As headlined, "sad judgment" is where you drop the e used for judge. A rule worth knowing. But on a cosmic scale of things - BFD.
Is such a rule drilling thing where you emphasize via rule drilling practice an approach making sense for how you motivate the young to desire a lifetime of reading, to learn more and new things over the lifetime of each?
I.e., to become literate?
Steve Timmer has been asking that question in a range of postings; most recently, here and here; each via a header linking back, to earlier posting fleshing out his theses in clear detail. He has a trifecta of postings about "The Great Literacy Food Fight," laid out sequentially, here, here and here. Each has a header linking to other related posting.
Timmer's posting is so clearly interlinked by him that a late-entry reader can backtrack and reconstruct the entire thread of his thinking.
Quoting from the outset of his initial post of Feb. 21, 2023,
Proof of the bromide, “There is nothing new under the sun,” comes once again to the Minnesota Legislature in the form of the febrile cheerleading for something branded by the subsidiary of a private capital company as the Science of Reading. But it’s just phonics, dressed up in an expensive package. You can sell some people anything if it costs enough, and if you can sell it to legislators, you’re golden.
Before we can talk about what’s afoot, though, we need some background on what I call The Great Literacy Food Fight. Here’s a short video introduction to the Science of Reading.
If you watch the video, you’ll see that phonics has periodically reappeared with near-religious fervor in the debate on literacy and the best way to teach reading. In the last few years, it’s been back again, largely fueled by the company responsible for a (big surprise) pricey phonics program of instruction: LETRS®.
The literacy food fight goes back even further than the video suggests, back to Horace Mann, who is widely regarded as the father of public education in the United States.
Parenthetically, the “Common School” movement started by Mann obviously influenced the drafters of the Constitution in Minnesota to include the Education Clause, Article XIII, Section 1, which creates the obligation of the state to create and maintain a system of Common Schools: a universal, free basic education to all students in the state.
UNIFORM SYSTEM OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.
As I have noted elsewhere, the Education Clause is under assault.
Whole language vs. phonics
Mann was a proponent of the “whole language” school (so to speak) of teaching literacy.
So what are the “reading wars” and when did they start? They go back to the 1800s, when debate began about the best way to teach kids to read. Horace Mann, the influential educational reformer who was secretary of education in Massachusetts, argued against teaching the explicit sounds of each letter, arguing that students would then not learn to read for meaning and that they should first learn to read whole words.
A debate over emphasizing “phonics” or “whole language” has been voiced ever since — at least by scholars and policymakers, who often don’t bother to pay attention to what teachers are actually doing in the classroom.
The debate flared in 2013, when the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group created by a conservative think tank to diminish the influence of teacher education schools, published negative ratings of many of these institutions and attacked their literacy instruction.
Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
LETRS® is the newest wave in the Greatest Thing Ever in Education
The quote above is Valerie Strauss, writing in her column, The Answer Sheet, in the Washington Post a few years ago. She was introducing a piece by Rachael Gabriel that was included in the column. In it, Gabriel wrote this:
Instead of arming educators with tools to manage the complexity of literacy learning, we put them in the middle of a political, philosophical conflict with religious overtones. We first tell them there is one right way. Then, 10-15 years later, we tell them they’re getting new materials, schedules, expectations and “professional development” because something else is the one right way. Some individual educators braid together coherent understandings in the midst of volatility. Others do not.
This sounds a lot like a current bill in the Minnesota House, HF629.
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Well a couple of things. Timmer did not start by quoting the Bible, but he paraphrased Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New International Version)
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
The quote ends with a link to "The Read Act" introduced as HF629 where key language is mid-bill at line 3.4 et seq.
"Science of reading" means evidence-based reading instruction practices that address the acquisition of language, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling, fluency, vocabulary, oral language, and comprehension that can be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students.
The commissioner of education must make available to school districts and charter schools a list of approved literacy curricula that are based on the science of reading. The commissioner must, upon request, provide support to school districts seeking to implement an approved curriculum. A school district or charter school must use a literacy curriculum that has been approved by the commissioner.
[italics added] Mandatory and not discretionary language is used, suggesting bill sponsorship believes it would know better than educational professionals in the executive agency what is best, something called "science of language" described as phonics, and then other generic stuff.
Edelson is chief author, with this data
- Education: M.S.W., University of Minnesota
- Elected: 2018
- Term: 3rd
- Family: Married, spouse Brett, 3 children
Nothing was found online whether Rep. Edelson ever taught a day of school in her life, her having had, "a career as clinical outpatient mental health therapist, helping those experiencing trauma and struggling with mental illness lead their best lives." Clearly in that capacity she would have encountered people with limited literacy affecting their quality of life so that even if never teaching students she was aware of literacy being important, causing her bill authorship ambition, as she judged best.
