[Vision2020] upcoming midterm election

[heirdoug at netscape.net]

… Luna's support comes from the side of the political spectrum that 
believes in a solely market-driven approach to public education and 
denies the reality of an institution that, dealing as it does in the 
education of human beings, is enormously more complex and crucial to 
the functioning of society than the management of, say, a jewelry store 
-- or an industrial scales business, which is the business Luna runs.

…The crushing burden of No Child Left Behind, social and economic 
factors that affect children, the complexities of education law and 
procedure, and the challenges of a largely rural state with very 
different demographics throughout is something that requires experience 
in education, administration, and a committment (SIC) to the 
institution itself.

… This inability to acknowledge the reality of today's federal 
oversight of schools in terms of standards, funding, assessments and 
bureaucracy, coupled with an apparent inability to …

…see children as human being and not units of production…


Keely,
If Compulsion Schooling is so great and is such a wonderful institution 
why is its funding based upon the number of seats filled, and not the 
outcome of students being able to read at even a 9th grade level?

“Washington, D. C., Oct. 10. Following in the footsteps of “No Child 
Left Behind,” the Department of Education is considering new 
requirements applicable to all colleges and universities benefiting in 
any way from federally financed programs, such as student loan and 
dormitory-financing programs. Continued eligibility for participation 
in the programs would require graduates receiving a baccalaureate 
degree to demonstrate at least a 9th-grade level of reading ability and 
a 7th-grade level of ability in mathematics.”

I thought that the following editorial would be of interest to some of 
you who don’t wish to listen to the tales of school woes.

Keely, show me the numbers!

lemeno, Doug
_______________________________________________________________
The One-Question Test
by Linda Schrock Taylor

In 1812 (forty years before the passage of our first federal compulsory 
school laws), Pierre DuPont de Nemours published the book, Education in 
the United States. Dupont, one of the founders of the DuPont fortune, 
known to be brutally honest and direct, spoke of the phenomenal 
literacy rate in the United States; was amazed by the difference he saw 
when compared to European literacy. Dupont said that less then 4 people 
out of every thousand in the new nation could not read and do numbers 
well.

In 1992 (one hundred and forty years after the passage of compulsory 
schooling laws) Regna Lee Wood, Director of Statistical Research for 
The National Right to Read Foundation, published the article, "That's 
Right – They're Wrong." In that very important piece, Wood compared the 
literacy rates of World War II recruits with those of the Korean War. 
She discovered that,

AFQT scores indicated that illiteracy (defined by the War Department as 
inability to read 4th-grade lessons, or today's 5th-grade lessons) 
among millions of prospective recruits with at least four years of 
schooling soared from almost zero (0.004 percent) during World War II 
to an unbelievable 17 percent during the Korean War. ("That's Right – 
They're Wrong" National Review, 9/14/92)

Such information should be considered as explanations are sought for 
the massive failure of our schools in these years since World War II; a 
massive failure that has occurred just within my lifetime. We should 
also consider whether those "4 people out of every thousand"; that 
"0.004 percent"; might be a more accurate reflection of the true 
occurrence of severe handicapping conditions in the general population.

Might "4 out of 1000" be the actual number of unfortunate individuals 
born with true handicaps so severe that the achievement of literacy is 
simply not possible? The observations of Dupont, and the statistics 
examined by Wood, certainly suggest a very different – and a vastly 
smaller – group of nonreaders than does the current educational 
Alphabet of Excuses (AE) for school failure – ADD, ADHD, ODD, BD, EI, 
LD, SLD, HI, VI, EMI, MR, MI, CI, AU, TMR, POHI…

No Child Left Behind should be identifying and using research like that 
done by Regna Lee Wood. Actually, NCLB should have done its homework 
before it forced narrow certification and ever-broadening assessment 
guidelines on each school and every teacher in the land; before it 
acted on such a massive scale to violate the sovereignty of local 
jurisdictions to make the educational decisions that best serve the 
local people who are actually the ones financing their local schools.

NCLB should have attempted to discover: the full impact of basic 
literacy upon the total educational experience and life of each 
individual. NCLB should have discovered: exactly how literacy was so 
skillfully brought about back when the purported 996 out of every 1000 
Americans were literate.

NCLB laws; accepted by lock-step and/or ignorant administrators; 
enabled by uninformed and/or incompetent school board members; have 
failed to identify the vital issue upon which all other aspects of 
schooling rest; the one single element; the Rosetta Stone – READING!

With that foundational academic need in mind, the effectiveness of any 
school can be assessed, and the decision made as to whether a school 
should remain open, – based upon whether a school passes or fails The 
One-Question Test:

"Does said school absolutely, positively, insure that 996 out of every 
1000 children are literate prior to the end of third (3rd) grade?"

