much they care and how easy they are to teach. In tougher neighborhood, it's a struggle for all but the best teachers to keep focus off behavior and on to teaching and learning. There are some really good teachers who can reach kids that others can't. Some kids are finding new ways to challenge them every day. Money counts when you ask people to do an unpleasant job, and teaching in bad neighborhoods is a really unpleasant unless you have some natural skills that aren't easily to replicate.
 
I agree wholeheartedly with the posts of Coelecanth, he speaks the truth. I'm beginning to see new teachers express the same desire to allow students to direct their own education instead of the teacher. CSCOPE is a manufactured product by a few to make a lot of money off the backs of Texas schools. The so called "experts" have minimal classroom instruction experience and their data is very limited and not peer reviewed. I know for a fact that the exemplar lessons many teachers are forced to use are written by graduate students who have never been in the classroom.

I hate to see comments that "teachers don't care". The opposite is true, teachers do care and want to teach the students they have been entrusted with. The problem is exactly what has been stated in previous posts. Teachers have been beaten down to a point that they no longer are allowed to teach, but must follow some protocol that has been assigned to them by an administrator who wants to flex his newfound "holy grail" of learning. One size does not fit all.
 
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