New Paper Exposes Stifling Effects Of Poverty On Young Students

Dr. Stephen Krashen forwarded this paper by Dr. David Berliner (AZ State U) to me last night after our #SOSChat Radio show.

It explains, in excruciating detail, the stifling effects poverty has on young children, and how the money spent on testing could be much better spent ameliorating the effects poverty has on students.

It's an important read, and an exclusive preview of the yet-to-be published paper. Nichols Final 1

TFT Welcomes Dr. Stephen Krashen

On Wednesday, August 24th at 3:30 I will be interviewing Dr. Stephen Krashen on Blog Talk Radio! I have lifted the Wikipedia information about the good Doctor and placed it here so you can get an idea of who he is, and what he has done, as well as why he should be heard.

He is a research machine.

I think I will ask him about his 1978 Venice Beach Open Incline Press/Nonsensical 100 meter dash win.

Hope you'll listen!

Work

Dr. Krashen has published more than 350 papers and books, contributing to the fields of second language acquisition, bilingual education, and reading. He is credited with introducing various influential concepts and terms in the study of second language acquisition, including the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis. Most recently, Krashen promotes the use of  free voluntary reading during second language acquisition, which he says "is the most powerful tool we have in language education, first and second."

Awards

• 1982 : winner of the Mildenberger Award, given for his book, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning (Prentice-Hall)
• 1985 : co-winner of the Pimsleur Award, given by the American Council of Foreign Language Teachers for the best published article
• 1986 : his paper "Lateralisation, language learning and the critical period" was selected as Citation Class by Current Contents
• 1993 : the Distinguished Presentation related to School Library Media Centers, was awarded to by editors of the School Library Media Annual
• 2005 : Krashen was inducted into the International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame.
• 2005 : elected at the National Association for Bilingual Education Executive Board.

Criticism

As education policy in Krashen’s home state of California became increasingly hostile to bilingualism, he responded with research critical of the new policies, public speaking engagements, and with letters written to newspaper editors. During the campaign to enact an anti-bilingual education law in California in 1998, known as Proposition 227, Krashen campaigned aggressively in public forums, media talk shows, and conducted numerous interviews with journalists writing on the subject. After other anti-bilingual education campaigns and attempts to enact regressive language education policies surfaced around the country, by 2006 it was estimated that Krashen had submitted well over 1,000 letters to editors.

In a front-page New Times Los Angeles article published just a week before the vote on Proposition 227, Jill Stewart penned an aggressive article titled 'Krashen Burn' in which she characterized Krashen as wedded to the monied interests of a "multi-million-dollar bilingual education industry." Stewart critically spoke of Krashen as the father of bilingual education. Krashen has been widely criticized in conservative and nativist political circles due to his influence on the field of language minority education, second language acquisition, and his efforts to educate the public on matters related to English language learners in schools.

Krashen has been an advocate for a more activist role by researchers in combating the public's misconceptions about bilingual education. Addressing the question of how to explain public opposition to bilingual education, Krashen queried, "Is it due to a stubborn disinformation campaign on the part of newspapers and other news media to deliberately destroy bilingual education? Or is it due to the failure of the profession to present its side of the story to reporters? There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence in support of the latter." Continuing, Krashen wrote, "Without a serious, dedicated and organized campaign to explain and defend bilingual education at the national level, in a very short time we will have nothing left to defend."

Personal

Dr. Krashen also holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and was the winner of the 1978 Venice Beach Open Incline Press/Nonsensical 100 meter dash Championship. He spent two years in Ethiopia teaching English and science with the Peace Corps.

From Wikipedia

Coming Up On TFT's Blog Talk Radio Show...

TFT Welcomes Peter Hooke

• by The Frustrated Teacher
• in Education
• on Fri, Aug 19, 2011 03:30PM

TFT Welcomes Sahila ChangeBringer

• by The Frustrated Teacher
• in Education
• on Mon, Aug 22, 2011 03:30PM

TFT Welcomes Dr. Stephen Krashen

• by The Frustrated Teacher
• in Education
• on Wed, Aug 24, 2011 03:30PM

Stephen Krashen On Poverty's Effect On Education

Education Experts: They Do Exist, And Can Tell You About Poverty

...

• There is very good evidence that our international tests scores are "low" because of poverty. Studies show that middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international tests. Our overall average is less than spectacular because we have such a high percentage of children living in poverty, at least 20%, the highest among all industrialized countries (Berliner, 2011). In urban areas, where test scores are the lowest, the poverty level is much higher: 51% in Cleveland and Detroit, 37% in Miami, and 35% in Dallas and New Orleans. (These figures are based on the federal poverty level. If we consider the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced lunch, between 130 and 185% of the federal level, the figure is much higher, with 81% of children in Detroit and 68% in Miami living in poverty. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (see e.g. here), families need an income of twice (200%) the official federal level to meet basic needs. Nearly 40% of children in the US live in families with incomes of less than 200% of the official federal level.)

