Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA — Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels. But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.

A reading teacher commented on the Internet: “The situation in the local public schools is getting worse. This year they switched to Guided Reading. Take a look at Pinnell & Fountas. This is a perfect example of 'how not to teach reading.'" Curious, I asked a teacher in Chicago what she knew about Guided Reading. Here’s her indignant response: -------------- “HA!!! Fountas and Pinnell!!!!! They created Guided Reading (I think). These are two women who are obvious whole language experts. They publish their stuff at Heinemann. Let me explain how Guided Reading goes. You know, Bruce, in a whole language...

.... From there the regression into abandoning the teaching of reading to children was rapid. Teaching “reading” came to be viewed by many to be the act of repeatedly showing children flash cards in an effort to get them to recognize words by rote memorization as opposed to actually reading the words. Fortunately for my eldest, this had not reached the elementary schools by the mid-90s and she was taught how to read and write. My youngest, though, was met with this like a freight train and the results were comparable with a train wreck. My youngest was a hard-working...

[ARTICLE IS ABOUT READING] Everyone sees the parallel between the Jerry Sandusky case and the Catholic Church’s problems with pedophilia over the last several decades. Namely, there are unspeakable crimes well hidden by endless hypocrisy. A blogger writes: “This Sandusky story reminds of pedophilia among many priests of the Catholic Church, that were also swept under the rug for many, many years by Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals…and I hate to say it, all the way up to the movers and shakers of Catholicism at the Vatican!” A professor of history wrote in a recent column: “For a quarter-century, much of my...

American media are excitedly reporting that women are smarter than men, according to IQ tests. Not equal to men, supposedly the goal of feminism, but superior to men. That is quite a jump, all in a matter of decades. How could such a thing happen? After all, biology tells us that genes tend to be stable over generations. An ABC News blog reported: “James Flynn, a New Zealand-based researcher known as an IQ testing expert, said...that women have closed the gap and even inched ahead in this battle of the intelligent sexes...Deciding which is the smarter sex is an ever-controversial...

The class of 2012 had the worst SAT reading scores since 1972. The left will no doubt attribute this to racism, but any serious look at the past generation leads to the inescapable conclusion that kids who grew up in the computer age just don’t read anymore. So it is no mystery that they will perform poorly on reading comprehension tests. Kids don’t forget how to read, they simply lose the ability (if they ever had it) to comprehend and process the information they are reading, and analyzing it to any meaningful degree. Based on what I have seen in...

House Speaker John Boehner--who two years ago led House Republicans in releasing the 48-page “A Pledge to America” to tell voters what Republicans would do if they won control of the House--mocked the national platform produced by the delegates to the Republican National Convention by telling a group of reporters in Tampa on Monday that the document should have been restricted to "one sheet of paper" if the delegates wanted anybody to read it. “Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform?” Boehner said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “I’ve not met ever anybody.”...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of...

“I scream, you scream… well, you know the rest.” That’s the line dozens of local news anchors across the country read off their teleprompters recently, giving Conan O’Brien plenty of fodder for what has become a regular segment on his show–supercuts of TV anchors saying the exact same thing (video above).

Students are suing the state of Michigan and their Detroit-area school district for violating their "right to read." The class-action lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, and potentially signals a new wave of civil rights litigation in the United States to enforce laws intended to boost academic achievement, education law experts say. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed what it has dubbed the "right to read" lawsuit on behalf of the nearly 1,000 students in the impoverished district.

Edward Yacuta felt rushed and nervous when he took a test to determine whether he was ready for college-level English classes at Long Beach City College. The 18-year-old did poorly on the exam, even though he was getting good grades in an Advanced Placement English class at Long Beach's Robert A. Millikan High School. Most community colleges would assign students like Yacuta to a remedial class, but he will avoid that fate at Long Beach. The two-year school is trying out a new system this fall that will place students who graduated from the city's high schools in courses based...

They've been called “Courtiers of the Marble Palace” and “Sorcerers' Apprentices.” But to the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, their law clerks are much more: sparring partners, workhorses and, often, extended family. Each of the court's nine justices hires several law clerks for yearlong stints, newly minted lawyers from top law schools who have impeccable credentials. The role of a clerk includes assisting the justices in determining what cases to take, preparing them for the oral arguments and helping write opinions. Now a new collection of essays, “In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices” (University...

