Latest U.S. Department of Education 'Reading' program will be DIBELS on Steroids

[Hannah Bell]

On June 22, 2010, the US Department of Education announced the appointment of its 'Reading Institute.' I regard this as a MUST Read. Below you will find a cast of characters traveling the country for the U. S. Department of Education. You will recognize many names from their work for the Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings DOE. And now Arne Duncan pretty much offers business as usual. Maybe the conference should be called 'Dibels on Steroids.' Certainly, a distorted and starved notion of what reading is marches on, rich in funding and power.

I'm not saying that some of these people haven't don't some good work, but the cumulative effect of reading about all this pre-school assessment and staff development done by the same small group of people is worse than chilling. They are building from the base laid down by Reading First. The topic here is reading. The same thing is happening in math. The vested interests are gearing up for the Common Core Standards — lining up the curriculum, the coaching, the assessments, and the professional development...

Read the short bios: What you don't know will destroy your profession and destroy the education of the children in your care. What you don't know will kill you.

Note who's here. Note how little experience with children is in the group. Most of all, note who's missing. The research base and the advocates for developmentally appropriate practice who are once again silenced. Maybe you should ask them why they remain silent.

You won't have to read far in the bios before you're asking, "WHO IS RMC and why are so many of their people listed here?" They provide the answer on their website...

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1548§ion=Article

[Dinger]

1. Kick & Rec #5

I've heard lexi domaradzki before, a real piece of work.

[lostnfound]

2. Kick & Rec #5 here too.

[txlibdem]

3. Can someone please explain the opposition to Common Core Standards

I went to their website and it seems pretty benign. I'm not sure that Common Core should be lumped together with and fought against as vehemently as the push to privatize schools in America. For the record, I'm no fan of non-public owned schools. There is ample evidence that they serve no purpose, achieve no better results than public schools, and are only another right wing power grab meant to take public funds and funnel them wholesale to private companies.
http://www.corestandards.org/

Can someone please explain why it would be bad to have an educational standard? Bear in mind that I am in Texas, where a group of right wingers have rewritten history and economics texts to paint conservative views in a positive light (presumably disregarding empirical evidence to the contrary), going so far as to remove one of our nation's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html This assault on our nation's children by a group of 10 conservative ideologues has convinced me that educational standards should be national and enforced by federal law.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. Do you really want legislation to mandate what is taught in your local public school?

My largest objection is the loss of local control. And seriously, the kids in Florida have different educational needs than the kids in North Dakota. The local cultures are pretty different.

[LWolf]

5. There are several:

1. No matter how you look at it, there are too many standards to adequately teach in the time we've assigned to teach them, automatically setting us all up to fail, and narrowing instructional focus, excluding too many parts of a sound, well-rounded education.

http://www.mcrel.org/PDF/Standards/5982IR_AwashInASea.pdf

2. Misuse of standards. Using standards, and inefficient and often inaccurate one-size-fits-all standardized tests to test those standards, as threats against schools, teachers, and students is counter-productive. Using high standards as goals to work towards is appropriate. Using them to develop and misuse standardized tests as threats is not. Until high-stakes testing is banned from public education, standards will be misused.

3. People are not standardized. Students are not standardized. The mission of public education is to educate ALL, regardless of their background, abilities, disabilities, or motivations. Brain research is quite clear: students aren't all on the same starting line when they enter school at age 5, and they don't all have the same abilities, talents, needs, or learning styles. Assigning them all the exact same goals, and expecting them all to be successful at the same pace, over the same course, given the same training, is ludicrous.

[RetAZEd]

6. DIBELS is Mind Death

I've given the DIBELS test and the small slice of information you can get on an individual student can be gotten in so many better and more efficient ways. It required many testers, pulling in specialists and teacher's aides from their duties, and pulled kids out of the classroom 4 times a year (and we had a pretty good system set up with parent volunteers to monitor and escort them). Here are a few examples from it. K-1 students had to be able to read single syllable, nonsense words. That test could identify their ability to show short vowel pronunciation and little else. Another test asked older kids (GR2-4 for us) to read a paragraph within a set amount of time then recall as many details as possible. The tester had to track the # of words read correctly & the # of details recalled. I noticed that only the most gifted students could do this well. Most students focused on doing their best to read quickly and couldn't remember as much. Anyway, if you knew the kids, as I often did from a distance, you'd already knew the basic info. the test showed.

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. Those nonsense words tests have been proven repeatedly to be ineffective

How sad that so many in our profession pay no attention to research.