THE BIG APPLEHEADS
By now, Dear Readers, you've probably
heard about the foul doings in
Articles by Sol
Stern (kindly forwarded by Diane
Ravitch and Jenny D.) and
Andrew Wolf (I couldn't get it from the NY Sun archives, so I pasted it in
full, at the end. Worth reading before you go on, if you
choose to go on.)
I mean, if the objective of the Apple Heads (who appear to have NO
expertise when it comes to curriculum design and research) was to
create a curriculum:
1. That had never been tested as a whole.
2. Whose parts (e.g.,
how to teach phonics, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing) had never
been scientifcally validated, but in fact had been been shown not only NOT to
work but also to rest on principles
derived from very strange thinking.
3. That was enormously expensive.
4. That was opposed by the preponderance
of scientific research.
5. That was opposed by teachers who
have awakened from the nightmare of pseudo-progressive edflop.
6. That was so bad that it could
receive no funding from Reading
First. [See the state
proposal, and compare it to the NYC trash. And see this, on features
of effective
programs.]
7. That WOULD serve the political,
ideological, and financial interests of whole languagists, who are steadily
losing their hegemonic hold on our Nation's literacy instruction--as
researchers, citizens, state departments of public instruction, and the federal
government finally say,
"Fie! Whole
language, Reading Recovery, constructivism, and associated piffle,
Forsooth!"...
...then Bloomberg, Klein, and their
partners have done a great job.
What job?
Well, let's put it this way.
Imagine that they approve using oatmeal to pave the streets of
"Ouch, man!! That
stings."
"Come along quietly now, miscreant,
or I'll bethump you with this balloon on a stick!"
Surely, the public would not stand for
it. But when
it comes to using untested reading programs that turn out not to work,
weeeellll, we tolerate that. Why, I could not say. But
panties-on-the-head comes to mind.
Let's be honest. Hizzoner, the Ed Czar, and their Hired Literacy
Gurus are staring the kids, their families, the public, the serious
researchers, the teachers, the school principals, the state government,
and
federal Reading First right in the eye, and they are saying...
"Go %$#@ yourself!"
Trickery?
Month by Month Phonics (part of Four
Blocks) is the main new phonics curriculum used in NY City. The
publishers present the
"research base" for it. You'll notice a queer thing about
this research base. There's no RESEARCH in it. All
they've done is say that certain features of Month
by Month Phonics are the same as features advocated by OTHER researchers.
This would be like a construction engineer saying that her bridge design is a
good one because, as with other bridges, she plans to use concrete.
What the Inquisitive Reader wants to know
is What research--experimental, comparative (different "treatments"),
controlling for extraneous factors (such as maturation and outside influences),
quantative, longitudinal, replicated, with large samples representative of the
populations to which you want to APPLY the findings--has been done, that shows
convincingly (according to canons of evidence) that Month by Month Phonics
WORKS? [I guess they didn't DO that research. If they had, they
probably would have reported it.]
Contrast the "research" on
Month by Month Phonics with the serious research on Reading
Mastery (which
Or Open
Court. [Data for a whole state--
So, let's see. This means that the
Big Brains in
What would you say if your doctor gave
your kid a medication that you found out later had not been tested, but merely
had a few FEATURES consistent with medicines that work? [It was a
liquid.]
And if you take the time to check out the
research on the Four
Blocks model itself, you'll notice pathetic weaknesses in the most
elementary features of design, data, analysis, and interpretation.
1. There is barely any
pre-test/post-test data showing how MUCH kids learned.
2. There is no analysis of the
separate aspects of Four Blocks. Does it work the same on all skills
(phonemic awareness, phoincs, spelling, sounding out?), or does it work on only
one?
3. They do not use MULTIPLE outcome
measures to see if they all say the same thing (and therefore add credibility).
4. They do not control for the
obvious OTHER things that could account for reading achievement--television,
parental teaching, sibling teaching, instruction from
other teachers.
5. There is no comparison between
classes/schools that used Four Blocks and those that did not--to see if Four
Blocks works better than what schools used BEFORE, or works better than OTHER
methods.
So far, then, there is NOTHING that says
Four Blocks as a whole works. And there is even LESS saying that Month by
Month Phonics works. This is not just sloppy accountability
and weak science. This is NO accountability and NO
science. This is the mere APPEARANCE of rationality--the usual educharade
which we have had occasion to yammer
about before.
