This article merely touches on two enormous school and societal problems: what to do about schools that teach little (populated by teachers who know little) and about whole segments of our society who do not value education. Add to this a technological revoluation (the "smart" phone) that is destroying the relationships between parents and children. Yesterday I was stuck waiting in a checkout line, along with a mom who had her one-year-old son sitting in her cart with her merchandise. The little guy was as cute as they come and he was getting into everything; I was tempted to interact with him but we have boundaries about adults interacting with others' children, so I mostly refrained. In a previous time the mom would've spent this time interacting with him, but instead she was staring at her phone; she lost this chance to forge her relationship with him and to build his vocabulary. On a larger scale, we have entire sub-populations (blacks, specifically) who are known to spend less time verbally communicating everyday knowledge their kids during their crucial pre-school years. How does a school compensate for such a cultural difference? And then we have the schools, which have eradicated much classical knowledge from their curricula and replaced it with Marxist, racist indoctrination. Other than the rantings of Ibram Kendi, what exactly is a modern child in a public school expected to comprehend on a "comprehension" test? How much comprehension can we expect of a "student" who literally cannot multiply numbers and who has no conception of the world around him? Like these, for example: https://youtu.be/Ufmcubp2szg?si=0O8h89ojivDRHCy6
Thanks for this. How would you go about writing state standards of learning that are content based? I am a parent with no education experience whatsoever (other than serving on various parent advisory boards). I’ve been selected by my state’s department of education to serve on a citizen advisory board for new ELA standards of learning. I’ve been following your work a lot and admire what you have to say. There has been a lot of focus in my state on phonics and structured literacy so I’m sure we will face no problem with that. What I would like to focus on grounding structured literacy in a knowledge rich curriculum and also on systematic writing instruction. I am struggling with how we can incorporate standards that mandate a knowledge rich curriculum when developing ELA standards of learning. I can see how we can do that for social studies or science but not for English. My sense is the best way to go about it is mandate that certain curriculums are used but not to push for knowledge based standards in the standards of learning. Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts! I think with writing standards it will be easier as I can focus on sentence construction, paragraph construction and outlining
I'm not sure that standards themselves can mandate curricula -- at least, they don't usually do that. State departments of education often recommend certain curricula, and in some states districts are required to choose from that list -- although they can usually get waivers. As far as I know, no state mandates any particular curriculum.
One thing you could do with ELA standards is try to put some specific content in them -- i.e., works of literature, including maybe some historical fiction, and also some nonfiction that schools need to teach. If you can't get agreement on specific titles, then just try to be as specific as possible about what you have in mind (e.g., full novels rather than brief excerpts from novels, which are very common). At the very least, I would try to make it crystal clear that a standard like "connect claims to evidence in text," or even "find the main idea," can only be achieved THROUGH a curriculum that focuses on rich content and brings in the standards (which are essentially "skills and strategies") as appropriate to get kids to think deeply about the content.
And yes, for writing it would be helpful to focus on the things you mention -- and also stress that writing instruction should be grounded in the content of the curriculum as much as possible. Usually that's not the case, especially at the elementary level. Kids are writing about personal experience or opinion (e.g., should we have chocolate milk in the cafeteria) or topics in a separate writing curriculum that they may have very little information about.
Thank you! This is all useful! Just to be clear, I did not mean to mandate curriculums in the standards of learning. But for elementary school what my state now has is a list of approved (or maybe suggested) curriculums.
I corresponded with you a year or so ago when I had edited a book that dealt with this issue as it particularly bedevils kids from backgrounds of poverty. I understand better now your point that once comprehension is required more intensively in the intermediate grades, lack of background knowledge is as much or more of an obstacle to their progress as weak comprehension “skills” and the two deficiencies have a confounding effect on each other.
I am at a loss to understand your statement, "After fifth grade, the boost from better decoding instruction disappears." What evidence supports this? Unless essentially all students somehow intuitively manage to figure out decoding by themselves at this age, how is this possible? I have an adult wife who never learned decoding as a child, and to this day her reading ability is crippled by that; she just doesn't have the patience or the skill to handle seriously unfamiliar and/or complex words, so she guesses, almost always incorrectly. The typical Whole Language teacher, of course, would applaud this. How do fifth graders suddenly start figuring out what the words are, or even more strangely start comprehending the text without knowing what the words are? http://mychildwillread.org/
It appears that you've misunderstood what I was saying. Of course if you teach a child or an adult who doesn't ALREADY know how to decode how to do that, at any age, that instruction will benefit them enormously.
What I was referring to is this: If you do a good job of teaching decoding to children in K-2, they will get a boost from that instruction on reading test scores in grades 3, 4, and 5. But that boost fades out after 5th grade because comprehension ability becomes more important. This is what the evidence shows.
