Posted on 01/18/2005 4:06:25 AM PST by shubi
Are taxpayer-subsidized infomercials and payoffs to friendly commentators the federal government's answer to education problems? The U.S. Education Department's secret million-dollar taxpayer-financed marketing campaign to sell the No Child Left Behind Act is only a symptom of what's wrong.
Former President Ronald Reagan used to say that government is not the solution, it's the problem. But we are in the post-Clinton era, and in 1997 former President Bill Clinton told us in Northbrook, Ill., to get over "our love of local control of the schools."
While national media are filled with pictures of horrors all over the world, the biggest tragedy in the United States rates only local stories. I'm referring to the sad, sad tale of how public school systems promote millions of children all the way into high school without ever teaching them how to read.
This situation wasn't pictured on network television, or even on CNN or Fox, but the Orlando Sentinel gave its customers the bad news on New Year's Day. Only 32 percent of Florida ninth-graders and only 34 percent of Florida 10th-graders can read at grade level.
That means two-thirds of Florida public school students are marking time in legally enforced incarceration in government buildings that are euphemistically called schools. Think of all those hours those illiterates have available to create mischief, annoy teachers and other students, and get into trouble.
Why is anyone surprised at the truancy and dropout rates? Wouldn't you - whether you are a student or a parent - check out of the system if it just baby-sat you for nine school years and never taught you how to read?
This high rate of nonreaders is not new; it obviously has existed for years, and I've reported it in this column over and over again. If ninth-graders can't read, we can infer that they couldn't read in the eighth grade, or the seventh grade, or the sixth grade, etc., but were promoted anyway.
What made this a 2005 news story, according to the Sentinel, is that school officials "are panicking," but not because of the appalling illiteracy rate. It's because the No Child Left Behind Act is enforcing accountability and nonreaders are giving entire schools a bad name.
The state of Florida gives a letter grade to each school each spring. A school can drop a whole letter - as from a C to a D - and be hit with a financial penalty if poor readers fail to improve two years in a row.
This threat has motivated schools into serious action, and their solution to this depressing report is predictable. Spend more taxpayer money and hire a new set of teachers to teach high schoolers what elementary school teachers were already paid to do.
Orlando school officials have decided to experiment with three new reading approaches: Scholastic's Read 180, which relies heavily students using computers and comes with a price tag of $439,000; McGraw-Hill's SRA Corrective Reading at $130,000; and Strategically Oriented Intensive Reading Instruction at $84,000.
According to the Sentinel, these three methods will be used on different groups of students because "no one knows exactly what works." That's not true; we already know what works: intensive, systematic phonics.
But for years, most public schools have rejected what works in favor of what's easy: the so-called whole-word method. Instead of teaching first-graders the sounds and syllables of the English language, and how to put them together like building blocks to read big words, schools have taught children to memorize a short list of frequently used words, guess at whole words by looking at the pictures on the page, predict words based on the content of the story, substitute words that seem to fit, and simply skip over words they don't recognize.
Memorizing, guessing, looking at pictures, predicting, substituting, and skipping, are not reading; they are bad habits. A child in those bad habits is guaranteed to be a poor and inaccurate reader.
This whole-word system gets children through the first and second grades when they are given only stories with one-syllable words and mind-numbing repetition, but it is doomed to failure when they are confronted with polysyllabic words in later grades.
Children who are not taught phonics grow up to be adults who can never be hired for anything other than a minimum-wage job. They will never be assimilated into our economy and achieve the American dream.
Children who are not taught phonics grow up to be incompetent voters, like the Palm Beach County voters who spoiled their ballots in 2000 by over-voting for both Al Gore and the Libertarian third-party candidate. Never having been taught to sound out syllables, they saw "Libertarian" and thought they were selecting "Lieberman" for vice president.
©2005 Copley News Service
The figures for private and home schooled children are so much better, it makes me wonder if the education credentialing process promotes making kids stupid.
An accurate read?
Okay-- government schools suck!
Yes, and so does the whole system of keeping out teachers who know a subject and putting in teachers who think they know how to teach.
How do you teach something of which you have no knowledge?
You don't!!! We need to junk the system and go back to hiring good teachers who care about kids and not so much about money and power.
H, but you'll hear, "that's not happening in MY school."
LOL!
God bless Phyllis for her decades of work in promoting the most tried and true method of reading. But because of her work, the government-education-industrial-complex will continue to resist what works.
NCLB forces report cards for SCHOOLS.
NCLB allows students in failing schools to transfer OUT.
NCLB sets teaching standards, such as PHONICS rather than whole language (totally discredited) or there is NO funding.
There is a reason why the NEA is bitterly against this program. They don't want accontability.
If you can create a better way to keep watch on schools, please do so.
Education is the single most important social issue in our country.
I'm acquainted with an elementary school teacher who is a floating reading specialist at a whole-language school. She works with the kids who are falling behind - mainly little boys - and she gets great results. How? She has five or six copies of Hooked on Phonics that she quietly loans out to families to work on at home.
What a load. Did this author ever hear of the No Pass, No Play rule that's been around for the last few decades? It's apparent whenever there's a slow news day, journalists merely pull out from the back of the file cabinet a rant on public schools. Of course it's not the parents' fault that Johnny can't read or even bother showing up for class. No, let's not blame the parents for letting Johnny play videos all day or do drugs or join a gang rather than doing his homework. No, it can't be the parents' fault that PTA's are things of the past. It would be too un-PC to place the blame squarely on uninvolved parents, where is belongs.
If your neighborhood public school isn't up to your standards, get up off your duff and fix it.
$40 per classroom for a copy of Alpha-Phonics, plus $3 for chalk. Presto! (This is based on the assumption that the teachers don't know phonics, either ... otherwise all they'd need is the chalk!)
I never made this connection before. I can always count on Phyllis to teach me something new every column. She isn't a babe, but she is the smartest Conservative woman we've got...as much as I like Coulter and Malkin and Ingrahm &c &c, we need Phyllis.
While I agree with your sentiment about fixing your own neighborhood schools, whatever the 'No Pass, No Play' rule is, it ain't working.
We wouldn't need to keep "watch" on our schools if each locality was running them like in the past.
It is the federalization of schools that caused the problem in the first place. Look at retirement and medical if you want other examples of how federal intervention makes things worse.
I agree that parents have a good deal of responsibility, but in the inner city there are really no parents to blame.
I know one high school here that graduates about 7 percent of those who start and a good number of those are barely literate.
Three of my four kids had a nun that taught intensive phonics in first grade (catholic private school). Results- 1 National Merit Finalist Lawyer, 1 Summa Cum Laude, 1 Engineer.
One without the nun is taking 6 years to get through undergrad.
You have to have kids that care about atheletics for no pass no play to have any effect. With grade inflation, the rule really doesn't have much effect in Public Schools.
That is how Public Schools get around the laws and standards. If they don't like it or can't perform, they just give the grades away and help the little illiterates cheat on the tests.
She'd probably be fired if the administration found out about it. I think she should get a medal.
The president sought to deal with the situation as it is today.
You can tell from the level of hysteria coming from the NEA that the President is on the right track. We have a long way to go, but must start somewhere.
Schools that use Whole Language rather than phonics have many students who can't read. Some kids learn to read in spite of Whole Language. Many don't.
It's not the parents' fault. It's the schools' fault. It has nothing to do with kids watching videos, joining gangs, or not doing homework. It's hard to get students interested in school if they can't read. Teach them to read correctly and many learning and behavior problems will disappear.
It is the parents' fault, however, if they don't go down to the school and raise hell.
Maybe it's just because it's the youngest :-).
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