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velvetpageA few years ago, when taglines were all the rage, there was one that always made me a little bit sad. It read, "Hukt on fonicks werkd fer me!"
Well, it's happening in my school, and in others around Ontario.
Here's what happened. Under Mike Harris, our unlamented former premier, EQAO tests were created for grades three, six, and nine. It stands for "Education quality and accountability," but it's really an excuse to test kids on developmentally-inappropriate and culturally-specific items of the new "rigorous" curriculum. I've mentioned my dislike of this testing before, and my opinion hasn't changed. Even if the tests were valid, which they aren't, the uses to which the test scores are put would invalidate them entirely.
Instead of being used to evaluate each student's needs and program to meet those needs, the tests are used to rank individual schools. A brief comparison of schools based on a few criteria reveals an unsurprising trend. Most schools in rich, English-speaking neighbourhoods do well. Schools in low-income and high-immigrant neighbourhoods do poorly. Rarely do the lines cross, though it does happen. Because of the culturally-loaded questions and too-high language levels that the test demands, ESL and underprivileged kids are almost doomed from the start, at least on the grade three test. Many ESL students, especially those from well-off families, will catch up by grade six, and many will start to surpass their peers by grade nine. But grade three is too soon for a kid who didn't start speaking English until junior kindergarten.
As the rankings came out, year after year, people started to wonder what the teachers in those poorly-ranked schools were doing wrong. This was the first mistake, in my opinion: while certainly some responsibility for student success has to lie with teachers, not all of it does, and this test doesn't adjust for other factors well enough to measure teacher performance. But the provincial government bought into the near-universal trend toward teacher accountability, and made a promise: they were going to set the goal of having 75% of students at all grade levels, meeting the Ministry standard of a level 3 (roughly equivalent to a B) within a certain time frame. In order to achieve this goal, they put in place several teacher-training programs to teach educators how to teach reading, writing, and math. The first of those programs has been in place about five years now. It was the Literacy Improvement Project, and it was huge. It was also very good. It involved influxes of cash to schools with low test scores, cash that was used for in-servicing teachers, setting up levelled book rooms, improving school libraries, and generally improving the teaching of literacy throughout the schools in question. This program was working. It raised our test scores by about ten percent, and the long-term effects have been even better.
But raising our scores ten percent wasn't good enough. It still left us with scores well below that magic 75% number. There are many reasons for this, but the three biggest are incredibly easy to recognize within minutes of walking through the door: we have a high ESL population, a low socio-economic level overall, and a very small pool of students. In any given year, there are around thirty grade threes taking the test. Two years ago, 55% of kids reached the goal; last year, only 39% did. Why? Because we had a higher percentage of probably-LD but not-yet-diagnosed kids than we had had the year before, and they brought the scores down. It's impossible to get a representative sample when there are so few kids taking the test.
So our school was offered the opportunity to become a "turnaround school." This meant that experts from the Ministry of Education came in, evaluated the teachers, and then spent an absolute fortune teaching them how to better teach literacy. They came in, they evaluated, they stressed out the primary teachers (the junior teachers were not involved, because it's only our grade three scores that this team is worried about - the middle school down the road can worry about the grade six scores.) And they found that the teaching was not the problem. Because of the literacy improvement project which our school had been doing for two years already at that point, our teachers knew what they were doing. The problem was the high ESL population and the low life experience of the kids we had. But our primary teachers agreed to become part of the turnaround project anyway, because of the wealth of resources we would get as a part of it. And I must say, we have the best book room in the city. We don't lack for literacy resources.
Yesterday, our primary teachers were out at another turnaround meeting. (They pull them all out of class on the same day, leaving a team of supply teachers covering all the primary classes, and even a supply principal. One wonders if having their regular teachers for that one day a month would do the kids more good than having their routine disrupted like this.) They were told that the director of the board had been by the day before (which they already knew - talk about a royal visit!) because there was talk of "resistance" to the turnaround project in the school, and he wanted to see what was going on.
Here's where we get to the meaty bit.
