Tuesday, May 16, 2006

ANOTHER ARROGANT AND IGNORANT SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION

A Seminole County principal said a boy was drunk at a school dance, but his parents, a doctor, and a police officer all said he wasn't. However, until Thursday, he was still at home serving a suspension. The eighth grade student at Lawton Chiles Middle School in Seminole County got violently ill at the dance last Friday. On Monday, his principal suspended him because he suspected the 14-year-old was drunk. The school district would not talk about the specifics of the case, but said that a principal only has to have reasonable suspicion to suspend a student.

The boy's mom said that's not enough for her, especially when her son's doctor said otherwise. "I just want to get back to school so I can finish my work so I can pass," 14-year-old Joey Muller said. He has spent two and a half days working at his kitchen table instead of Lawton Chiles Middle School. His mom said he's learning the wrong lesson about fairness. "I just feel you shouldn't point a finger without actual evidence," said Michelle Hernandez, the boy's mother.

It all started Friday night at the eighth grade dance. Joey was driven there by a friend's parents and he felt fine at first. "I went inside, was talking with friends, went and got some punch and food," he said. But half an hour later while dancing, Joey felt violently ill. Friends had to help him to the bathroom. "My stomach was just turning the whole time and I felt like I had to throw up," he said.

School administrators and the resource officer called his mom to pick him up. He went to the doctor that night, but Monday morning the school principal called him in and suspended him for being drunk. Off camera, the resource officer said Joey did have trouble balancing and seemed like he could be intoxicated, but he did not see or smell any alcohol. The doctor wrote a note saying there was no evidence to justify the suspension from school.

"I just don't feel it's fair to suspend a child without actual evidence that they know for sure that's why he was sick," Hernandez said. The school district said, under state and federal policies, evidence isn't necessarily needed. "It's the sole prerogative of the principal and that's based on the professional training and educational experience that they make wise decisions," said Regina Klaers, Seminole County School District.

But the principal did shorten the suspension from ten days to five when Joey's mom complained he'd miss his final exams. Then, after Channel 9 started asking questions, suddenly the suspension was lifted. His mom brought him right to school on Thursday. There were rumors going around that the punch may have been spiked with alcohol or Visine. The officer said he found no evidence of that. About ten other children later told the officer they felt ill after the dance, but none of them were vomiting or sent home. The district wouldn't say why Joey's suspension was suddenly dropped Thursday. His mom's just glad he's back at school.

Source






IDEOLOGY VERSUS WHAT WORKS

What nobody seems to be mentioning is that "whole language" seems to work for the children of more affluent families because the parents take their kids aside at some stage and explain phonics to them. Kids with less involved parents are not given those clues and so flounder. A particular interest of the excerpt below is that it does try to explain what motivates the "whole language" religion

The reading wars, of course, aren't only about reading. Yes, reading skills matter tremendously to New York parents, whether they aim to get their children into Harvard or just to their age-appropriate reading level. But the Reading Wars are also about race and class. Everyone stands to gain from phonics, advocates say, but no one figures to benefit more than children from low-income families who-unlike, say, the kids at elite private schools, most of which use a whole-language approach-often can't get extra tutoring in the basics. Parents of children with learning disabilities say their children benefit similarly from phonics.

There's also a political component to the Reading Wars. To phonics advocates, whole language is rooted in the worst liberal traditions: It's a freewheeling approach that lacks rigor and standards and could even, some say, be the first step down the slippery slope to abominations like Ebonics. And the entire New York City education culture, they say, is permeated by such soft thinking. Whole-language proponents, in turn, say phonics perpetuates authoritarian, patronizing "drill and kill" strategies that insult the art of teaching and turn kids into fifties-style robots, putting them off learning for life.

Where George W. Bush and many red states are phonics supporters, New York is dyed-in-the-wool whole-language country. Influential programs at Columbia and Bank Street College developed variations of the approach before it even had a name. Balanced Literacy, or at least the way it's practiced in New York, is largely the brainchild of Lucy Calkins, founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, who is looked upon nationally as a godmother of whole-language learning.