More Problems
Month by Month Phonics is part of Patricia Cunningham's Four
Blocks literacy. Four Blocks makes extensive use of word walls.
Word walls IS a useful way for kids to BUILD on fundamental
skills in phonemic awarness (hearing and manipulating syllables and sounds
in words), letter-sound correspondence (m says mmm), and sounding out
(decoding) words.
For example, the word wall can be used to
sort words by categories (food, clothing), to generalize knowledge (e.g., of
endings, such as ing in flying) to new word stems (play), and to juxtapose
words (slim, slip) to reveal clearly how one letter makes a difference in what
a word says and means.
BUT word walls should NOT be used to teach
the very same fundamental skills that are required BY word walls. Kids should FIRST receive systematic and
explicit instruction on each of these basic skills and THEN perhaps use word
walls to EXPAND these skills.
You may recall how badly the Big Shots in
California screwed up when they threw out phonics and required whole language a
decade or so back. Reading achievement fell to the level of
Bill Honig, who headed
that debacle, has been apologizing and setting things right ever since.
Did the Big Brains in
In
fact, they figgered they'd REPLICATE IT.
Boys and girls.
New word. [write on
board flogging]
Get ready to sound it out.
flllloogiiiinnnng
Say it fast.
flogging
Yes, flogging.
[Here's the article by Andrew Wolf.
Gratuitous and sundry insults and sarcastic remarks in italics.]
The
Dec 5, 2003
Editorial & Opinion Page:9
Beware the Flying Pigs
ANDREW WOLF awolf@nysun.com
According to the office of City
Comptroller William Thompson, the Department of Education has overspent its
budget for professional service contracts by more than $200 million. Since only
$150 million or so was budgeted in the first place, this is a remarkable
increase in nonclassroom spending for a system that the courts have ruled does
not spend an adequate amount of money educating our children. Much of this sum
is directed to “teaching the teachers,” rather than children.
Even for our billionaire mayor, this is
real money, enough to fund about 30 charter revision campaigns. How did our
friends at
Since the teaching methodologies they
have imposed on unsuspecting children and their parents haven’t been working,
and they have total religious conviction that their programs are absolutely the
one and only way children should be taught, then it must be the teachers who
are not executing these “perfect” programs correctly. How could it possibly be the
fault of the educational ideology they believe in so fervently? [What
do you mean, "not working"? Just
because kids don't learn from the program doesn't
mean it's not working!! Who said it is SUPPOSED to teach kids anything? Since when is achievement
an important criterion for judging instruction?
What a hidebound conservative!]
So the answer to getting the children up
to speed is to fix what the “progressive” educational establishment sees as the
real problem: educate those stupid teachers. By subjecting the teachers to an
endless program of professional development, maybe those dullards will finally
“get it” and be able to implement failed pedagogy like whole language and fuzzy
math correctly. [There you go again! Who said whole
language is a "failed pedagogy"? Just because
it doesn't work and is based on a psychotic "theory"
doesn't mean it has failed? Besides, that's just YOUR opinion.]
So we train our teachers during the
summer, train them in weekly sessions after school, even during time that the
teachers union had agreed to spend teaching the children, train them during the
school day in their classrooms and even pull them out of their classrooms for
more training and give the classes over to substitutes. We plant our teachers
in front of computers for more training, issue them thick binders of detailed instructions
to follow, and create expensive CD-ROMs to train them interactively. We hire
coaches to train them within the schools and hire others to train the coaches.
At what point does the school system get
down to the business of teaching the children, not the teachers? [This
guy is SO not in touch. Since when is the job of schools to teach
children? Just look at the past 100 years? ARE they teaching
children? And look at the intellectual trash coming out of ed schools. Does THAT look like the mission is to
teach children? Wake UP!] When do we start spending these
hundreds of millions of dollars on instruction that benefits the children
directly?
There was an interesting item in the news
earlier this week about one program run by Lucy Calkins of
One of Ms. Calkins’s contracts with the
DOE is to train educators in her reading and writing program. The contract
calls for Ms. Calkins’s
However, Ms. Calkins has refused to
provide sufficient materials for all of the teachers, claiming that this wasn’t
part of her agreement. [Two million bucks is NOT enough bucks.] We
can leave it at this point for the lawyers to sort out. Perhaps Ms. Calkins is
right, or perhaps, as the Daily News suggested in its article, she is looking
to boost sales of her book, “Units of Study for Primary Writing,” which sells for
$149 a copy. For a book this expensive, it seems to selling unusually
briskly on Amazon.com.