The resistance stemmed from one of our grade one teacher's comments at an earlier turnaround meeting. She had tested her kids' reading and discovered that the turnaround methods weren't working. It was January, and her kids couldn't decode simple texts any better than they'd been able to do at the end of kindergarten. So she had put the shared reading, shared writing, modelled reading, and all the jargon aside for a few weeks, and she'd gone back to teaching what she saw as the basics: phonics, spelling, word families, rhyming words, and other similar strategies for building sight vocabulary and decoding skills. After all, you have to decode a word before you can figure out what it means, right?
Apparently not.
They were told that all word-level activities need to be pulled out of the reading they're doing in class. You need to teach the word "cat"? Find a book about cats, and point out the word. Pull spelling words directly from reading material. Teach phonics as the words come up in the reading material, and so forth. Here's the real gem: use comprehension techniques as a scaffold for decoding. Anyone else see the problem with that? They're telling primary teachers, grade one teachers, that comprehension has to come BEFORE decoding. They have it backwards.
This is the new generation of Whole Language, the trend from the eighties that was totally discredited long before I started teaching. It doesn't work. So why are all these so-called reading experts telling our teachers to do things they ought to know don't work?
It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but then I got it. These people are experts at reading, and their expertise is legitimate. But it wasn't gained by studying the learning processes of small children. It was gained by observing and breaking down what good readers do when they read. Think about it. You, my learned readers, probably do exactly that. You know more or less what you expect to see in a sentence, and you're using that understanding of your subject matter and context to predict what you'll see next. Then you're reading, not to decode words as a way to understand them, but to decode them as a way to confirm the understanding you already had (or almost.) You're scaffolding decoding from comprehension. (It should be noted that good readers aren't doing very much traditional decoding at all - they're working from a huge bank of sight vocabulary, and almost never read more than the first few letters and the last few of any word. But that's an issue for another day.)
So the reading experts are trying to teach kids to do what good readers do. That's reasonable, and I've certainly learned a lot about teaching reading at the junior level from their work. It makes sense at the junior level, because most kids come to grade four already able to decode fairly well. They need to work on many levels of comprehension, and I can do that by showing them how to get deeper into the text.
The problem is that they haven't actually shown how good readers learned to do what they do. Our grade one teachers don't want to know that a good grade eight reader is operating from a huge bank of sight words and rarely decodes any word thoroughly anymore. They want to know what that grade eight student was doing seven years ago, to become a good reader. They want to know the process. Did they learn phonetically? Did they skip the phonetic stage and go straight to sight words, as many early readers do? When did their higher-level comprehension strategies start to develop? What were their teachers doing to encourage that development? Did spelling taught the traditional way benefit them? What about word families, rhyming words, homophones, and other tricks for remembering specific words out of context? Most importantly, which things went right over their heads at the time, only to be developed later, when it was developmentally appropriate - that is, which teaching strategies were a waste of time at that age?
And while the turnaround experts steadfastly refuse to admit that every single primary teacher in the turnaround schools is wrong, and this is in fact going to work, the teachers themselves are faced with a very serious consequence. They could face disciplinary measures if all of their kids fail to improve on their reading tests. If a class of twenty kids all fail to make any headway in grade one, then clearly something is wrong. I'm not disputing that. But the most likely source of that problem is the procedures espoused by the turnaround team themselves - the ones that do not allow teaching of phonics, spelling, word families, or other out-of-context reading activities. In other words, teachers are most likely to fail when they are following instructions exactly. But no one will believe they're following instructions. I heard that myself from my principal a week ago. Her opinion is that our teachers aren't doing everything they're supposed to be doing, because if they were, the test scores would be coming up. If the test scores stay low, the higher-ups at the board are going to blame the teachers for not following all the steps/procedures/teaching methods/jargon that they suggested - even if they have been.
