I applaud the authors of this
funding proposal, a group of legislators involved with the Joint Task Force on
Education Funding, for acknowledging, “One of the most pernicious failings in education
is the divergence in educational attainment between children of modest means
and those with more money.” I’m just not sure that remediation is the answer.
At the beginning of this school year, I asked my middle schoolers to
make a timeline of their experiences with science, in and out of school. Nearly
all of my more affluent students included experiences such as science camp,
collecting rocks, playing a musical instrument or doing water quality
monitoring; their experiences tended to be richer. On the other end of the
economic spectrum, one student wrote, “I went to a place called the beach
once.”
Let’s imagine a hypothetical peer of this student who visits the coast
regularly and over time has become accustomed to the tides and to reading a
tide table book in order to plan tide pool visits. This individual would be at
a distinct advantage back at school with a variety of science and math topics,
including ecosystems, weather, tides, phases of the moon, integers (positive and negative numbers),
and decimal place value. Are the additional worksheets or scripted curriculum
typical of remediation programs truly going to close this achievement gap?
The other aspect of this part of the proposal I find troubling is the
suggestion that schools could multiply their effect through the exchange of
certified staff for more instructional aides. This idea runs contrary to other
parts of the proposal that promote teacher quality as essential to student
success. Over the years I have worked with some stellar assistants. However, if
we expect our neediest kids to gain more than a year’s growth in a year,
wouldn’t success be more likely with our most accomplished teachers?
I suggest the authors revise the language of this section of the
proposal to paint a vision of the type of experiences that will help children
grow and develop like their more affluent peers – small group trips to cultural
events and into nature, individual music lessons, scholarships for summer camp –
alongside access to accomplished teachers to nurture the realization of
academic learning related to these experiences. At the same time, I think it
would be wise to replace the term “remediation” with one that conveys the
desire to level the playing field; perhaps “enrichment” would work.
Yes, Tom, I agree that we are talking about different parts and perhaps different priorities of the same learning process. Thanks for asking.
In short, learning occurs through observable, countable learner behavior patterns regardless of how or where instruction occurs with any learner.
By literacy code breaking, I use a generic definition teachers learned during an ed psych class to qualify for certification. I mean reducing trial-and-error behavior patterns of a student to reach a correct response (as determined by a teacher, et al.) as close to 1:0 as possible in a given time block. The variation depends on the precision of the instruction, not the condition of the learner.
From this view, correct responses take priority over allowing errors by imprecise software or instruction.
And, yes, I agree that learning can appear complex, etc., and that not everyone knows what a fishing lure or Spanish word for it is or does. But they can learn these quickly, because they rely on definitions. That’s different from learning to use either routinely (some call this comprehension – I don’t know what that means beyond measurements during an assessment; I refer to it as generalizing beyond a specific matching-to-sample, etc.), which may take a few more minutes of instruction and a learner.
To repeat, yes, I think we use different vocabulary to describe the same elephant: learning. Does this description make sense?
Well said, Kelly. Bob, what exactly do you mean by “Breaking literacy codes?” Maybe we’re all talking about the same thing.
Thanks for clarifying your point, Kelly. YOu and Tom make a good case. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees, yes?
Bob, you have distorted my comments to focus on a battle between decoding and whole language. Tom, I believe, gave quite an illustrative example of how decoding is meaningless without comprehension. My understanding is that there are several attributes to the successful reader and should you be interested in that, I would recommend Catherine Snow’s research. In the meantime, I am writing about what might augment the goal of access to educational attainment policymakers have proposed.
Luckily for the students of Washington, policymakers in this state have a broader view of basic education than decoding. The state legislature established the task force in order to provide all students with an education that will make them competitive in the global economy. The State School Board is working on a Meaningful Diploma policy to ensure that all students are prepared for post-secondary education and work life. I am merely suggesting, based on my extensive experience in high-poverty schools and as an individual who has had the privilege of high educational attainment, one small area of a comprehensive proposal that might need adjusting to help realize the goals policymakers have laid out.
Thanks, Tom, for your comment. Yes, I recognize the meaningful approach to instruction that you describe. It appears consistent with what many public school teachers use to prepare students for a normal distribution of tested academic results.
Many people have argued for centuries (and more recently with experimental empirical data to undergird their efforts) that breaking a mechanical literacy code comes before meaning exists. Those who use the mechanical approach to instruction have found that their students learn measurably more in less time than those who use the meaningful approach, and can generalize from specifics with relative confidence.
It seems reasonable that teachers would go for the databased code breaking approach before relying on less precise meaningful instruction. Yes?
No Bob, you’re not right. Teaching entails much more than “show(ing) students how to break literacy codes.” It also involves filling in the background so that those codes make sense. I know the literacy codes for the Spanish language, for example, but take me out of Mexican restaurant and I don’t what the words are about. Let me give you an example from my own classroom, which is split pretty evenly between middle and working class students. We were doing a math problem recently, the premise of which was somebody collecting fishing lures. Before we started, I asked my third graders if they knew what a fishing lure was. Guess which kids didn’t. So we learned what fishing lures were. And then we solved the problem. All of us. Now, could a kid who had never seen the phrase “fishing lure” decode the word? Of course. Could that same kid solve a story problem about fishing lures without knowing what they were? Possibly. Would that kid want to? No. And it is not “class warfare” to point out that students with enriched backgrounds do better at school.
Thanks for pointing to the WA state discussion about revising public school funding formuli and to propose a new definition of basic education.
You cast your post, I assume unintentionally, in the same socio-economic mold that has yielded current public schooling approaches to different ways of student life, that is, as if class warfare exists as a relevant point for learners labeled haves and have-nots.
Basic schooling for everyone means learning to read, write, etc. There’s no mystery about what teachers must do to have this happen efficiently and promptly. Show learners how to break literacy codes.
These codes are the same regardless of a student’s background or ability. It takes only minutes for a teacher to show students how to break literacy codes when a teacher know each code.
The significant question then is, why don’t teachers just show students how to break these codes? Then, questions of remediation, defining disadvantage, etc. remain academic exercises rather than political disputes. Right?