2021 Medley #5 - Vouchers, Testing, and Reading

Vouchers, Testing, and Reading

VOUCHERS

Scholars show how to challenge voucher discrimination

How many ways can we say it? School choice is not about parents choosing the school for their child. It's about schools choosing which students to allow through their doors. Private schools get to choose their clients.

The law may state that private and religious schools must not discriminate in order to receive state funds, but the actual real-world actions of schools accepting vouchers shows that private schools can, and often do reject certain students based on various characteristics such as religion or sexual preference (or the sexual preference of their parents). Under other circumstances, this discrimination wouldn't be a problem. Religious schools should be allowed to require their teachers and students to follow certain theological teachings. However, it becomes a problem when public funds are used to further such discrimination.

The simple fact is that private schools, and religious schools in particular should not be allowed to use public funds because they are not required to accept all students. Public tax dollars should go to public schools which accept all students -- gay and straight, faithful and faithless, white or black. Using tax dollars to support religious schools that discriminate is contrary to the intent of the founders. Jefferson wrote,

...to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness...

Using tax dollars to support private and religious schools which discriminate based on religious beliefs is forcing taxpayers to pay for something they might not believe in. It's "sinful and tyrannical".

Green, the lead author, said supporters promote vouchers to expand opportunities for students and families. But, as the programs expand, state officials often enable them to deny those benefits to entire groups of students.

“Vouchers were sold as program that all could benefit from, but the anti-LGBT provisions give the lie to that statement,” Green said.

Voucher programs come in a variety of forms, but all provide ways for states to provide full or partial tuition funding to private schools for qualifying students. Indiana’s program, established in 2011, serves over 36,000 students in more than 300 private schools, nearly all of them religious schools, at a cost of $172.8 million. Lawmakers want to expand the program and extend it to upper-income families.

Vouchers Are About Abandoning Public Education, Not Freeing Parents

Public education is a public good, like roads, water systems, and libraries. It benefits everyone.

Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it's striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form.

Think of voucher programs this way.

The state announces, "We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child's education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we'll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck."

...Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community's.

TESTING

Lawmakers Backing Standardized Tests Should Practice What They Preach

Forcing students to waste time taking standardized tests this year (and, actually, any year) is absurd. It is a waste of taxpayers' money -- even more than during normal (aka non-pandemic) times.

Educators are scrambling to teach safely and most lawmakers stand aside unsure how to help.

We can’t figure out which students to assist, they say, without first giving them all a batch of standardized tests.

It’s absurd, like paramedics arriving at a car crash, finding one person in a pool of blood and another completely unscathed – but before they know which person needs first aid, they have to take everyone’s blood pressure.

I mean come on! We’re living through a global pandemic.

Nearly every single class has been majorly disrupted by it.

So just about every single student needs help – BUT SOMEHOW WE NEED DATA TO NARROW THAT DOWN!?

Our duly-elected decision-makers seem to be saying they can only make decisions based on a bunch of numbers.

Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing?

Following the pattern of previous Democratic and Republican administrations, the Biden administration's Secretary of Education has determined that the most important thing the Federal Government has to do for public schools throughout the country is force them to take wasteful standardized tests. Arne Duncan would be proud.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona insists that federally mandated standardized testing will go on as usual in this COVID-19 dominated year. While his decision feels particularly impractical, intrusive, complicated and disruptive in the midst of COVID-19, the decision is of much deeper concern for two reasons.

One would like to think that Dr. Cardona is familiar with the huge debate that has consumed education experts and also many parents who have been opting out for years now. But when Dr. Cardona explained why testing must go on as usual, he didn’t even bother to offer a rationale that addresses any of the reasons experts have insisted he should cancel the tests once again this year. Instead he said we need the tests so that the Department of Education can ensure that federal investment goes to the school districts that need it most. That is such a lovely thought, and if tests were designed and used to gauge needed investment in the poorest communities, it would be wonderful.

READING

The Reading Helper

Halfway through my career I moved out of my general education classroom and became, what Russ Walsh calls, a Reading Helper.

