New Study Might Spell the End for Federal Reading Program

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There's honour among thieves

Flirting Tips For Girls of AL 9:08AM July 08, 2010

Do you have copy writer for so good articles? If so please give me contacts, because this really rocks! :)

Caleb Dixon of HI 6:16AM February 21, 2010

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view

Anibal Campbell of HI 2:46PM February 19, 2010

In a New York Times article (November 26, 2006), Paul Tough explained why urban students have more literacy problems than suburban children. He summarized the classic study of Hart and Risley as follows:
Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.
What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Alan Frager of OH 9:09PM November 30, 2008

As a certifed reading teacher who taught high school for 8 years and middle school for 2, I KNOW every child should be in a formal reading class yearly (grades K-12). The kids should be grouped by reading level with good and appropriate-level materials selected. Reading teachers need to be creative, interesting and well-trained to teach the subject. As a Maine public school child growing up, I had one class of reading and one class of grammar/English EVERY day. Reading and writing are my strengths and I owe much of that to the public school system. It's time we return to the basics; there's nothing more basic than learning to read and learning to appreciate fiction, non-fiction, poetry, magazines, newspapers, etc. Teaching is harder due to duel-income families, broken families, uneducated and apathetic parents (etc), but that's no excuse for the public schools not to rise to the challenge. What we need FIRST is to rid the public schools of lousy administrators and lousy teachers (the latter protected by greedy unions). Once we get the right people into the top spots, the public schools can and WILL improve. We owe that much to our children!

FLNonny of FL 8:48AM November 30, 2008

A more pertinent investigation would have examined various districts (such as Los Angeles) where students DID make significant gain. What were the variables in place? How were teachers trained? What materials were provided? What administrative support was provided? How were classrooms monitored to ensure that what was supposed to be taught was actually being taught? What was the long-range plan, and how was the plan carried out?
Too often, taxpayers spend huge amounts of money on studies that are flawed.
The truth is that many districts made exemplary gains. We should learn from them, rather than tossing away everything that has been done - although that is a prevalent pattern in education.

Jane Fell Greene, Ed.D. of FL 1:28PM November 25, 2008

Learning to read will always be harder than necessary to do so long as we cling tenaciously to the theory that "there are 26 letters in the English alphebet." Actually, there are some 67 (foolishly described as 26). This is because some of the letters have multiple sounds. The letter "A" alone has 5 basic sounds: "a" as in cake, "ah" as in cat, "eh" as in any, "uh" as in America, and "aw" as in auto. But we stubbornly continue to teach 26 letters because, well, because "we've always done it that way." Time to change, folks. How? With something called diacritical markings(found in every dictionary) which is a standard method of depicting how each letter sounds EVERY time. So why not give our new readers a break and MARK each new word diacritically until, by sheer familiarity (say, by third grade), readers no longer even bother noting the marking of a word because they already know it well? So, for example, a word like cake would be presented to new readers as c a k e with the "a" unmarked to show the "natural" sound of the letter and the "e" underlined to show that it is silent. A word like cat?
u
Presented as C A T with the diacritical marking directly above it showing that "a" pronounced as "ah" as in, well, as in cat or bat, or sat.
The point is: why leave our kids initially guessing how some words sound or else teaching them arcane "letter association" rules? With diacritical markings we can teach new readers to sound out words correctly (and if they can sound them out, they can recognize them). Put another way, initially make our written language completely PHONIC until new readers are familiar enough with written words to be comfortable with the fact that it ... isn't.

D.S. Arthur of CA 3:05PM November 24, 2008

Are the real waste of money.
That money would have been better spent buying reading material that would appeal to children and giving it to the children from impoverished families.
Children from any background are capable of achieving much if given the opportunity.

HillbillyBill of TN 7:24AM November 22, 2008

Are the real waste of money.
That money would have been better spent buying reading material that would appeal to children and giving it to the children from impoverished families.
Children from any background are capable of achieving much if given the opportunity.

HillbillyBill of TN 7:24AM November 22, 2008

As I understand it, one of the most enduring findings in education is that children from poor families lag behind children from wealthier families. There may be many reasons for this, but one is that parents of children in poverty usually are poor readers and impoverished speakers themselves.
Environmental and family influences on children often trump anything school systems can offer. Children are at home for far more time than they are in school. I think that more well-read parents, who use better vocabulary at home, will continue to produce children who score higher on tests of reading ability. Poorly educated parents will tend to continue to rear children who will fall behind the children of better educated parents.
Interventions like the Federal Reading Program will probably continue to fail until parents are better educated. Future reading programs should consider helping the parents as well as the children.

Paul of CA 3:06AM November 22, 2008