By: KENRIC WARD
Sunshine State News January 14, 2012
More Florida high schools are earning A's and B's while only 39 percent of 10th-graders are reading at or above proficiency levels on the state's FCAT exam, Department of Education records show. Some 78 percent of high schools scored either an A or B grade in 2011, up from 71 percent last year. A-rated schools receive financial awards from the state of up to $150,000 per campus.
Yet high school students' academic competence is flat or falling. The 39 percent of students reading at or above Level 3 "proficiency" was the same as it was in 2010. Though math scores were better -- 71 percent of 10th-graders were "proficient" -- that was down 2 points from 2010.
The 2011 high school grades were boosted by a new formula that factors in more than scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Graduation rates, as well as participation and performance in advanced-placement courses, now count toward a school's grade.
The FCAT writing battery, where 90 percent of students score at or above the "proficient" level, helps pad the scores.
"Reading and math scores may not improve. In fact, they can decline, but a school can still improve its score by achieving growth in the other benchmarks," said Jason Caros, president of the Florida Council of the Social Studies.
Amid indications of campus grade inflation, the state Board of Education last month voted to raise the "cut scores" that determine which pupils are passing and which are failing. It was the first time in a decade that the state approved tougher standards.
The state expects that many more students will be required to take remedial lessons as a result of the higher score requirement, which first applies to the class of 2014. The new system will kick in with exams taken this coming spring.
Amber Winkler, a senior researcher for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said, "Florida should be lauded for raising its cut scores. Too many states are content to rest on their laurels, but Florida keeps raising the bar.
"Raising expectations now becomes even more important since Florida plans to implement new Common Core standards in 2015 -- which will require even more of students. There has to be continued pressure on the system to improve," Winkler said.
Meantime, the state Board of Education took another step to thin the herd of A-rated schools. Currently, a school must earn 525 points or more (on an 800-point scale) to earn an A grade. A final level hasn't been determined yet, but beginning in 2012-2013, if, for example, 75 percent of Florida’s high schools earn an A, an "automatic trigger" would raise the minimum threshold to 560 points the next year.
Jaryn Emhof, spokeswoman at Jeb Bush's education-reform think tank, Foundation for Florida's Future, hailed the state's moves. "The foundation has said standards need to be raised across the board," Emhof said.
Caros, an educator in Volusia County, says poor reading skills at middle schools and high schools are "a byproduct of the failure to teach core knowledge" in early grades. "Much of the reading elementary students engage in at school is fiction. While fiction is certainly important, a 2006 Stanford University study found that Florida’s failure to emphasize 'the acquisition of appropriate knowledge at each grade level' made comprehension of nonfiction texts very difficult for middle and high school students," Caros writes in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the James Madison Institute.
Citing one example, Caros asks: "Why would it be bad for someone to meet their Waterloo?" Without broad background knowledge, readers will find it difficult to make sense of the many historical and literary allusions that appear in readings," Caros says in his article, "Why Johnny Can't Understand What He Reads."
Still, many teachers and administrators bridle at the tougher, upcoming cut scores. Maintaining that academic deficiencies begin at the lower grade levels, high schools are particularly concerned.
Orange County School District Superintendent Ron Blocker told the Orlando Sentinel, "There will be blood on the table."
"Adding more focus to an already flawed assessment process will not result in real learning gains in reading," Caros predicted in an article written for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
But DOE Commissioner Gerard Robinson says the new standards will put high school students "on a pathway for colleges and careers in a far better way than we've ever seen before."
State officials say the whole testing system is being reformed as Florida replaces FCAT math, reading and writing exams with new “common core” exams in 2015.
Developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a consortium of states that won federal Race to the Top funds, the new exams will likely include two tests per subject.
It is not yet known how the "PARCC" tests will stack up against FCAT, but education observers point out that continual changes in test regimens thwart any longitudinal, apples-to-apples comparisons. Skeptics say that's exactly the intent and objective.
Whatever assessment devices and scoring systems Florida uses, Bill Mattox, resident fellow at James Madison Institute, says, "We ought to be raising the bar, not lowering it. Hold everyone -- students, teachers, parents -- to higher standards."