In this post, Walsh reminds us that the most important aspect of being a teacher is the relationship between teacher and student, not standardized tests...not state standards...not grades.

I have a teaching certificate that says I am a qualified Teacher of Reading, and Reading Specialist and Supervisor, but from the time I got a certain Valentine's Day card from a student in 1993 I have thought of myself as a Reading Helper. That card was from a second grade vulnerable reader named Danielle who had been my student since that September. The cover of the hand made card was full of many colored hearts and flowers and said, of course, "Happy Valentine's Day." Inside was a message that I will never forget and which has defined my work ever since: "Thank you for hleping me read. Love, Danielle" Yes, exactly, "hleping." Danielle still had some spelling reversals crop up from time to time. But the message could not have been clearer. I was being thanked for helping and it meant the world to me.

Why Do So Many Children Have Dyslexia? What is it Exactly?

The word “dyslexia” literally means “difficulty with written words”. In my experience -- more than forty years as a paraprofessional, teacher, and retiree volunteer -- there are as many different types of dyslexia as there are struggling readers — every child is different! Parents define it based on their own child’s (or children's) struggles. Teachers define it by what they've seen in their own isolated classrooms. I’ve watched arguements between parents and teachers exposing the conflict as “that’s dyslexia,” “No, this is dyslexia”. The arguments about reading programs are even worse. There is no one perfect program that works for every single student. There is no panacea.

Nancy Bailey is absolutely correct in this post, that we need to stop worrying so much about the label and find out what works for each individual child. If a parent wants to call their child’s struggles dyslexia, so be it, but we still need to figure out what works for the child.

This post is followed by an interesting discussion in the comments. Many of the comments prove the points that Bailey makes in her article.

It’s important to continue to raise questions about reading problems and to seek school programs that help children learn to read.

But we should also be asking why so many children present such problems when they show up to school.

No matter what causes reading problems in children or what the label, schools, and teachers must continue to provide students with the individual help they need. There is no one perfect reading program for all children. Schools need to provide rich reading environments and extra phonics for students who need it.

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One Size Does Not Fit All

More than four dozen literacy experts have signed on to a letter expressing concern over the lack of balance in PBS Newshour's segment about dyslexia.

Among the signers of the letter are Reading Hall of Fame members, Richard Allington, Pat Cunningham, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Michael Graves, Stephen Krashen, P. David Pearson, Gay Su Pinnell, David Reinking, and Barbara M. Taylor.

The entire letter can be found at Concern_letter_to_PBS.pdf and is listed with all signers.

One objection the signers have with the PBS episode is the assumption that there is only one way to teach reading that works for every child, and that other variables and individual characteristics of students are unimportant. The show also implies that America's teachers don't know how to teach reading, once again, misdirecting blame onto teachers for a lack of achievement among students.

There are a wide variety of out of school factors which could result in reading difficulties such as vision problems, lack of literacy experiences in the home, exposure to environmental toxins such as lead, and family trauma.

Dyslexia is defined differently in different places and by different people, so one single method of teaching reading is insufficient to cover all differences. Because of the confusion and differences in defining dyslexia, the American Psychiatric Association has removed dyslexia from it's Diagnostic Statistical Manual.

The letter goes into detail on these and other issues.

Paula Kerger, PBS, President and CEO
pakerger@pbs.org

Sara Just, Executive Producer, PBS NewsHour
viewermail@newshour.org

Dear Ms. Kerger and Ms. Just,

We, the undersigned, write to express concern about the PBS NewsHour segment on dyslexia, broadcast on April 30. As experienced senior scholars in the field of reading and literacy education, we found this segment to be inconsistent with the NewsHour’s stated aim of balanced and trusted reporting.

Our professional work is devoted to studying literacy and how it can be developed in schools to enrich the lives of all students. So, we well understand and share parents’ and others’ anguish and frustration when children are identified as experiencing reading difficulties. Competent reading and writing are fundamentally important in and out of school, and difficulties can shape children’s concepts of themselves as learners, while affecting virtually every aspect of their everyday experience.