The issue in New York is that at the exact moment that Bloomberg and Klein made Balanced Literacy the cornerstone of the curriculum here, phonics scored several major victories in the Reading Wars. A National Institutes of Health-created commission of Ph.D.'s came down squarely on the side of phonics in a 2000 report, influencing the Bush administration to crack down-some say improperly, perhaps even scandalously-on non-phonics programs. And where hard science once had little to say about how various reading methods affected kids, a series of MRI studies done at Yale starting in the late nineties appeared to show that as many as one in every four children, regardless of class, race, or other demographic factors, needs direct instruction in basic skills before he can read. When kids with learning difficulties read with phonics, their brains light up on MRI scans like a Christmas tree. The conclusion, phonics advocates say, is clear: Kids need technical instruction in the basics before being immersed in the world of literature.

That argument doesn't persuade Klein. He's cultivating mindful, curious readers, he's said, not vanilla word-decoders. "I'm quite convinced the curriculum we're using, with inquiry-based learning, will serve our students throughout the city well over time," he says. In particular, Klein likes that Balanced Literacy looks a lot like the reading approaches in successful school districts on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and in most of the city's elite private schools. In a system where so many great schools coexist with so many horrible ones, Klein is convinced that the solution is not to adopt the practices of the worst schools but to export the best practices of the successful ones and end the educational apartheid.

To phonics advocates, this is like turning your back on the invention of the wheel or the secret of fire. Despite the modest improvements in city reading scores, they say, the reading crisis isn't going away here: The city's high-school-graduation rate is still only 54 percent. Phonics, supporters say, could be the closest thing New York gets to a vaccine that can stop kids' reading difficulties before they start. Why, they demand to know, isn't New York using it?

It's safe to say that when Michael Bloomberg came to City Hall in 2002, one of the last things on his mind was the best way to teach kids how to read. Taking over the public schools, as he improbably persuaded the state to let him do in his first six months in office, was more about management changes to him than pedagogy. In the summer of 2002, he hired Klein, a fellow outsider, as his chancellor, and Klein recruited a career superintendent named Diana Lam as his deputy for instruction. It was Lam who brought in Balanced Literacy. Neither Klein nor Bloomberg knew much about the program at the time, except that Lam had used it in cities where test scores went up, like San Antonio, Texas, and Providence, Rhode Island. For a mayor who wanted his first term judged on what he did with the schools, this was a clear plus. In what would be one of their only moments of agreement, Randi Weingarten, the teachers-union chief, agreed at first with Klein's plan and even went out of her way to praise his bravery. "If the system isn't working and someone has an idea that could theoretically make things much better," she said in an interview, "why not try it?"

It didn't take long-just days, actually-for the phonics camp to open fire. When Lam and Klein unveiled their reading program in January 2003-Balanced Literacy, with a small supplemental program called Month by Month Phonics-seven reading researchers unconnected to the public schools wrote an open letter to the mayor and Klein, blasting Month by Month Phonics as a phonics program in name only. They called Month by Month "woefully inadequate," lacking "a research base" and "the ingredients of a systematic phonics program" and putting "beginning readers at risk of failure in learning to read." Others were still less kind: Sol Stern of the conservative Manhattan Institute and the education historian Diane Ravitch berated Balanced Literacy's whole-language roots. "Many of the programs and methods now being crammed down the teachers' throats have no record of success," wrote Stern, "and are particularly ill suited for disadvantaged minority children. In fact, a cabal of progressive educators chose them for ideological reasons, in total disregard of what the scientific evidence says about the most effective teaching methods-particularly in the critically important area of early reading."

Parents in the more politically connected parts of town didn't need to be won over by Balanced Literacy, since more than 200 elementary schools already used it. But the ones who sent their kids to the other public schools were bewildered by a reading program that didn't have a textbook. "I held four days of hearings on reading," recalls Eva Moskowitz, then the City Council's Education Committee chair. In the hearings, she says, the city was hammered for what some called its "loosey-goosey" approach to teaching basic skills.

