
{"id":5345,"date":"2009-04-02T06:46:08","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T14:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=5345"},"modified":"2009-04-02T06:46:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T14:46:08","slug":"it-may-be-cruel-but-it-ain%e2%80%99t-unusual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/04\/02\/it-may-be-cruel-but-it-ain%e2%80%99t-unusual\/","title":{"rendered":"It may be cruel but it ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t unusual"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Steve Peha<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Academic genocide.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how Judge Howard Manning characterized the performance of the Halifax County school district last month. Harsh language to say the least, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure the judge didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t toss it around lightly. But as strong as this turn of phrase may be, the situation it describes is all too common in our country: entire school districts, many in rural areas, with abysmal academic performances.<\/p>\n<p>Currently there are over 3,500 schools in the U.S. that have failed to meet the No Child Left Behind\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s (NCLB) Annual Yearly Progress requirement for seven years in a row. If you add to that the even larger numbers of schools who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve failed just six or five or four years in a row, you can imagine possibly tens of thousands of situations where the term \u00e2\u20ac\u0153academic genocide\u00e2\u20ac\u009d might apply.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The real tragedy here is not the number of schools doing so poorly but how easy it might be to help them. I say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153might\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because helping schools like these requires those who work in them to trade in their traditional notions of teaching and learning for contemporary practices that are foreign to them.<\/p>\n<p>The good news, if there is any, is that virtually all troubled schools have the same problem: poor literacy instruction.<\/p>\n<p>Literacy is the foundation of school success. But kids in troubled schools rarely start out with a strong foundation. The culprit here, in many cases, is publisher-supplied programmed instruction. Rather than using the latest information about how to teach reading and writing effectively, teachers blindly follow a textbook-based program, and even sometimes lesson-by-lesson scripts.<\/p>\n<p>This kind of traditional teaching has two main drawbacks: teachers pay more attention to their programs than they do to their pupils, and everyone ends up having to do the same thing, the same way, at the same time, on the same day. Differentiation, which research tells us is key to success, is almost impossible, and therefore rarely attempted.<\/p>\n<p>Another problem with publisher-supplied curricula is that writing gets short shrift. Writing is essential to a child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s language development and must be given just as much time as reading. But many teachers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like to teach writing because they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t good writers themselves, and they have never learned to teach writing well because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always relied on publisher-supplied resources that push writing to the side. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s if they attempt to tackle it all.<\/p>\n<p>Virtually everything at school depends on a student\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to read and write. And literacy is even more crucial as kids hit middle and high school. At many troubled schools, more than half of the entering high schoolers are already more than two years below grade level. How can they tackle the demands of social studies, science and math if they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read the content?<\/p>\n<p>In my career as an education consultant, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll bet I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve visited more than 100 schools where literacy instruction is so poor, and resulting student literacy rates are so low, that a term like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153academic genocide\u00e2\u20ac\u009d might be applicable. What has always fascinated me about these schools is that everyone in them is aware of the problem; that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usually why they hire me. But when I provide training, materials and classroom demonstrations in more effective contemporary practices, teachers and administrators act surprised. Does my practice differ from theirs? Yes, it does; often dramatically. Is there work involved in learning a new way of teaching? Yes, there is; often a lot.<\/p>\n<p>This is where we get to the heart of education reform. The practices we need to implement are well known and well documented. But the majority of teachers in our country don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to use them. And the majority of principals don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to require them. On a certain level, this is understandable. Change is hard. And dramatic change is even harder. But when we as a nation bought into standards and testing and NCLB, we bought into the idea of dramatic change. Given the way our laws work, it was inevitable that many schools would be unsuccessful.<\/p>\n<p>For schools that reach the lower rungs of NCLB, an uncertain fate awaits. Technically, these schools can be turned over to the state and reorganized. But in these reorganizations, one set of ineffective practices is often replaced with another. Results may improve slightly in the short run but they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make the grade in the long run.<\/p>\n<p>The part we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re missing in all of this is that changing the way a school works means changing the way teachers teach. This is especially true with literacy. Without a sound approach to literacy, students have no more chance of success in a reorganized school than they had before.<\/p>\n<p><em>Steve Peha is president of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., a K-12 education consultancy based in Carrboro.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Steve Peha \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Academic genocide.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how Judge Howard Manning characterized the performance of the Halifax County school district last month. Harsh language to say the least, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure the judge didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t toss it around lightly. But as strong as this turn of phrase may be, the situation it describes is all too common&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5346,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5345\/revisions\/5346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}