This article merely touches on two enormous school and societal problems: what to do about schools that teach little (populated by teachers who know little) and about whole segments of our society who do not value education. Add to this a technological revoluation (the "smart" phone) that is destroying the relationships between parents and children. Yesterday I was stuck waiting in a checkout line, along with a mom who had her one-year-old son sitting in her cart with her merchandise. The little guy was as cute as they come and he was getting into everything; I was tempted to interact with him but we have boundaries about adults interacting with others' children, so I mostly refrained. In a previous time the mom would've spent this time interacting with him, but instead she was staring at her phone; she lost this chance to forge her relationship with him and to build his vocabulary. On a larger scale, we have entire sub-populations (blacks, specifically) who are known to spend less time verbally communicating everyday knowledge their kids during their crucial pre-school years. How does a school compensate for such a cultural difference? And then we have the schools, which have eradicated much classical knowledge from their curricula and replaced it with Marxist, racist indoctrination. Other than the rantings of Ibram Kendi, what exactly is a modern child in a public school expected to comprehend on a "comprehension" test? How much comprehension can we expect of a "student" who literally cannot multiply numbers and who has no conception of the world around him? Like these, for example: https://youtu.be/Ufmcubp2szg?si=0O8h89ojivDRHCy6
Thanks for this. How would you go about writing state standards of learning that are content based? I am a parent with no education experience whatsoever (other than serving on various parent advisory boards). I’ve been selected by my state’s department of education to serve on a citizen advisory board for new ELA standards of learning. I’ve been following your work a lot and admire what you have to say. There has been a lot of focus in my state on phonics and structured literacy so I’m sure we will face no problem with that. What I would like to focus on grounding structured literacy in a knowledge rich curriculum and also on systematic writing instruction. I am struggling with how we can incorporate standards that mandate a knowledge rich curriculum when developing ELA standards of learning. I can see how we can do that for social studies or science but not for English. My sense is the best way to go about it is mandate that certain curriculums are used but not to push for knowledge based standards in the standards of learning. Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts! I think with writing standards it will be easier as I can focus on sentence construction, paragraph construction and outlining
I'm not sure that standards themselves can mandate curricula -- at least, they don't usually do that. State departments of education often recommend certain curricula, and in some states districts are required to choose from that list -- although they can usually get waivers. As far as I know, no state mandates any particular curriculum.
One thing you could do with ELA standards is try to put some specific content in them -- i.e., works of literature, including maybe some historical fiction, and also some nonfiction that schools need to teach. If you can't get agreement on specific titles, then just try to be as specific as possible about what you have in mind (e.g., full novels rather than brief excerpts from novels, which are very common). At the very least, I would try to make it crystal clear that a standard like "connect claims to evidence in text," or even "find the main idea," can only be achieved THROUGH a curriculum that focuses on rich content and brings in the standards (which are essentially "skills and strategies") as appropriate to get kids to think deeply about the content.
And yes, for writing it would be helpful to focus on the things you mention -- and also stress that writing instruction should be grounded in the content of the curriculum as much as possible. Usually that's not the case, especially at the elementary level. Kids are writing about personal experience or opinion (e.g., should we have chocolate milk in the cafeteria) or topics in a separate writing curriculum that they may have very little information about.
Thank you! This is all useful! Just to be clear, I did not mean to mandate curriculums in the standards of learning. But for elementary school what my state now has is a list of approved (or maybe suggested) curriculums.
I corresponded with you a year or so ago when I had edited a book that dealt with this issue as it particularly bedevils kids from backgrounds of poverty. I understand better now your point that once comprehension is required more intensively in the intermediate grades, lack of background knowledge is as much or more of an obstacle to their progress as weak comprehension “skills” and the two deficiencies have a confounding effect on each other.
I am at a loss to understand your statement, "After fifth grade, the boost from better decoding instruction disappears." What evidence supports this? Unless essentially all students somehow intuitively manage to figure out decoding by themselves at this age, how is this possible? I have an adult wife who never learned decoding as a child, and to this day her reading ability is crippled by that; she just doesn't have the patience or the skill to handle seriously unfamiliar and/or complex words, so she guesses, almost always incorrectly. The typical Whole Language teacher, of course, would applaud this. How do fifth graders suddenly start figuring out what the words are, or even more strangely start comprehending the text without knowing what the words are? http://mychildwillread.org/
It appears that you've misunderstood what I was saying. Of course if you teach a child or an adult who doesn't ALREADY know how to decode how to do that, at any age, that instruction will benefit them enormously.
What I was referring to is this: If you do a good job of teaching decoding to children in K-2, they will get a boost from that instruction on reading test scores in grades 3, 4, and 5. But that boost fades out after 5th grade because comprehension ability becomes more important. This is what the evidence shows.
I've explained more about that here: https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/just-adding-more-phonics-yields-only.