For more than 40 years, Mona McNee has been fighting the good fight on behalf of intelligent reading instruction. She is the author of "Step By Step" (a phonics program) and "The Great Reading Disaster" (with Alice Coleman, 2007, 335 pages), which chronicles the incompetence of the UK's Education Establishment. I always think of Mona McNee as the Patron Saint of Reading.Mona has recently prepared a booklet called "Why Billy can't read," which sums up her message in 30 pages. You can find a pdf of this booklet, and as well her free phonics program, on phonics4free.org (link below). Mona...

Willa Cather wrote an American literary masterpeice - so did Fitzgerald, Bellow, and Mailer - but Clancy's Red Storm Rising is just commercial junk. Take a university English course offered under a summary like "The American Novel" or "A Survey of American Literature" and you find that before the 1930s the great American novel was written by people like Mark Twain, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Henry James - but literary greatness after that period devolved to people like Philip Roth, John Barth, and Paul Auster. So why is the Life of Pi great literature and Cardinal of the Kremlin just paplum?...

[More about Sight-Words...] Your average criminal has a few aliases. It’s de rigueur in the underworld. But only real swashbucklers pass the half-dozen mark. Think about the confusion keeping your identities straight. Down South you’re Jackson Jones, but in New York you answer to Maxie Smith, however, guys in Atlantic City call you Lefty,” as in, “Yo, Lefty, still doing hits?” Which has to remind us of Whole Word, one of the greatest swashbucklers since Charles Ponzi’s business plan. This wise guy--I mean Whole Word-- came into the world as Look-say, with a few early aliases such as Word Method...

Sunday Mass Readings of Fourth Sunday of Lent: http://new.usccb.org/bible/readings/031812-fourth-sunday-of-lent.cfm Dearest Lord: Your royal instrument said, “Whoever, therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people, let him go up (to rebuild Jerusalem) , and may his God be with him!" Oh, we were born in iniquities, our nature, which was once pristine, is now defiled with infidelity upon infidelity. It is perpetually true that the loss of charity and sanctifying beauty of our soul always come from infidelity, the refusal to worship the Lord our God. You have given so much grace and strong foundation, the Church, to guide...

Marie Antoinette, on hearing that French peasants had no bread to eat, suggested, “Let them eat cake.” This quip perfectly captured the haughty indifference which many people attributed to the French monarchy. A few years later, she was punished for her hauteur: execution by guillotine. The famous quote was probably never uttered. Real or not, it’s a handy symbol for an arrogant elite, indifferent to the suffering of the people. When you read in the newspaper that the US has 50 million functional illiterates, the disdainful queen should flash into your mind.During the 1920’s, the American population was moving toward...

[MORE ABOUT READING, SPECIFICALLY, THAT SO-CALLED BALANCED LITERACY IS ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE LONG-RUNNING HOAX:] So here’s the deal. The same people who lied to us about reading for 70 years now want us to believe they are finally telling the truth. They said that English isn’t phonetic, that children don’t need the alphabet and the sounds, that children need only to look at words and memorize the shapes. All this was utter nonsense. They further said that if children didn’t recognize a word (which they typically didn’t as it’s hard work to memorize a word by its shape), they...

Gov. Scott Walker and the state schools superintendent unveiled a task force's recommendations Wednesday for how Wisconsin might ensure that every child can read by the end of the third grade, including testing incoming kindergarteners' reading proficiency, providing teachers with more training opportunities and holding teachers to higher standards. Walker formed the Read to Lead task force in March after reading tests showed Wisconsin students were falling behind students in other states. He and state Superintendent Tony Evers unveiled the recommendations at a public school in the Milwaukee suburb of Greendale. They called the recommendations an "aggressive plan to improve...

GOOD INSIGHTS ON WHY MILLIONS OF KIDS CAN'T READ. (A FOLLOW-UP FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN EARLIER POST TITLED "FAKE READING THEORY IS THE SLAVE TRADE OF OUR ERA.") The country continues to be plagued by illiteracy. The reason is simple. The country continues to be under the heel of some of the most reckless and reprehensible “experts” imaginable. They make little children memorize the SHAPES of words, which most little children simply can’t do. Ergo, these children experience major reading and cognitive problems.  Don Potter, the phonics guru and as well a teacher in Texas, recently sent me this illuminating...