Our concern is that the NewsHour received inadequate and incomplete scientific advice when producing the segment on dyslexia. The result perpetuates inaccuracies, misconceptions, and distortions related to reading, how it is taught, and the complexity of reading difficulties. It suggests erroneously that there is scientific certainty about dyslexia and how it should be addressed instructionally. In fact, the research evidence is equivocal and there is much room for debate about whether dyslexia is an identifiable condition, whether it can be reliably diagnosed, and whether there are instructional approaches that are uniquely effective in ameliorating it...

...We are particularly concerned about the dyslexia segment’s suggestion that a narrowly conceptualized instructional approach is unequivocally effective, not only for individuals categorized as dyslexic, but for all individuals learning to read. Such a suggestion perpetuates a view that there is a single approach guaranteed to transcend the incredible diversity of factors and individual characteristics that might explain why learning to read is easy for many but incredibly difficult for some. It is widely accepted that learning to read English texts entails instructional attention to sound-symbol correspondence and other phonemic aspects of reading. But, the amount and form of that attention, how it is balanced with other aspects of reading and learning to read such as motivation, and how it might deal with the orthographic irregularities of English spelling, cannot be reduced to a single, narrow, unquestioned approach. In particular, we worry that such a narrow view might divert teachers from attending to other scientifically based facets of good literacy pedagogy, such as attention to oral language, knowledge acquisition, motivation and self-efficacy, and sheer exposure to print. Again, such issues, in one form or another, have periodically blossomed into public controversies across decades and are often nurtured among the general public by shallow or misleading media reports such as the NewsHour’s segment.

We are also dismayed that the NewsHour segment implicitly questioned, even if unintentionally, the professionalism of teachers and American schools in regard to teaching reading. It was suggested that teachers were ignorant of or resistant to the scientific certainty of dyslexia and how reading can be effectively taught, not only to those children diagnosed with dyslexia, but to all children. Beyond the absence of such certainty, as we have explained above, the segment unfairly provided no opportunity for a rebuttal from qualified representatives of those groups. They could have pointed to a complementary body of scientific research that supports alternative explanations of reading difficulties and instructional approaches that have been shown to be effective for a wide range of students with reading difficulties. That lack of balance was exacerbated when the segment included emotional comments about how children’s needs were not being met...

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2017 Medley #29

Teaching, Privatization: Vouchers, 
DeVos's Attack on Special Education, Dyslexia, Screen Time as Textbooks

UNIQUE TO TEACHING?

Another Faux Teacher Memoir

Teachers are told how to teach by legislatures and are critiqued by pundits who apparently know everything about education because "they went to school." Do we see this sort of behavior in other professions?

• Are doctors told how to practice medicine by people who "know all about medicine" because they have been sick before?

• Do you automatically know how to handle 150 high school math students just because you have a degree in math? Are you able to present content in a way that students can understand just because you know that content?

• Would a chemistry major be allowed to dispense drugs at a pharmacy?

• Would an anatomy major be allowed to practice medicine at a local hospital or clinic?

• What other profession regularly has politicians and policy makers determine how they should do their jobs? Is a dentist forced to use methods not backed by research?

• The majority of Americans know nearly 100% of the content taught by early childhood educators. Because you have internalized one-to-one correspondence or the concept of "story," does that mean you can help preschoolers develop those skills and concepts? Since you know arithmetic are you automatically able to explain the process to 8 and 9 year olds in a way they will understand?

Teaching is more than just imparting knowledge. A teacher should understand learning theory, child development, and pedagogy. A college graduate with a degree in pre-law can't hope to learn how to teach in a five week course as completely as someone who has had 3 and a half years of education training, plus a semester of student teaching.

It's no surprise to Peter Greene, then, when a college grad with a pre-law degree, along with five weeks of TFA training found teaching difficult. I love his metaphor of Christopher Columbus...those who are lionized for "discovering" something that the professionals in the field already know.

...Is it the part where she puts in her two years and then leaves for her "real" profession (in this case, lawyer and memoirist)?