(Now, this is the kind of outcome-based education that America needs 
and has needed for at least seventy-five years.)

One-roomed schoolhouse teachers were able to teach reading to almost 
every child. More importantly, back then the goal was to have every 
child literate by the end of first grade – in an era when homes owned 
few books other than the Bible; Webster's "Blue-backed Speller"; a 
reading book filled with wisdom, intelligent stories and big words; and 
a slim arithmetic book.

Children came to school – many without breakfast – carrying a lunch 
pail that might hold something as simple as a butter sandwich (made 
more nutritious by being provided by the hard work of the parents 
rather than by funds stolen from the taxpayers to feed someone else's 
child). The children often came from extremely poor homes; many where 
chickens and more, might have shared the dwelling on bitterly cold 
winter nights. The children often came in rags or hand-me-downs. 
But…the main difference between schools then and schools now is that 
then schools taught almost all children to read. The schools back then 
leveled the population UP!

For this massive increase in illiteracy, coming so soon after the prior 
war, our welfare-growing, prison-building, America can thank Sight 
Words and Dick and Jane, including all their offspring and clones, 
including Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and any other 
avoid-systematic-phonic-instruction fads.

Most children, who learn to read well in our current educational 
climate, learn to read in spite of the teaching. Until such time as 
teachers are trained to skillfully and effectively teach phonics, 
spelling, writing and reading, this method of not-so-benign neglect, 
which fails the majority of the children, will continue to be used with 
each generation, with ever-worsening results. That steady decline has 
been the norm since the sight word fad usurped educational decisions 
and destroyed the meaning of scholarship.

The educational culture must drop pet theories and favorite fads in 
order to properly train teachers to skillfully teach reading, spelling, 
and writing skills. Educators would be wise to seek out the few 
remaining one-room schoolhouse teachers and ask them to teach the 
professors at all the schools of education How to Really Teach Reading. 
My Great-aunt Mildred, who taught for fifty (50) years, probably knows, 
herself, more about reading instruction, than most graduate schools of 
education currently know collectively!

Those graduate degrees are quite impressive on paper, but too often the 
schools of education only require that professors who train future 
teachers in How to Teach Reading have "an earned PhD and three (3) 
years of classroom experience." Three years!! Almost every teacher 
spends the first three years getting organized and learning more from 
the kids than the teachers were able to get taught. Yet, inexperienced 
teachers are actively recruited to train America's future teachers! It 
is no wonder that American education has lost its footing on the 
shifting sands of fads and theories. PhD research papers abound, as 
each tries to outdo the next.

I confronted one such theorist at Michigan State University. He had 
made up a flyer to advertise the graduate class that he would be 
teaching. On the flyer he explained that the outcome of the class would 
be that the students would know about a lot of different theories of 
reading. I acted naïve and explained that I wanted to learn how to 
teach reading so I was wondering if his class would provide me with the 
skills I would need. He danced around my question, never answering it. 
He knew full well that I would waste my time and my money, yet be 
unable, at the completion of the class, to teach a nonreader of any age 
how to read.

Graduate degrees are given for the study and research of theories (pet 
or otherwise). In all likelihood, a teacher with a master's degree in 
Reading will still lack the skills and knowledge necessary to 
effectively do the job for which such teachers are certified, recruited 
and hired. Still, the certification process, as well as NCLB, refuses 
to acknowledge that literacy is the cornerstone of education; which is 
the foundation of scholarship; which is the basis of intelligent, 
logical thought and decision making.

Instead of asking the only question that matters, NCLB flounders in 
ever-widening circles of failure and rights violations, fruitlessly 
searching for potential demons to exorcise: Physical education 
teachers; Physics majors; Career counselors; Early childhood teachers… 
On and on the search goes – at all levels; throughout all subject 
areas; losing all effectiveness, and most certainly all focus, in that 
process.

There is only one question!

"Does your school insure that 996 out of every 1000 students are 
literate prior to the completion of third grade?"

One question – yet fifty-one departments of education; scores of 
colleges of education; thousands of school districts; are unable to 
pass the most important test of all.

Unless foolish and progressive (a misnomer if ever there was one) fads 
are thrown out of schools, and teachers return to the explicit and 
accurate teaching of phonics, any attempt to save the schools will be 
meaningless rhetoric. Until the first weeks of school, at every grade 
level, in every building, are used to teach reading until 996 of every 
1000 children are literate enough to be successful in all other areas 
of study, all else is a sham.

The future of America is at stake, yet the Fascist educational 
establishment is uninterested in actually educating the populace. Our 
schools educate for ignorance. The deck has long been stacked against 
teaching children to read early and well.

Remember…Thomas Jefferson said that if a nation expects to be ignorant 
and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and 
never will be, and prepare for the end of America as a sovereign, 
civilized and free country.



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