Now, these teachers probably won't find themselves out on the street, unless they have the misfortune to be in their first two years of teaching and get a principal who expects a high level of expertise from them in spite of that. Most of them will retain teaching positions. But the results are already being felt. Teachers who are outspoken about their concerns are being moved out of their preferred grades against their will. In one school, a grade one teacher was moved to grade five (taking her entirely out of the turnaround process into a grade two years older than anything she's taught before.) In another, a grade two teacher was moved to half-time library, half-time phys. ed. I'm expecting the most outspoken of our grade one teachers to find herself with a 2/3 split, separated from her colleagues in a room outside the primary area of the school. Teachers involved in the turnaround project are jumping ship left, right, and centre, desperately trying to get out of situations that are going from bad to worse. The result: the turnaround schools, which are supposedly on a three-year program to improve, are going to be starting almost fresh in year three, with a whole new crop of teachers, many of whom have never taught primary before (because people who know what's going on are going to avoid those jobs like the plague.) All the training those teachers have received will either be wasted on a job that won't make use of it, or it will go to benefit a school that has the good sense not to push their teachers into nervous breakdowns. And the turnaround schools, which were disadvantaged in many ways from the outset, will lose that expertise. They'll lose the continuity of having teachers in one place for a span of several years. They'll lose the impetus to scaffold new successes off of old ones. They'll lose whatever headway they've made, in every area except one, and that's the resources they got out of the deal.
They've taken a good idea, and made it so stressful, so intensive, and so demoralizing, that it's going to do only a small fraction of the good it could have done.
Well, it's happening in my school, and in others around Ontario.
Here's what happened. Under Mike Harris, our unlamented former premier, EQAO tests were created for grades three, six, and nine. It stands for "Education quality and accountability," but it's really an excuse to test kids on developmentally-inappropriate and culturally-specific items of the new "rigorous" curriculum. I've mentioned my dislike of this testing before, and my opinion hasn't changed. Even if the tests were valid, which they aren't, the uses to which the test scores are put would invalidate them entirely.
Instead of being used to evaluate each student's needs and program to meet those needs, the tests are used to rank individual schools. A brief comparison of schools based on a few criteria reveals an unsurprising trend. Most schools in rich, English-speaking neighbourhoods do well. Schools in low-income and high-immigrant neighbourhoods do poorly. Rarely do the lines cross, though it does happen. Because of the culturally-loaded questions and too-high language levels that the test demands, ESL and underprivileged kids are almost doomed from the start, at least on the grade three test. Many ESL students, especially those from well-off families, will catch up by grade six, and many will start to surpass their peers by grade nine. But grade three is too soon for a kid who didn't start speaking English until junior kindergarten.
As the rankings came out, year after year, people started to wonder what the teachers in those poorly-ranked schools were doing wrong. This was the first mistake, in my opinion: while certainly some responsibility for student success has to lie with teachers, not all of it does, and this test doesn't adjust for other factors well enough to measure teacher performance. But the provincial government bought into the near-universal trend toward teacher accountability, and made a promise: they were going to set the goal of having 75% of students at all grade levels, meeting the Ministry standard of a level 3 (roughly equivalent to a B) within a certain time frame. In order to achieve this goal, they put in place several teacher-training programs to teach educators how to teach reading, writing, and math. The first of those programs has been in place about five years now. It was the Literacy Improvement Project, and it was huge. It was also very good. It involved influxes of cash to schools with low test scores, cash that was used for in-servicing teachers, setting up levelled book rooms, improving school libraries, and generally improving the teaching of literacy throughout the schools in question. This program was working. It raised our test scores by about ten percent, and the long-term effects have been even better.
But raising our scores ten percent wasn't good enough. It still left us with scores well below that magic 75% number. There are many reasons for this, but the three biggest are incredibly easy to recognize within minutes of walking through the door: we have a high ESL population, a low socio-economic level overall, and a very small pool of students. In any given year, there are around thirty grade threes taking the test. Two years ago, 55% of kids reached the goal; last year, only 39% did. Why? Because we had a higher percentage of probably-LD but not-yet-diagnosed kids than we had had the year before, and they brought the scores down. It's impossible to get a representative sample when there are so few kids taking the test.
So our school was offered the opportunity to become a "turnaround school." This meant that experts from the Ministry of Education came in, evaluated the teachers, and then spent an absolute fortune teaching them how to better teach literacy. They came in, they evaluated, they stressed out the primary teachers (the junior teachers were not involved, because it's only our grade three scores that this team is worried about - the middle school down the road can worry about the grade six scores.) And they found that the teaching was not the problem. Because of the literacy improvement project which our school had been doing for two years already at that point, our teachers knew what they were doing. The problem was the high ESL population and the low life experience of the kids we had. But our primary teachers agreed to become part of the turnaround project anyway, because of the wealth of resources we would get as a part of it. And I must say, we have the best book room in the city. We don't lack for literacy resources.
