SYSTEMATIC CHANGE TO ACHIEVE SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

Whose Knowledge Counts?

Ken Goodman

NRC Ft Worth 12/2/2010

 

Who remembers an NRC meeting_-was it 1994? -when everybody was buzzing about an article that had just appeared in Atlantic Monthly. The author, Arthur Levine, declared phonics was proven science and whole language was anti science led by guru Ken Goodman. I made a prediction then that this man stream magazine taking this line was a harbinger of something that could engulf us all.

 

Only a short while later , the Reading Wars were declared. I was getting two or three calls a week from national magazines and big and little newspapers. Their stories were already written but the editor wanted a quote from me in defense of whole language. There followed two national panels, many state laws notably in California and Texas, The Reading Excellence act championed by an Ohio Congressman named Boehner and Bill Clinton. And the Reading First program a part of NLCB backed by Bush 2 and Ted Kennedy and George Miller, liberal Democrats. And now we have Race to the top. Walter Dean Myers, at a NCTE luncheon presented an allegory. Two African American adolescents, boy and girl, encourage each other to compete in a race. If you finish the race there are wonderful foods that you get. But every time they are ready they discover that the rules have changed. The bar has been raised. So the current administration is turning fiction to fact. They are raising the bar in the Race to the top.

It took me some time to figure out that “reading wars”had nothing to with reading. A crisis was manufactured ( as David Berliner puts it) in reading to achieve a different goal: destroying public confidence in public education and privatizing our schools.

 

So in addressing our topic Systematic Change to Organize Schools for Improvement I would like to be talking about my comprehensive model of making sense of print, about EMMA research in which we combine eye tracking and miscue analysis, and how to support learners in joining the literacy club ( as Frank Smith puts it) But school improvement in modern America isn’t a matter of what we know.

 

 

 In the time of Galileo and Copernicus the only knowledge worth attending to was not even in the holy books but the official dogma of the church in interpreting the holy scriptures. Copernicus waited till he was dying to publish. Galileo published his last work in secret because their science and its theoretical explanation challenged that dogma. And regardless of its truth knowledge which challenged the dogma was heresy.

 

I live in a state where the Secretary of State is required to see a birth certificate before putting Obama on the ballot in 2012, where it’s legal to carry a gun without a license even into schools, and the law intended to put undocumented aliens in jail was funded by the private company that runs the prisons they would be housed in at public expense.

 

In the context of 21^st century America all that we have learned about literacy through our research and the theory we have built from it are less valued than the concepts of literacy that serve the political and economic purposes of those who have the power to control the decision making of federal state and local politicians. And the reason those concepts are valued has nothing to do with literacy.

 

The law of the land in education is NCLB now four years overdue for renewal. And the end of days for education , 2014, is looming . In that year all students in American public schools must be proficient in reading, math and science. In Lake Woebegone they only have to be above average.

 

And nothing I see in the proposals to amend or replace that law values knowledge. The defnitions and mandates enacted as law or proposed as law are part of the pedagogy of the absurd. Absurdity is legally framed as Scientifically based reading research . Sound research becomes anti-science by law. Nonsense becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes nonsense . One of the most important approaches to curriculum in vogue today is Response to Intervention, which is nothing more than trial and error. You try an intervention and if it works that’s what the learners needed. But why did work? Who says it worked? And what exactly does work mean?

 

Serious claims about the effectiveness of Reading First were made based on DIBLES scores. And when you get Dave Pearson, Jay Samuels, Dick Allington, and Roger Farr and Ken Goodman all agreeing , DIBELS must be a terrible test.

 

But every teacher in New Mexico has a palm pilot that sends DIBELS scores to the state capitol and the University of Oregon- at a dollar a throw And kindergarten kids all over the country are being labeled as reading failures the first week of kindergarten because they couldn’t get enough letters identified or pictures matched with sounds in one minute. Not to mention sounding out a nonsense trigraph in three seconds.

 

The World Bank and US AID have been promoting EGRA (Early grade reading assessment) which is a Dibels look alike but in the colonial and indigenous languages in Africa, Latin America and Asia. What research knowledge went into testing kids in an African village with nonsense in Xhosa or Swahili?

 

The Inspector General of DOE published reports of scandalous conflicts of interest in forcing states to modify their Reading First proposals to use materials and tests developed by the reviewers and not only have none of the perpetrators been prosecuted but they are still earning millions. And teachers everywhere are forced to conform to the absurdities illegally mandated.

 

The Manhattan Institute says:

 

If Doherty’s sin was to lean on a state education agency or two to promote a reading program backed by science over one that wasn’t, well, that’s just what the RF legislation intended. At $1 billion per year, RF, ... accounts for just 2 percent of federal education spending. Yet this program for lifting reading achievement, always the apple of George W. Bush’s eye, is already delivering promising results.(City Journal, Winter 2007)

 

Diane Ravitch, once a staunch supporter of NCLB now says:

 

Under NCLB, the federal government was dictating ineffectual remedies, which had no track record of success. Neither Congress nor the U.S. Department of Education knows how to fix low performing schools…

 

Let us face the reality: Systematic Change to Organize Schools for Improvement is not currently possible. Knowledge cannot make a difference in and of itself. Educational decision making is political. And as the last election demonstrated our politics have become totally amoral. Winning is what it’s all about regardless of whether it took lies, distortions, and gross misrepresentations or massive spending of anonymously donated money now permitted by our highest court.

 

Ironically the de facto black list of ideas and those that advocate them has made the research community realize that we had more in common than we thought. Though we differed on some minor and major aspects of literacy we were moving toward some broad agreement on what literacy is, how it is learned and how best to support learners in becoming literate. 

 

As literacy researchers we have an obligation to stand up and work for respect for knowledge and truth. If we want the knowledge we produce to be valued, if we want science to be valued over nonsense. If we care about what is done to teachers and kids in the name of science then we have to become political. As individuals and through our professional organizations, we have to use the political system as they have used it to coopt and marginalize us.

 

There are many courageous professional, informed teachers, teacher educators and administrators who are not afraid to put the best knowledge to work. They need our support. I remain an optimist. Over time wisdom prevails over nonsense, truth over falsehood. Good research drives out bad. Together we can recognize our responsibility to join the fight to make knowledge count.