• Studies show that children living in poverty suffer from conditions shown to impact educational attainment and school performance, such as "food insecurity," environmental toxins, lack of health care, and lack of access to books. The impact of these factors is enormous: No matter how good teaching is or how carefully a curriculum is put together, it will be of little value when students are hungry, malnourished, in poor health, and when they have little or no access to reading material.

• When these conditions are dealt with and alleviated, school performance improves. Providing food for hungry children has been shown to produce dramatic differences in behavior and performance in school (Berliner, 2009), having medical insurance improves school performance (Berliner, 2009), and increasing access to books as well as providing time to read for pleasure results in better literacy development (Shin and Krashen, 2009).

The obvious cure for poverty is full employment, with a living wage paid for honest work. Our society today provides neither of these, with unemployment high and with wages low: As of this writing, the average pay for a retail sales position, about $20,000 per year, is well below the federal poverty line for a family of four (Gibson, 2011).

...
via Living In Dialogue

Results Of The Poll

WHAT CORRELATES WITH ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AS SHOWN IN THE RESEARCH?

Excellent work. Socioeconomic status, which includes both choices voted for here and excludes the choices not selected, is what correlates with student achievement as shown in the research.

To those who claim we need to educate these kids out of poverty (I'm looking at you Obama, Duncan, Gates, Rhee, DFER, Guggenheim, Canada, and the rest) I say, enough already.

Here's some data to back this up from Stephen Krashen:

Protecting Students

Let's Call It Radical

Submitted to Newsweek but not published
04/03/2010

To the editor

Newsweek describes Pres. Obama's education plan as "centrist" ("More big effing deals," April 5, p. 33). Hardly. It is a radical plan, involving far more testing than we have ever seen in the history of American education.

According to the "Blueprint for Reform," released by the Department of Education in March, the new standards will be enforced with new tests which include "interim" tests in addition to those given at the end of year. No Child Left Behind only required reading and math tests. The Blueprint recommends testing in other subjects as well. The Blueprint also insists we measure growth, which could mean testing in the fall and in the spring, doubling the number of tests.

The most radical aspect of this plan is that there is no research showing that this vast expenditure of time and money will increase learning.

— Stephen Krashen

h/t SO

NCLB Pushback At The New York Times

Letters to the editor at the NYT:

To the Editor:

“Making ‘No Child’ Better” (editorial, Feb. 5) misses the point that the No Child Left Behind law is founded on faulty assumptions of top-down mandates, zero tolerance, narrow forms of assessment, and privatization. These are all popular nowadays, but have been shown to be ineffective in other sectors (health, corrections, welfare and so on) and have a dismal track record so far in education.

“Tightening up” the law will only prolong the agony.

President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary instead of the education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond has set authentic reform in education back by at least a decade. Educators aren’t the villains; we might actually know something about education and how to reform it. Consult us.

Gary L. Anderson
New York, Feb. 5, 2010

The writer is a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University.

•

To the Editor:

Die-hard backers of the No Child Left Behind law refuse to recognize that it has failed and needs a comprehensive overhaul. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, student performance was improving faster before the law than after it passed. Achievement gaps have not narrowed significantly.

No Child’s assumptions and strategies are deeply flawed. Updating the law’s name and making cosmetic changes are insufficient.

Real reform starts with determining why a school is not meeting standards, instead of test-driven, one-size-fits-all policies. Improvement must focus on building capacity to help students learn, not the fantasy that sanctions will transform educational quality.

Instead, Secretary Arne Duncan is pushing unproven nostrums like charter school expansion, which failed in Chicago, and linking teacher evaluations to test scores. These are no more likely to succeed than No Child Left Behind.

Congress needs to start over, drafting an education law that truly improves school quality and closes achievement gaps.

Monty Neill
Boston, Feb. 5, 2010

The writer is deputy director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, and chairman of the Forum on Educational Accountability.

•

To the Editor:

I was intrigued by your phrase “placing a qualified teacher in every classroom,” seemingly mandated by No Child Left Behind. Does anybody really believe that there is an untapped magic pool of “qualified teachers” out there waiting to be placed in the classrooms of the disadvantaged?

The way to guarantee qualified teachers is to train and nurture those who have already chosen teaching as a career. Until boards of education, school administrators, parents, politicians and the general public recognize that teachers are indeed professionals, and treat them as such, they cannot expect professional results.

Teachers respond positively and enthusiastically to praise, constructive suggestions and genuine attempts to improve their performance, as do professionals in other fields.

I taught for more than 20 years in the New York City school system, all of them in schools in disadvantaged areas. I watched earnest, hard-working, mostly new teachers succumb and ultimately fail in a system that featured little or no support, thoughtless supervisors, subpar physical plants and a general feeling that they were disdained by the central board and the public in general.