Phonics could be the closest thing New York gets to a vaccine that can stop kids' reading difficulties before they start. Why, advocates demand to know, isn't New York using it?

Parents' outrage was matched by that of teachers who had been asked to switch curricula in real time with just a few days of training and little day-to-day support. Instead, principals were handing them daily directives from the Tweed Courthouse to reconfigure their classrooms and lesson plans. The workload became staggering, and many teachers resisted, blasting Lam in the press for punishing teachers who didn't rearrange their rows of desks into cozy clusters or lay "reading rugs" in the corners. To some, Balanced Literacy became a buzzword for a new, bizarre form of tyranny. What was supposed to have been a progressive, flexible technique to unleash a child's inner reader had become something so claustrophobically scripted that critics predicted Klein would drive the most talented teachers out of the system.

The curriculum, in fact, became a lightning rod for the mayor's entire overhaul of the schools. Every criticism of the reforms, it seemed, circled back to the reading program. When the mayor tangled with the teachers union over contract negotiations, Weingarten abandoned her early enthusiasm for Balanced Literacy and demanded it be abolished. When the mayor ended social promotion for third-graders in 2004, Ravitch insisted that Klein ditch the scientifically flimsy curriculum. And when Lam abruptly resigned from her job in disgrace-exposed for getting her husband a job in the school system and trying to cover it up-it surprised no one when Sol Stern and others argued that it was time to scrap the "unproven" curriculum Lam brought in.

Cognition experts like Harvard's Steven Pinker have argued for some time that while learning to talk is an organic process you can generally learn on your own, like walking, reading is more like riding a bike or driving a car. Someone has to take you through the initial steps and get you over the unfamiliarity of the experience; then you have to spend time on your own perfecting the skills until it becomes second nature. The question at the heart of the Reading Wars is how much direct instruction do children really need.

The debate has raged, back and forth, across the country-phonics was out in California, then in again, and battled over in Texas and elsewhere-until finally, in the mid-nineties, NIH launched a project intended to settle the matter. In 1997, Congress asked NIH to create the National Reading Panel (a commission of academics) to consider the question. The panel took three years to review and scrutinize 1,000 recent academic studies of phonics-related reading programs, eliminating all but the most carefully constructed. In 2000, the panel released its "meta-analysis" and concluded that in order to learn to read, all children must master five separate skills: phonemic awareness (separating words into distinct sounds, like the c, a, and t in cat), phonics (learning the sounds letters and letter combinations make), fluency (the ability to read with speed and accuracy), vocabulary (learning new words), and comprehension (understanding what you're reading). These basic skills were nothing new to most people who taught elementary-school English. What the NRP added to the debate was the notion that direct instruction of these skills was the only proven method for teaching reading.

As a direct result of the NRP, those directing federal educational policy held up phonics as a sort of magic bullet, even though the data, critics say, fell well short of supporting such a blanket conclusion. For example, while the full NRP report acknowledged that "phonics instruction failed to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving readers in second through sixth grade" and "there were insufficient data to draw conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above first grade," the more widely distributed NRP summary report endorsed phonics without qualification. "Phonics instruction," it read, "produces significant benefits for students in K through sixth grade and for students having difficulty learning to read."....

In the years after the NRP report, phonics racked up more scientific support. In the Yale MRI studies, researcher Sally Shaywitz, a member of the NRP, demonstrated that kids learning the NRP way developed their occipital-temporal parts of the brain (the part responsible for reading) more dramatically than the other children did. (Shaywitz was one of three members of the NRP to co-sign the open letter to the mayor in 2003 lambasting Month by Month Phonics.) "Learning to read used to be catch-as-catch-can, but now it is real science," she says. "There is evidence now that if you use evidence-based teaching methods, you can really rewire the brain." Faced with these results, Shaywitz says, it's foolish to hang on to whole language. "If you had a program that you know works, and something else you just feel pretty good about, would you volunteer your child for the one you weren't sure worked?"....

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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