Moreover her Wikipedia page notes, " Edelson has worked as a mental health therapist and served as a guardian ad litem in Hennepin County. She served on the Edina Public School Board Special Education Advisory Council and the Edina Race and Equity Working Group. Edelson also served as Edina's Human Rights and Relations Commissioner." Her spouse, Brett Edelson is reported online to be CEO, UnitedHealthcare of MN, ND & SD, having been with UnitedHealthcare since 2005 and now leading that medical insurance firm's team serving 900,000 members across these states.
So, moving on from such background facts, should you be motivated to kill a love of reading how might you bore students into causing such a death? One thing, by making teaching literacy a pain in the ass rote bunch of stuff to where it cannot help but be a big turnoff.
That exists. It is called phonics.
You do not focus on reading for its own joy, or for learning things you do not already know; indeed things you might never have thought of on your own, had you not read of it.
An example might be an intuitive but latent idea, crystalized by having read the thought that, "The law amazes, in that it equally treats the wealthy and the poor, in that neither is permitted to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, or to steal bread." And yes, I cannot remember which Frenchman first phrased it that way, nor do I say my "quote" is exact, but close enough to the gist, and the original was in French anyway, where what I read is the translation. Online. But such a tight phrasing, I might have stumbled around the gist of it, had I not read it.
Said another way - actual, real literacy put the crystalized thought in front of me.
Not phonics. But actual, real literacy. Not something rote you can drill students on ad nauseam (a term I learned from reading), but something with a heart to it.
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Surely profit seekers can form a program of "science of literacy" where phonics are drilled, and then tested for by the same profit seeker who formed (and set the price and sold) the teach-phonics bill of goods. Good to drill phonics. Kids will love it. And we've a test that will show those drilled - by how we measure "literacy" - test better in aggregate; for literacy skills.
These purveyors can be convincing, and a legislator could judge their product worth sponsorship as an educational public good. Even if it is not.
However, the Crabgrass viewpoint is phonics drilling and testing skill = BFD. Say it again. BFD. Surely not an end in itself.
Those gullible might buy into such a program, or those possibly with an agenda going unstated but strong, e.g., we are training children to become calm and happy workers over adulthood and not troublesome boat rockers, possibly being such an agenda.
But we know actions, not motives.
I read how Tip O'Neill cautioned, you do not question motives when you disagree with a colleague or person voted into political power with whom you need to coexist with civilly, you question judgement. Tip prospered in politics, we remember him years after he died, and setting teaching agendas at its root, is political.
I will not question motives. Just judgment.
Ideas can lead to rocking the boat, and a powerful faction of our people don't want their yachts to be rocked; or as George Carlin said in one routine, they want you to be smart enough to run the machines and keep the records straight, but they do not want you to think. They being the big club (and you ain't in it).
Rote skill is not congruent with imagination. The former can help the latter, but cannot replace it. Rote skill leads to no discontent with a status quo; imagination, figure out the distinction.
Imagination is served by a
lifetime joy of reading. Rote skill by practice and repetition, such as if required in a
low-pay low-status job. Where an ongoing quest for reading, for its own joy, is not required.
Rote skill is not belittled. Surgeons and carpenters both get better with practice.
Yet, if you can imagine such things as Medicare for All, free of insurance intermediaries' profiteering, but healthcare as a right and not a privilege, there exist powers that might not like that thought having public traction. As if imagining college being affordable could also rock boats.
Cataloging further examples might show diminishing returns, but a fertile, well read mind can have its time to think of more while knowing already of the concept "diminishing returns," it being intuitive, but also something we curious and imaginative adults have read about as a term convenient for encapsulating the intuition. Beyond any phonics, there are ideas. Our innate will to like ideas and to read new ones should not be bored out of us.
I recall hearing and also reading Leonard Cohen's phrasing:
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
There always is ambiguity in poetry, but there is also fundamental communication in a non-rote way, of an idea behind and within those words, and some might see them as boat rocking. Regardless of who the "we" is in the lyrics (you vs. Cohen might see a different or same grouping as the "we" under contemplation in his wording), literate ambiguity is not a bad thing. It is a thing sparking imagination, moving and speculative imagination, which we might never encounter if we go too much by rote, rather than being balanced and intentionally literate.
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As noted previously, Steve Timmer has written much that focuses upon literacy, what it is and is not, and he has most recently written:
Readers here know I’ve written about the Read Act many times, most recently here. The current draft of the bill would require the selection of up to five vendors of phonics curricula and up to three vendors of professional development programs on phonics for the existing teacher corps. HF2497 pencils in $40 million for the reimbursement of districts for the purchase of approved curricula, and $27 million for reimbursement for professional development expenditures, a gigantic sum.
Under the bill, an institute at the University of Minnesota, the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, or CAREI, is appointed to be a “partner” with the Minnesota Department of Education, for which CAREI will be paid $4.2 million.