Yesterday, our primary teachers were out at another turnaround meeting. (They pull them all out of class on the same day, leaving a team of supply teachers covering all the primary classes, and even a supply principal. One wonders if having their regular teachers for that one day a month would do the kids more good than having their routine disrupted like this.) They were told that the director of the board had been by the day before (which they already knew - talk about a royal visit!) because there was talk of "resistance" to the turnaround project in the school, and he wanted to see what was going on.
Here's where we get to the meaty bit.
The resistance stemmed from one of our grade one teacher's comments at an earlier turnaround meeting. She had tested her kids' reading and discovered that the turnaround methods weren't working. It was January, and her kids couldn't decode simple texts any better than they'd been able to do at the end of kindergarten. So she had put the shared reading, shared writing, modelled reading, and all the jargon aside for a few weeks, and she'd gone back to teaching what she saw as the basics: phonics, spelling, word families, rhyming words, and other similar strategies for building sight vocabulary and decoding skills. After all, you have to decode a word before you can figure out what it means, right?
Apparently not.
They were told that all word-level activities need to be pulled out of the reading they're doing in class. You need to teach the word "cat"? Find a book about cats, and point out the word. Pull spelling words directly from reading material. Teach phonics as the words come up in the reading material, and so forth. Here's the real gem: use comprehension techniques as a scaffold for decoding. Anyone else see the problem with that? They're telling primary teachers, grade one teachers, that comprehension has to come BEFORE decoding. They have it backwards.
This is the new generation of Whole Language, the trend from the eighties that was totally discredited long before I started teaching. It doesn't work. So why are all these so-called reading experts telling our teachers to do things they ought to know don't work?
It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but then I got it. These people are experts at reading, and their expertise is legitimate. But it wasn't gained by studying the learning processes of small children. It was gained by observing and breaking down what good readers do when they read. Think about it. You, my learned readers, probably do exactly that. You know more or less what you expect to see in a sentence, and you're using that understanding of your subject matter and context to predict what you'll see next. Then you're reading, not to decode words as a way to understand them, but to decode them as a way to confirm the understanding you already had (or almost.) You're scaffolding decoding from comprehension. (It should be noted that good readers aren't doing very much traditional decoding at all - they're working from a huge bank of sight vocabulary, and almost never read more than the first few letters and the last few of any word. But that's an issue for another day.)
So the reading experts are trying to teach kids to do what good readers do. That's reasonable, and I've certainly learned a lot about teaching reading at the junior level from their work. It makes sense at the junior level, because most kids come to grade four already able to decode fairly well. They need to work on many levels of comprehension, and I can do that by showing them how to get deeper into the text.
The problem is that they haven't actually shown how good readers learned to do what they do. Our grade one teachers don't want to know that a good grade eight reader is operating from a huge bank of sight words and rarely decodes any word thoroughly anymore. They want to know what that grade eight student was doing seven years ago, to become a good reader. They want to know the process. Did they learn phonetically? Did they skip the phonetic stage and go straight to sight words, as many early readers do? When did their higher-level comprehension strategies start to develop? What were their teachers doing to encourage that development? Did spelling taught the traditional way benefit them? What about word families, rhyming words, homophones, and other tricks for remembering specific words out of context? Most importantly, which things went right over their heads at the time, only to be developed later, when it was developmentally appropriate - that is, which teaching strategies were a waste of time at that age?
And while the turnaround experts steadfastly refuse to admit that every single primary teacher in the turnaround schools is wrong, and this is in fact going to work, the teachers themselves are faced with a very serious consequence. They could face disciplinary measures if all of their kids fail to improve on their reading tests. If a class of twenty kids all fail to make any headway in grade one, then clearly something is wrong. I'm not disputing that. But the most likely source of that problem is the procedures espoused by the turnaround team themselves - the ones that do not allow teaching of phonics, spelling, word families, or other out-of-context reading activities. In other words, teachers are most likely to fail when they are following instructions exactly. But no one will believe they're following instructions. I heard that myself from my principal a week ago. Her opinion is that our teachers aren't doing everything they're supposed to be doing, because if they were, the test scores would be coming up. If the test scores stay low, the higher-ups at the board are going to blame the teachers for not following all the steps/procedures/teaching methods/jargon that they suggested - even if they have been.
