Orwell Award Announcement SusanOhanian.Org Home


Outrages

 

9486 in the collection  

    LEARN Guidelines Obsolete Before They Were Written

    Ohanian Comment: Keeping to the entreprenurial spirit, every piece of legislation directed at schools speaks of "competitive" grants, not grants because schools need the money. I don't see any mention of legislation to do something about the lead poisoning poor children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Because lead poisoning often occurs with no obvious symptoms, it frequently goes unrecognized. See Michael Martin's report on this here


    by Stephen Krashen

    Dr. Jerome Groopman, interviewed in the New York Review of Books (12/17/09), points out that in medicine, clinical guidelines drawn up
    by committees don't last long: "A recent analysis of more than a hundred evidence-based conclusions about clinical practice reported that after two years more than a quarter of the conclusions were contradicted by new data, and that nearly half of the 'best practices'
    were overturned at five years." (see Evidence-Based Practice, Best Practices, and Other Lies by Susan Ohanian.

    The LEARN Act [S2740] insists on direct instruction, reinforced by frequent testing (sometimes known as "skill-building"). A great deal of research, done over decades, shows that direct instruction has very limited value in the areas mentioned by LEARN (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading fluency, knowledge of text structure), and that most of our competence in these areas is absorbed through extensive reading.

    Dr. Goopman points out that half of the pronouncements of committees on clinical guidelines were overturned in five years. Some of the guidelines in the LEARN Act were overturned before the Act was written.

    — Stephen Krashen
    website
    2009-12-09


    INDEX OF OUTRAGES

Pages: 380   
[1] 2 3 4 5 6  Next >>    Last >>


FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of education issues vital to a democracy. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information click here. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.