I submit that for No Child Left Behind ever to succeed, we must first incorporate a module entitled “No Teacher Left Behind.”

Richard J. Leimsider
Staten Island, Feb. 5, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“Making ‘No Child’ Better” reflects a disturbing tendency in your editorial stance toward educators. Without language to the contrary, words like “fraud” and “evasion” create the impression that education is rife with incompetence and conspiracies to hide it.

Certainly incompetence and cover-ups can be found in education, as in any profession, but so can a great many instances in which educators are doing remarkably well in addressing daunting challenges with inadequate resources. The public interest would be better served by more recognition of those educators, and by some acknowledgment that their resistance to “reform” may be based on well-founded judgments that some reform initiatives are actually counterproductive.

True educational reform will not come from measures intended to force recalcitrant educators to do the right thing, but from coupling reasonable accountability with the support that competent, dedicated educators need to provide a good education for all.

Paul Ammon
Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 5, 2010

The writer is professor and director of the Developmental Teacher Education Program, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.

•

To the Editor:

“Experts Say a Rewrite of Nation’s Main Education Law Will Be Hard This Year” (news article, Jan. 29) notes that No Child Left Behind was unpopular “partly because it requires schools to administer far more standardized tests.”

All educators understand the necessity of assessment, but it is our obligation to do the minimum amount of testing necessary, and no more. Every minute spent testing that is not necessary bleeds time from learning, and every dollar spent on testing that is not necessary is stolen from investments that really need to be made in schools.

Any new education law should result in less testing, not more.

Stephen Krashen
Los Angeles, Jan. 29, 2010

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education.

h/t Krashen

Krashen's Open Letter To Congress Re: LEARN Act

The LEARN Act promotes direct instruction at the expense of education. Sure, good teachers use all different kinds of techniques and tools in a day of teaching. All this scripting and removing of the human component means we are growing robots, not people. Thank goodness for the Stephen Krashens, the Deb Meiers, the Jim Horns, and the rest who keep the eduformers somewhat honest.

This is long, so I have chopped it (just read the rest when the time comes).

January 11, 2007

Senators Murray, Franken, Brown, Boxer, Feinstein Representatives Polis, Yarmouth, Miller, Waxman

Dear Members of Congress:

The Congress will soon vote on the LEARN Act (Senate Bill 2740, House Bill 4037). Enclosed are some documents outlining my concerns with LEARN. I tried to make them as straight-forward as possible.

The conclusions are simple: The core element of LEARN, namely the emphasis on "direct instruction" of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text structure, is not supported by scientific research. The research shows again and again that we acquire our competence in literacy through wide, extensive reading, which has been marginalized in LEARN.

The documents also comment on the fact that LEARN opens the door to an unprecedented amount of testing, a very bad idea at a time when children are already over-tested, when our schools have been turned into test-prep factories, and when our budgets are strained.

I conclude with some simple suggestions for improving education that cost far less than what LEARN calls for.

Contents:
1. LEARN Introduction
2. LEARN and Phonemic Awareness
3. LEARN and Phonics
4. LEARN and Vocabulary
5. LEARN and Text Structure
6. LEARN and Testing
7. LEARN Recommendations

Sincerely,

Stephen Krashen, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern Californa
skrashen@yahoo.com

1. Comments on the LEARN Act:

Introduction

I do not support the LEARN Act. As described in the Senate Bill, the LEARN Act is Reading First expanded to all levels. It is Reading First on steroids.

The approach required by LEARN for K-3 is identical to the five "essential components" of the National Reading Panel: "systematic, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonic decoding, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension."

The conclusions of the panel were thoroughly criticized by some of the most respected scholars in the field. The same five components became the foundation of Reading First, which failed every empirical test (e.g. Krashen, 2006, 2007, 2008).

To make matters worse, LEARN presents the same philosophy of literacy development for grades 4- 12: "direct and explicit instruction that builds academic vocabulary and strategies and knowledge of text structure for reading different kinds of texts within and across core academic subjects."

LEARN thus assumes that direct instruction is the only way children become literate, that "The intellectual and linguistic skills necessary for writing and reading must be developed through explicit, intentional, and systematic language activities" and assumes that there is no contrary view.

There is massive evidence that this approach is incorrect, as I will show in subsequent sections of this report. Even if it were valid, however, it is not at all clear that a certain methodology or theory should be enforced in the schools by law.

LEARN also endorses excessive testing, requiring "diagnostic, formative and summative assessments at all levels." This is an astonishing requirement at a time when children are already overwhelmed with tests, when schools are being turned into test-prep academies, and when education is facing severe budget cuts. It also presumes that we do not trust our teachers to evaluate their students (see LEARN and Testing).