...I've seen all of these stories hundreds of times. The fact that Kuo tells a tale more nuanced than the infamous Onion TFA pieces doesn't mean she isn't working the same old territory. And while Kuo seems to be a decent writer, she doesn't appear to have gleaned any insights that aren't already possessed by millions of actual teachers (the majority of whom stuck around long enough to actually get good at the job).

...only in teaching do we get this. Students who drop out of their medical internship don't get to write memoirs hailed for genius insights into health care. Guys who once wrote an article for the local paper don't draw plaudits for their book of wisdom about journalism and the media. But somehow education must be repeatedly Columbusized, as some new tourist is lionized for "discovering" a land where millions of folks all live rich and fully realized lives. [emphasis added]

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

Fla. Newspaper Exposes Host Of Problems In State’s Voucher Scheme

The problems with vouchers are similar nationwide. In Florida, for example, they have a problem with the lack of public oversight. Go figure...

...private schools in the state are accepting $1 billion a year in taxpayer funds with virtually no oversight. The result has been what you’d expect: a raft of fly-by-night schools, some of which use questionable curriculum, hire unqualified staff and place children in dangerous facilities.

Indiana school voucher debate continues

The Indiana State Supreme Court rule that vouchers don't violate the state's constitutional restriction on giving tax dollars to religious groups because the money goes to the parent. No matter how you look at it, however, tax dollars are going to churches which teach sectarian religion.

And, by the way, students in public schools are allowed to "speak about God," too.

"I wanted an environment where my children were allowed to speak about God," she said. Her daughter recently brought home artwork with a pumpkin that also included a picture of a cross.

...traditional public schools are subject to state Board of Accounts audits, while board meetings and budgets are public. Teachers must meet licensing requirements credentials. Also, private schools receiving vouchers also can be more exclusionary in who they admit.

DEVOS: ATTACK ON SPECIAL EDUCATION

The Pharisaical DeVastation of Betsy DeVos

Remember, during her confirmation hearing, when DeVos was asked whether she supported the "federal requirement" protecting students with disabilities and it was clear that she had no clue what IDEA was?

Remember, during her confirmation hearing, when DeVos refused to say that all schools getting federal funds should be subject to the same accountability standards.

Why are we not protecting the lives of those who are already born? I feel that being “pro-life” is not a matter reserved for the issue of abortion and the unborn, but should include those who are living and need help.

Hubert Humphrey once said in 1977, “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

DYSLEXIA

Scientists May Have Found Out What Causes Dyslexia

I tend to be skeptical when someone says (or writes) that "the cause" has been found for something. People have a tendency to latch on to a "reason" and not let go. My guess is that the information in this study will be helpful for some students (and adults) with reading difficulties, but not all.

In my experience, the causes of reading difficulties - often labeled dyslexia, even when it's not - are varied. As a layman (I'm a teacher, not a neuroscientist), I discovered early in my career that what works for one child, might not work for another, even though their symptoms might be similar.

I'm not suggesting that this line of research be abandoned. On the contrary, we need to continue to find ways to help children learn. We just need to be aware that there might not be one, single, identifiable, cause or remedy for reading problems.

It's worth pointing out that this is just one study, and that plenty of other researchers view dyslexia as a neurological trait. Perhaps these visual differences are a consequence, rather than a trigger, of dyslexia. Additionally, people with dyslexia sometimes see it as not something that needs to be "fixed," but a type of creative advantage.

Do We Need a New Definition of Dyslexia?

Some background information about Dyslexia...

1. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability...

2. ...that is neurobiological in origin...

3. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities...

4. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language...

5. ...that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities...

6. ...and the provision of effective classroom instruction...

7. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.

SCREEN TIME AS TEXTBOOKS

A new study shows that students learn way more effectively from print textbooks than screens

Special note to schools and teachers who have students read textbooks online...

...from our review of research done since 1992, we found that students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were more than a page in length. This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension. We were also surprised to learn that few researchers tested different levels of comprehension or documented reading time in their studies of printed and digital texts.

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