Last winter, the instructional strategies
to teach children to read that were put in place by Schools Chancellor Joel
Klein came under attack by a group of seven of the nation’s most prominent
reading experts. They charged that the Klein program did not conform to the
findings of the latest scientific research. None of them had any financial
stake in the school system, which gave their well-researched concerns special
credibility. [Findings of scientific
research? Who cares about research? That's
just a right-wing conspiracy. First they want programs to WORK.
Next thing you know they'll want accountability!]
It was Ms. Calkins who organized the
response of 100 education “experts” to offer support to Mr. Klein. [So?? What's wrong with that!?
Everyone needs friends. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she hadn't been
getting much mail. Besides, if you don't have DATA to show that your
program works, what else is there but TESTIMONIALS FROM "EXPERTS"?
Nothing, that's what.] As I
pointed out at the time, virtually every one of the 100 or the institutions
they were affiliated with was a recipient of DOE largess. [Sooo? Just because it LOOKS like
collusion does not PROVE it is. Just because it quacks
like a duck, waddles like a duck, and has a waterproof butt doesn't mean
it IS a duck. It could be a whole language perfesser. They all
waddle and quack. As to their butts? Well,
we haven't had occasion to check.] Defending Mr. Klein and his
controversial curriculum seems to have worked out just fine for Ms. Calkins,
her institute, and her highend publishing career. However, it may have worked
out even better for another signatory to Ms. Calkins’s letter, Diane Snowball.
Ms. Snowball hails from Down Under and runs a private company with her husband,
Greg, called Australian and United States Services in Education (Aussie).
In Bronx Regions 1 and 2 alone, the total
of their contracts for just this year certainly approaches and perhaps exceeds
$10 million. Aussie is also working for six other New York Cityregions, as well
as for the DOE itself. An enormous amount of money is being funneled to it,
nearly enough to place an additional teacher in every
I started doing some research, and what I
found was fascinating. I searched on “Diane Snowball” for mentions in the
American press, going back a quarter-century. I could find only four citations.
[Of course! You should have
searched for Snowblower, Snowshoe, and Snowcone!] One was a passing mention
of a children’s book she wrote; one was an article in the real estate section
of the New York Times discussing temporary New York housing arrangements for
Aussie’s foreign workers, and one was the article I wrote about Aussie in the
October 10 edition of The New York Sun. A search of a national newspaper that
intensively covers the education scene, Education Week, yielded just one
mention more than a decade old. A search in the foreign press, even in Ms.
Snowball’s native
“‘They [Americans] really finish their
teacher training not knowing how to teach children how to read and write,’ she
says.”Ms. Snowball goes on to express her disdain for the testing of children.
“‘You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it,’ says Mrs. Snowball.” [No, dummy. But you WILL know what
it weighs.]
For a company that has such large
contracts, it seems odd that it and its leadership have thus far flown under
the press radar. Perhaps it is the pigs that never get weighed that end up
flying. My advice to Comptroller Thompson is to look carefully at the Aussie
contracts to make sure that it isn’t our money that’s flying away.
* * *
* * * * *
Professor Plum is willing to bet (he
won't, but he's willing) four boxes of .45 caliber pistol ammo that NYC is
going to use Reading
Recovery as its "remedial" program for all those kids (I'd say
75% of first graders) who aren't learning to read with the new and improved
curriculum. This will of course cost anywhere from 4 to 10 grand per kid
and won't work. But who ever said that's the point?
EVERY FAMILY IN NYC WITH A LITTLE KID
SHOULD GET TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ IN 100 EASY LESSONS (20 BUCKS) AND GET THEIR
KIDS READING BEFORE THE IMBECILES HAVE THEIR CLAWS IN THEM.
You know what Professor Plum says to
Hizzoner, the Ed Czar, Mrs. Snowplow, Professor Camshaft, Cornbread, Cambourne,
or whatever it is, and their gaggle of well-paid Literacy Hucksters? He
says,
Go.....