Parenthetically, and before describing the partnership, note that legislature is telling the administration who, by name, to hire for a job. Picking vendors and consultants is ordinarily the administration’s job, and for good reasons. Imagine a legislature telling a governor who to hire as chief of staff. Directing a department who to hire is perhaps different in degree, but it isn’t different in essential kind.
What is CAREI supposed to do for its $4.2 million? It will assist the Department of Education in selecting and approving vendors of curricula and professional development. CAREI – not coincidentally – is a seller of phonics curricula and professional development programs. Here’s the problem:
The bill specifically provides that CAREI is under no disability to be one of the vendors chosen. It also exempts the choice of CAREI from the notice and competitive bidding requirements of Minnesota law.
Timmer gives the CAREI homepage link, https://carei.umn.edu/ and I went to their website and studied several pages. These pages are not particularly literate, not really any more so than, say, an online cooking recipe.
There is no compelling, memorable thing I found there. There is doublespeak, e.g., homepage:
Welcome
CAREI is a research center that serves as the link between research and practice in Minnesota schools, PreK-16, and other agencies interested in applied educational research. We are experts in research, evaluation, literacy, and assessment with a wealth of diverse and interrelated experience.
Our vision is to be the premier network hub that builds educators' data-based decision-making capacity through high quality technical assistance, professional learning, and program evaluation in education.
Commitment to Equity
We are committed to tackling injustices and embracing diversity by continuously engaging with principles of equity, antiracism, cultural responsiveness, and intersectionality. We seek to learn about, live out, and promote these principles in our work with educational programs and systems as applied researchers, evaluators, trainers, and coaches.
Services offered
We are working to close the gap between research and practice in Minnesota schools. Each project is tailored to the specific needs of each client and the program, context, or policy involved
Okay, advertising a product, like Budweiser does for its beer. Two links. One about learn more about "functional phonics" and the other about learn more about CARI.
1. The learn more about functional phonics linking uses empty buzzwords to tout their product, and links over to yet another page, to really learn more, ostensibly. If this latter page is literacy training in action, count me out. It uses much space and gimmickry to say NOTHING. For instance, tell me from looking through the sequence of pages, how does "functional" phonics differ from any other phonics, even from simple plain old phonics without any adjective claiming some vague but unstated differentiation.
Never mind the sizzle, get to the steak. What - wtf - is it? Why buy it?
You, reader, go through the pages, and tell me why the State of Minnesota should spend millions over something thusly "explained" to us.
2. The learn more about us https://carei.umn.edu/about-us link begins:
Our Mission and Vision
At CAREI, our vision is to be the premier network hub that builds educators' data-based decision-making capacity through high quality technical assistance, professional learning, and program evaluation in education. We work to improve the quality of education for all learners. As applied researchers and evaluators, we believe we can have an immediate impact on our communities. Accordingly, we listen to and work with our clients and partners to understand their experiences. We do this through these service offerings:
This reminds me of the saying, "Brevity is wit." What they say, in substance:
We offer services noted below, which we believe you will study, so without self-congratulatory rhetoric, these are: [... list]And then they include a footer saying exactly what they said, verbatim, on opening the homepage, "CAREI is a research center that serves as the link between research and practice in Minnesota schools PreK-16 and other agencies interested in applied educational research." And that is after, in opening the secondary page saying, "At CAREI, our vision is to be the premier network hub that builds educators' data-based decision-making capacity through high quality technical assistance, professional learning, and program evaluation in education," which also repeats verbatim something already said on the homepage.
"Repetition is wit?" No, that is not the saying. Brevity! Get to the point.
Who wrote that stuff, and where is the "literacy" to it? Keep repetition in mind if wanting to understand what they'd do to students - drill, drill again, how about a third time with things simplistic enough to have been mastered the first time.
BOTTOM LINE: If the intention is to bore young minds away from a love of reading, from actual literacy, toward rote phonics practicing over multiple k-12 grades to more likely than not kill interest in anything more exciting than rote learning while transferring the skill level of a software spelling checker, that goal can likely be met while spending wasting fewer millions of tax dollars then this legislation envisions.
Boring school stuff is nothing new, nothing innovative, and surely is not a "science." And it should not be super expensive. How do you better teach reading and engender a love of it and a will toward its practice throughout adult life? Not by phonics recitation-drilling in classes of thirty five pupils per one teacher. Not by gimmick phonics tarted up as "science of reading."
Bastardizing literacy in such a simplistic, false dressing insults intelligence needed among voters in the general public. Voters who'd ideally read up on the issues rather than sitting passively before a TV set watching voice-over negative advertising with creepy background music, cooked up by a political consultant level of "literacy," and then filling out a ballot.
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Update, two video segments courtesy of Steve Timmer; best viewed in sequence; here and then here. (NOTE: Each produced and posted by persons other than Timmer; links educating me to existence of each, from Timmer.)