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/more-florida-high-schools-earn-a-while-fcats-fade
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2012
Monday, October 5, 2009
Reading Is Not a Skill--And Why This Is a Problem for the Draft National Standards
Today's guest is Psychology Professor Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia, who researches learning and the brain.
A draft of the voluntary national standards for reading was just released, and at first glance the 18 standards sound quite sensible: students should be able to determine what a text says, make inferences from it, discern the most important ideas, and so forth.
Many of the standards boil down to this notion: "The student will be able to comprehend the text.” For the others, comprehension is a prerequisite. The problem is that teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them. But reading comprehension is not a “skill” that can be taught directly.
We tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way. The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.
Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)
The writer could have included all that information. The writer gambled that the reader would know about puppies, carpets and landlords. A writer who doesn’t assume some prior knowledge on the part of her readers will write very boring prose. What happens if the reader doesn’t have the prior knowledge the writer assumed she had? The reader will be confused and comprehension breaks down.
This is exactly what happens for millions of poor readers. They can “read” (they can sound out the words on the page) but they can’t consistently comprehend. They read it, but they don’t “get it.”
Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.
In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.”
The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things--and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it. (This is only true once kids have cracked the code of letters and sounds and can apply that translation fluently-- say, 5th grade and after.)
Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?
To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost. Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.
Oftentimes, knowledge gaps can’t be filled by a strategy. For example, suppose you read this: “The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.”
In this instance, the writer assumed that the reader knew the definitions of “rendition,” “warrantless wiretaps,” what a state secret might be, and the significance of the announcement coming from the executive branch of the government, at the least.
If you know those things, comprehension is effortless. What strategy is going to lead you to correct guesses?
I didn’t pick that sentence randomly. It was the first sentence of the lead story of The Washington Post on the day I’m writing this post. If we want students to be able to read a serious newspaper, they need prior knowledge.
How do students get prior knowledge? It accumulates through years of exposure to newspapers, serious magazines, books, conversations with knowledgeable people. It should also come from a content-rich curriculum in school.
Oddly enough, the new national standards actually say that. The standards documents lists “have a strong content base” as one of the things that college-ready readers tend to have.
But the standards themselves don’t recommend that we ensure that students “have a strong content base” as a way to ensure that they are good readers! (A few months ago, I created a video called “Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading” that explains this. You can see it here on YouTube.
Instead, the standards document lists things that students ought to be able to do (summarize, find the main idea, etc.) that invite states, districts, and teachers to design curricula emphasizing practice in those skills.
The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country.
Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.
By Valerie Strauss | September 28, 2009; 7:30 AM ET
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/willingham-reading-is-not-a-sk.html
A draft of the voluntary national standards for reading was just released, and at first glance the 18 standards sound quite sensible: students should be able to determine what a text says, make inferences from it, discern the most important ideas, and so forth.
Many of the standards boil down to this notion: "The student will be able to comprehend the text.” For the others, comprehension is a prerequisite. The problem is that teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them. But reading comprehension is not a “skill” that can be taught directly.
We tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way. The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.
Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)
The writer could have included all that information. The writer gambled that the reader would know about puppies, carpets and landlords. A writer who doesn’t assume some prior knowledge on the part of her readers will write very boring prose. What happens if the reader doesn’t have the prior knowledge the writer assumed she had? The reader will be confused and comprehension breaks down.
This is exactly what happens for millions of poor readers. They can “read” (they can sound out the words on the page) but they can’t consistently comprehend. They read it, but they don’t “get it.”
Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.
In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.”
The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things--and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it. (This is only true once kids have cracked the code of letters and sounds and can apply that translation fluently-- say, 5th grade and after.)
Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?
To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost. Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.
Oftentimes, knowledge gaps can’t be filled by a strategy. For example, suppose you read this: “The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.”
In this instance, the writer assumed that the reader knew the definitions of “rendition,” “warrantless wiretaps,” what a state secret might be, and the significance of the announcement coming from the executive branch of the government, at the least.
If you know those things, comprehension is effortless. What strategy is going to lead you to correct guesses?