Now, these teachers probably won't find themselves out on the street, unless they have the misfortune to be in their first two years of teaching and get a principal who expects a high level of expertise from them in spite of that. Most of them will retain teaching positions. But the results are already being felt. Teachers who are outspoken about their concerns are being moved out of their preferred grades against their will. In one school, a grade one teacher was moved to grade five (taking her entirely out of the turnaround process into a grade two years older than anything she's taught before.) In another, a grade two teacher was moved to half-time library, half-time phys. ed. I'm expecting the most outspoken of our grade one teachers to find herself with a 2/3 split, separated from her colleagues in a room outside the primary area of the school. Teachers involved in the turnaround project are jumping ship left, right, and centre, desperately trying to get out of situations that are going from bad to worse. The result: the turnaround schools, which are supposedly on a three-year program to improve, are going to be starting almost fresh in year three, with a whole new crop of teachers, many of whom have never taught primary before (because people who know what's going on are going to avoid those jobs like the plague.) All the training those teachers have received will either be wasted on a job that won't make use of it, or it will go to benefit a school that has the good sense not to push their teachers into nervous breakdowns. And the turnaround schools, which were disadvantaged in many ways from the outset, will lose that expertise. They'll lose the continuity of having teachers in one place for a span of several years. They'll lose the impetus to scaffold new successes off of old ones. They'll lose whatever headway they've made, in every area except one, and that's the resources they got out of the deal.
They've taken a good idea, and made it so stressful, so intensive, and so demoralizing, that it's going to do only a small fraction of the good it could have done.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 01:39 am (UTC)I am another "Hamilton Teacher" ... good resources to have!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 01:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 11:02 am (UTC)I have mostly been teaching at Pauline Johnson & Cardinal Heights
Did my placements at Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Elizabeth Bagshaw last year.
Where do you teach?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 04:20 am (UTC)I think you know I volunteer at my son's school. Second grade. Sometimes I am sent to the library so the kids can practice reading aloud with me.
When they make a mistake, should I correct it or just keep going? Usually it is simple, it is a similar word in sound and meaning, doesn't change the meaning of the paragraph or sentence really, but isn't what was said.
Or is it more complex than that, and is the answer 'it depends'? Because that is ok too. But if it was an easy 'always let them go' or 'always gently correct them', that would be nice to know.
This post made me think of it. The school is an at risk school, and they are trying to boost their reading scores so even though they have reading teachers, if the opportunity comes up to practice reading, I'm another warm body to listen.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 10:29 am (UTC)That said, the reading tests do not make any difference between miscues that don't affect meaning and those that do (which IMO is pretty silly, but anyway.) The tests expect 97% accuracy, which allows for about six mistakes per page of text in a novel. If they're making fewer miscues than that, meaningful or not, don't sweat it; if they're making more, get them to reread.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 12:27 pm (UTC)That's why I prefer to cut stuff out, set up packages, photocopy, staple, and so on. I'm not so responsible for a kid's education then. It's just a little bit of reading but I am so bad at TEACHING.
Seriously if you came to my house now and wanted to know how to make something I know how to make, I would be unable to express it clearly, and you might even leave without any more knowledge than you came in with.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 05:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 05:07 pm (UTC)I know you've said before that your principal is...um...not great, and I think that probably even compounds all the other issues that go along with this. They need people like you in administration or at the Ministry--someone who has BEEN through the process and knows what works and what doesn't. My mom always says that it's so sad that so many administrators were never teachers, so they have no idea what it's really like to be IN the classroom.
Also, you're writing is frickin amazing. You're so capitvating, no matter what you write about. I'm jealous.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-26 11:18 pm (UTC)Which makes one wonder how they manage to get so many total morons as principals.
And thank you. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-27 12:52 am (UTC)Wow. It IS surprising how you get so many morons!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:54 pm (UTC)