Posted on 01/15/2009 4:10:25 PM PST by neverdem
A solution for the reading gap between black and white children was discovered four decades ago. So, why aren't we taking advantage of it?
One does not expect to see New York's school Chancellor Joel Klein on the same stage as Reverend Al Sharpton. Klein is infamous for his emphasis on test scores and shutting down schools that fail to measure up. Not so long ago, Sharpton was in the barricades with Russell Simmons protesting mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein's plan to cut New York City's education budget.
Yet these days the two are teaming up for the Education Equality Project, which seeks to close the achievement gap between white and black kids in public schools. And at the New York City Department of Education's kickoff in a series on the topic last week, Klein and Sharpton agreed on most issues. Sharpton, who in his "reformed" guise has decided that education is a key civil rights issue, actually spoke up for vouchers and mayoral control of the school board.
The forum was a typical one on race and education, as ritualized as a religious service. First, an introducer recites the latest dropout statistics. Then, discussants and audience questioners flag the usual terms--Low Expectations, Parental Involvement, Vested Interests, Resources, Accountability--each greeted with knowing murmurs and applause. A tacit assumption is always that the grievous intersection of these factors explains why poor children, especially black and Latino ones, tend to trail so far behind white ones in reading skills--a maddening gap that persists in National Assessment of Educational Progress reports year after year.
Yet a solution for the reading gap was discovered four decades ago. Starting in the late 1960s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation, Project Follow Through, that compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results in more than 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading was vastly more effective than any of the others for (drum roll, please) poor kids, including black ones. DI isn't exactly complicated: Students are taught to sound out words rather than told to get the hang of recognizing words whole, and they are taught according to scripted drills that emphasize repetition and frequent student participation.
In a half-day preschool in Champaign-Urbana they founded, Engelmann and associates found that DI teaches four-year-olds to understand sounds, syllables, and rhyming. Its students went on to kindergarten reading at a second-grade level, with their mean IQ having jumped 25 points. In the 70s and 80s, similar results came from nine other sites nationwide, and since then, the evidence of DI's effectiveness has been overwhelming, raising students' reading scores in schools in Baltimore, Houston, Milwaukee, and other districts. A search for an occasion where DI was instituted and failed to improve students' reading performance would be distinctly frustrating.
Still, at this forum you would never have known Project Follow Through existed. Key moment: A teacher reminded us to keep "creativity" in mind as a teaching tool, with coos and scattered applause from the audience, and Sharpton milking it by chiming in. Indeed, schools of education have long been caught up in an idea that teaching poor kids to read requires something more than, well, teaching them how to sound out words. The poor child, the good-thinking wisdom tells us, needs tutti-frutti approaches bringing in music, rhythm, narrative, Ebonics, and so on. Distracted by the hardships in their home lives, surely they cannot be reached by just laying out the facts. That can only work for coddled children of doctors and lawyers.
But the simple fact of how well DI has worked shows that "creativity" is not what poor kids need. At the Champaign-Urbana preschool, the kids--poor kids, recall, and not many who were white--had a jolly old time with DI, especially when they found that it was (hey!) teaching them to read.
In 2001, third-grade students in the mostly black Richmond district in Virginia were scoring abysmally in reading. But once a scientifically proven reading program similar to DI was brought in, by 2005, three-quarters of black students passed the third-grade reading test. Meanwhile, out in wealthy Fairfax County, where DI was scorned as usual, the black students taking that test--despite ample funding--were passing it at the rate of merely 59 percent.
The saddest thing about the blithe neglect of Engelmann's findings is that they are the answer to the problems people at forums like these find so challenging. It's as if you're listening to people discuss the merits of moving a two-ton load of grain into a barn by spreading the ground between the load and the barn with cooking grease and heaving-ho. The solution's "creative," alright--but hasn't Engelmann already invented the wheel?
Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's appointed Secretary of Education, happens to be a signatory to Klein and Sharpton's Education Equality Project to bring "equity to an educational system that, 54 years since Brown v. Board of Education, continues to fail its highest-needs students." In Washington, Duncan might consider taking the blinders off and forcing America's urban school districts to teach poor kids to read with tools that we have known to work since the Nixon Administration.
Otherwise, all we will have is the likes of the audience at the Klein-Sharpton event coming away thinking the event was "great" because Sharpton is a jolly presence and everyone got to clap upon hearing terms like Low Expectations and Resources. I submit that this is a distinctly thin basis upon which to translate our President-Elect's call for hope into action.
John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.
lol. liberals don’t like the right way, the right way is offensive
I wonder why phonics became a political issue. I can see Global Warming because the left wants to use it to destroy capitalism, but whats up with phonics? Why does the left want the “whole word recognition” method so much?
Damn, I tbought we solved THAT problem— and many others — when we integrated the schools.
As everyone now knows, a black kid can’t learn unless he’s sitting next to a white kid.
Sounds like phonics to me. Gee, somehow all the black kids in my little parish school in the ‘50s and ‘60s learned how to read, diagram sentences, and write essays. And they managed to do it in classrooms with 50-60 kids and 1 little nun. Hmm...maybe some of those old-fashioned ways actually worked. I don’t think they even teach sentence diagramming anymore.
More liberal sophistry. The real problem is children raised in single family homes and lack of parental support. The out of wedlock birthrate for blacks is 68% and for Hispanics it is 50%. School performance among asians and whites is general higher than blacks and hispanics regardless of the economic conditions. We seem to accept black athletic prowess and superiority, but there seems to be no politically correct way to explain the disparity in academic performance.
The real solution: A culture that values education.
My first thought (re: “sounds like phonics”) as well...
We did in my homeschool in English and in Latin.
The oldest is in the 5th grade and is reading at about the 10th-11th grade level. The middle one is in the 1st grade reading at about a 4th grade level. The youngest is a year away from kindergarten and he is just learning to read now. Of course he can already type thanks to Toon Disney where is seems to know the names of all the games and the players.
That was racist because it didn't acknowledge race as an excuse for failure. I mean, as a justification for special treatment. I mean compensation for non-race based inequality like income. Or something. Anyway, it was racist. That is to say, "historic".
Do you know what works even better? Parents that read to their kids.
“We seem to accept black athletic prowess and superiority, but there seems to be no politically correct way to explain the disparity in academic performance.”
It couldn’t be IQ?
The Bell Curve
Children in functional families are getting phonics from their parents. Parents in functional families ( knowingly or unknowingly) teach their children the sounds of the alphabet and combinations of these letters.
In other words children in functional families are successful **in spite** of their government school, not because of it. It is the parents and the children themselves who are doing 99% of the teaching and learning.
As a health professional, I informally interviewed the parents of children who are academically successful. In **every** instance ( without a single exception) the home habits of academically successful homeschoolers and institutionalized children are **identical**.
With academically successful instituionalized children, it is the parents and children who are doing 99% of the work. The school is merely sending home a curriculum. The child is succeeding **in spite** of his institutional school experiences. The parents and children are “afterschooling”.
Teaching phonics, which is learned by rote, didn’t provide the opportunity for sex education and free love. The NEA was bored with phonics and eager to teach sex.
Hooked on phonics works!
Because phonics are how the boomers' parents learned to read...and tried to teach them to read.
Boomers didn't like their parents, remember. And phonics is boooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring!
So, one of the boomers who went to grad school invented "whole word recognition". And an entire generation leaped to adopt it.
It was widely accepted as superior. Because it was theirs. And not their parents'.
I really don't know if that's the truth...but it wouldn't surprise me it was.
I found an old picture with 45 kids. I remember counting them. I think the nun was there too. Here's my fourth grade class. I count 39 plus Sister Florentine.
So you’re saying blacks have a lower IQ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.