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9486 in the collection
10 New York City Schools to Focus Reading Skills on Content
Ohanian Comment:
This could be calling us to a new and better balance.
--Lucy Calkins
What?! Is declaring that "more scripts" offer a better balance a determination not to offend Klein?
Those that play along, get along.
I invite--and even emplore you to read Finding a Loony List While Searching for Literacy. There, I ask what you make of a list of cultural need-to-know terms that includes the trombone but not the tuba, Fresno but not Ghana, Kenya, Nagasaki, Sri Lanka, and Armenia. It's a bizarre list that includes Onan but not Ruth, Naomi, or Esther.
NOTE: Here are members of the Board of the Fund for Public Schools, which is financing this: Joel I. Klein, Chairman; Caroline Kennedy, Vice-Chair;
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Vice-Chair; Richard Menschel, Treasurer; Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner, Secretary; Charles H. Googe, Jr.; Agnes Gund; Wendi Murdoch; Leonard Riggio; Elizabeth Rohatyn.
You can see samples of the Core Reading Program here.
Core Reading Program
Here are some of the books, articles, and websites we have found useful in developing the Core Knowledge reading program. Most articles are about skills and decoding. [Go to >a href="http://coreknowledge.org/CK/schools/KTR/links.htm"> this site for hot links to the items below.]
Miscellaneous U.S. Sites:
National Reading Panel, official website
Children of the Code: a documentary project with many interesting interviews
"10 Years of Brain Imaging Research Shows the Brain Reads Sound by Soundâ"
Reid Lyon, "Overview of Reading and Literacy Initiatives"
Kerry Hempenstall, "Miscue Analysis: A Critique"
Marilyn Jager Adams, "The Three-Cueing System."
Sebastian Wren, "The Three Cueing Systems"
Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, Seidenberg, "How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading"
Marilyn Jager Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print
Joseph K. Torgeson and Patricia Mathes, "What Every Teacher Should Know About Phonological Awareness"
Ted Hirsch, "Teaching Kids to Read," A paper outlining a McGuinness-influenced approach to early reading instruction, as laid out by veteran Core Knowledge teacher Ted Hirsch.
National Right to Read Foundation a U.S. phonics advocacy group
Don Potter's Education Page-- loaded with interesting links and old phonics primers.
SEDL Reading Research Site.
Martin Kozloff's website.
Kerry Hempensall's website
Diane McGuinness, Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading. Possibly the best single book on teaching decoding.
Diane McGuinness, Early Reading Instruction. Also useful.
Diane McGuinness, "A Prototype for Teaching the English Alphabet Code." A shorter version of the argument made in Why Our Children Can’t Read.
Carmen McGuinness, Geoffrey McGuinness, Reading Reflex: The Foolproof Phono-Graphix Method for Teaching Your Child to Read. A trade book outlining a linguistic phonics approach.
10 New York City Schools to Focus Reading Skills on Content
By Elissa Gootman
In a bid to correct what he called a â??knowledge deficitâ?? among New York City public school students, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced on Monday a pilot program that would overhaul the way children in 10 city schools are taught to read.
The program, devised by E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Core Knowledge Foundation, is being paid for with $2.4 million in private donations raised by the Fund for Public Schools. Called the New York City Core Knowledge Early Literacy Project, it will run for three years, following kindergartners at the 10 schools through the first and second grades.
The pilot program, which will involve about 1,000 children, represents a shift from the Bloomberg administrationâ??s longstanding approach to teaching children to read, known as â??balanced literacy.â?? Under that approach, children are encouraged to select books that interest them, at their own reading levels, from classroom libraries. The theory behind the approach is that it is more important to ensure that young children are truly engaged by books than to dictate that everyone read the same thing.
The Core Knowledge curriculum, by contrast, is heavily focused on content, vocabulary skills and nonfiction books, based on the belief that when students struggle in middle school and beyond, it is largely because they lack basic knowledge in subjects like history, science and literature.
Dr. Hirsch is perhaps best known for popularizing the phrase "cultural literacy," and calling on schools to impart basic knowledge rather than simply teach students the skills they need to become better learners.
New York, which already has about 100 elementary and middle schools using other Core Knowledge curricular materials, is one of eight school districts around the country testing out the new early literacy materials on the youngest pupils. The term "knowledge deficit" comes from the title of one of Dr. Hirsch's books, which Mr. Klein said he had found compelling.
At a news conference announcing the project at the Tweed Courthouse, Mr. Klein said the new program was "not at all" an acknowledgment that balanced literacy had failed, pointing to the city's rising scores on both state and national fourth-grade reading tests as signs of the Bloomberg administration's success. But the chancellor said he hoped the early Core Knowledge approach could help raise eighth-grade reading scores, which have not shown the same gains.
"I view it as building on but not in any way repudiating-- our results speak for themselves," Mr. Klein said. "There is so much further to go, and one of the things that you've heard the mayor and myself speak about is, even as you make progress, you want to look to make greater progress and to move this to a higher and different level."
In 2008, 43 percent of the city's eighth-graders read at or above grade level, according to state tests; while that is an improvement over the scores in 2002, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the schools, the city's eighth-grade reading scores on national exams known as the nation's report card have not shown significant improvement over the same time period.
Some critics of the balanced literacy approach said they welcomed the pilot program-- but that it should have been adopted much earlier and for a larger number of schools.
"I can finally say something nice about one of Klein's curriculum choices," said Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group. "Unfortunately, it's just a few schools in the sixth year of his administration. But at least it looks like he's educable."
Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College and an architect of the city's balanced literacy program, said that the 10 schools participating in the Core Knowledge pilot should try to also include other approaches in their curriculum. For example, she said, she hoped there would still be time "to teach revision strategies in a writing workshop or the skills of inference in a reading workshop "that you're not only talking about the subject."
Still, she said, "This could be calling us to a new and better balance."
Education officials said the 10 schools, all of which have large numbers of poor children, were chosen based on their principals' desire to participate. Some are members of what is called the city's Knowledge Network--schools that have chosen to affiliate with Kathleen M. Cashin, a veteran superintendent who has long embraced Dr. Hirsch's approach to teaching basic subjects.
participating are Public Schools 26 in Staten Island; 96, 104, 223 and 333 in Queens; 30, 50 and 102 in the Bronx; and 214 and 308 in Brooklyn.
A list is online at nytimes.com/nyregion.The $2.4 million being spent on the pilot program will also cover the costs of a study in which the progress of schools in the program will be measured against a control group of similar schools, Mr. Klein said. 10 schools
Roxanne Marks, principal of Public School 30 in the Bronx, said she and her teachers had chosen to participate in the Core Knowledge literacy pilot because it was "more scripted, more structured" than the balanced literacy approach, which she said many teachers struggled to master.
"I didn't see the payoff," she said of the old program, adding that she hoped the Core Knowledge curriculum would be "more engaging for the kids, more structured and a little easier for the teachers to follow."
"We have struggled as a school with reading," she said. "I hope this works. I pray."
— Elissa Gootman
New York Times
2008-08-26
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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