LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

New NM Language Arts Content Standards Now Available

As you probably know, the New Mexico Language Arts Content Standards have been undergoing revision.  They're now available and ready to be used.  Find them here or, as usual, you can click on the link in the left margin of this page. 

New Report Calls for a Re-engineering of the Nation’s Approach to Adolescent Literacy

A new report on adolescent literacy is out today from the Carnegie Corporation.  It's always hard to tell if policy reports like this will make a difference (or if they'll be misused and make the wrong sort of difference).  But we probably shouldn't be too skeptical, because it's not an easy question.  What would you have schools do to transform adolescent literacy if you were in charge? 

You can read the summary from Education Week or the entire 108-page report. 

David Berliner Tells Australians to Think Twice About TFA

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The view from America: what on earth are you thinking? August 17, 2009

The Teach for America program which sends top graduates who are not trained in teaching into poorer schools is about to start in Australia. Some educators in the US, such as David Berliner, are asking why.

The news that Australia is following the United States in introducing a program which puts untrained teachers in the classroom came as a real shock to us here.

Simply put, you are being conned. Teach for America (TFA), the model for your national program, is not effective in helping students in poverty learn more, though it is very effective at raising large amounts of money.

The facts are much tougher to dismiss than the feel-good announcements made by the corporate supporters and those who derive their income from the program.

More here.

Too Much Time Teaching, Not Enough Time For Everything Else?

This is interesting.  The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), has published its latest round of international comparisons of education systems.  Among the findings:  American teachers spend more time teaching than teachers in any of the other countries surveyed.  The average American teacher spends 1080 hours per year teaching ("Net Teaching Time in Hours").  Teachers in most other countries spend 500-700 hours per year in front of the class.  In Finland, which often has the highest test scores in international comparisons, teachers in middle school and high school spend 550-600 hours per year actually teaching.  Wouldn't it be nice if some of the education reformers who are so focused on making the school day and year longer took notice?  The full OECD report is available here.

Texas Bible Literacy Law

From the Houston Chronicle:

DALLAS — Some northern Texas school districts are scrambling to interpret a state law that requires public schools to incorporate Bible literacy into the curriculum.

The Legislature provided little guidance, no funding for materials or teacher training when it passed the law in 2007 requiring Bible literacy to be taught starting in the 2009-2010 school year.

More here.

Another Year, Another AYP Report

The 2009 New Mexico AYP reports were released yesterday.  Secretary Garcia tried to provide a balanced way of looking at the information, but of course most of the local news outlets took the usual "Schools Fail to Make the Grade" approach.  It's all very frustrating for those who work in the schools--tests that test (or even mis-test) only a tiny portion of what really matters, entire schools being labeled "failures" based on a fraction of what goes on in the school, "interventions" that no one really believes make a difference being forced on schools and teachers and students, and words like "rigor" and "data" being tossed around as if the words themselves have some kind of magical power.  It's hard to believe this mess is what some people call "reform." 

Standards, Standards Everywhere

On July 31 the New Mexico PED will be holding another hearing on the proposed new language arts standards for grades 9-12.   A number of teachers were at the last hearing and it looks like some of their suggestions were incorporated in the most recent draft, but there's still room for improvement.  You can find more on the time and place of the hearing and a link to the standards here.  

At the national level, an early draft of the proposed national standards was leaked last week.  Following the release, a number of groups weighed in with their opinions of the draft.  Based on just this small glimpse of the process, it's hard to imagine national standards won't become more about educational politics than about teachers and kids. 

Not More Nonsense?!

For lots of smart discussion about educational policy and the forces that are shaping schooling, read "Bridging Differences," a blog co-authored by Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.  Unfortunately, the news they bring often isn't good.  The sentence that caught my attention today was, "We’re in for lots of nonsense in the name of reform."  You can find it here (the blog, not the nonsense). 

More on Testing

A new study finds that high school exit exams may be having a negative impact on graduation rates. From Education Week:

Researchers found that, after 2004, when 10th graders took the exit exams for the first time, graduation rates across the four districts declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points each year.

During the same time period, student achievement, as measured by other state tests that the students take in 11th grade, did not significantly improve.

The detrimental effects of the new policy were harder on girls in the bottom achievement quartile than on boys. Girls experienced a 19-percentage point drop in graduation rates after the California High School Exit Exam, or CAHSEE, was implemented, while the graduation rate for boys with similar academic profiles decreased by 12 percentage points over the same period.

Likewise, graduation rates among the poorest-performing black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students declined by 15 to 19 percentage points following the enactment of the exit-exam policy. The comparable graduation-rate drop for white students in the same achievement quartile was 1 percentage point.

Read the rest here.

On Teaching "Those" Kids

NCTE President writes about "The Genteel Unteaching of America's Poor," in a recent essay available on the NCTE web site:

In too many schools, especially schools overwhelmed by poverty, writing is not about thinking but about copying; not about creating but about editing; not about persuading or telling or sharing or clarifying but about completing fill-in-the-blank activities or circling verbs in blue and nouns in red or counting the number of sentences in a paragraph to make sure the requisite three (or four or five) are there.