I didn’t pick that sentence randomly. It was the first sentence of the lead story of The Washington Post on the day I’m writing this post. If we want students to be able to read a serious newspaper, they need prior knowledge.
How do students get prior knowledge? It accumulates through years of exposure to newspapers, serious magazines, books, conversations with knowledgeable people. It should also come from a content-rich curriculum in school.
Oddly enough, the new national standards actually say that. The standards documents lists “have a strong content base” as one of the things that college-ready readers tend to have.
But the standards themselves don’t recommend that we ensure that students “have a strong content base” as a way to ensure that they are good readers! (A few months ago, I created a video called “Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading” that explains this. You can see it here on YouTube.
Instead, the standards document lists things that students ought to be able to do (summarize, find the main idea, etc.) that invite states, districts, and teachers to design curricula emphasizing practice in those skills.
The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country.
Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.
By Valerie Strauss | September 28, 2009; 7:30 AM ET
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/willingham-reading-is-not-a-sk.html
Friday, May 15, 2009
Another Argument in Favor of Teaching Content!
Our thanks to Jason Caros for bringing to our attention the work of Professor Daniel Willingham, author of Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom . FASSS has been strongly arguing for years that the work of cognitive psychology is reaffirming the contention of educational theorists like E.D. Hirsch and Robert Marzano that 'content knowledge' is vital to reading comprehension. Supervisors will remember our sharing the "Background Knowledge" powerpoints [see the training links area of this website] with former D.O.E. Chanellor Cheri Yecki and Deputy Bureau Chief Todd Clark about this very issue a few years ago. When Jason and Jack made it a point to bring out the reading titles and topics in the D.O.E. approved "Third Grade Reading Portfolio" and compared these with titles and topics from the typical third grade CORE KNOWLEDGE curriculum, Dr. Yecki could only profess that she could only 'wish for a magic wand to be able to immediately change the booklet into something more meaningful.' Urged to make the revision of the third grade portfolio a priority by including many more non-fiction readings for children, FASSS is aware that minor changes have been made, but for the most part these were superficial and the document remains an embarassement to the Department.
The influence of cognitive psychologists have indeed made considerable headway with the legislature in recent years. Florida's assessment statute was heavily amended two years ago with repeated references to the need for FCAT to assess not only 'skills' but 'content knowledge'. It appears that FASSS members who have been showcasing to other educators in their districts the arguments of Marzano and Hirsch are indeed making a difference. Add to these educational theorists the new work of Dr. Daniel T. Willingham from the U. of Virginia. His colleague, E.D. Hirsch, writes of the above work, "This readable, practical book by a distinguished cognitivescientist explains the universal roots of effective teaching and learning. With great wit and authority it practices the principles it preaches. It is the best teachers' guide I know of—a classic that belongs in the book bag of every teacher from preschool to grad school."
—E. D. Hirsch, Jr., university professor emeritus, University of Virginia
Educators now have the benefit of a powerful video that clearly illustrates the points these pundits have been making for years. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc .
All Social Studies educators should be familiar with their work and should share it with the school administrators in their district.
The influence of cognitive psychologists have indeed made considerable headway with the legislature in recent years. Florida's assessment statute was heavily amended two years ago with repeated references to the need for FCAT to assess not only 'skills' but 'content knowledge'. It appears that FASSS members who have been showcasing to other educators in their districts the arguments of Marzano and Hirsch are indeed making a difference. Add to these educational theorists the new work of Dr. Daniel T. Willingham from the U. of Virginia. His colleague, E.D. Hirsch, writes of the above work, "This readable, practical book by a distinguished cognitivescientist explains the universal roots of effective teaching and learning. With great wit and authority it practices the principles it preaches. It is the best teachers' guide I know of—a classic that belongs in the book bag of every teacher from preschool to grad school."
—E. D. Hirsch, Jr., university professor emeritus, University of Virginia
Educators now have the benefit of a powerful video that clearly illustrates the points these pundits have been making for years. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc .
All Social Studies educators should be familiar with their work and should share it with the school administrators in their district.
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