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What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading

A report from The National Council on Teacher Quality: http://www.nctq.org/nctq

ABSTRACT

The persistent reading struggles and failure of nearly 40 percent of all American children, little improved over time, has led to aggressive government-funded efforts in school districts to train veteran teachers in the science of reading. The accumulated scientific findings of nearly 60 years of research gained the nation's attention with the release of a number of significant reviews and compendia of the research beginning in 1990, but most notably the National Reading Panel report in 2000. The findings call for explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics, guided oral reading to improve fluency, direct and indirect vocabulary building, and exposure to a variety of reading comprehension strategies. All this attention on veteran teachers begs the question: How are future teachers being prepared to teach reading? In this study, the National Council on Teacher Quality makes a unique effort to learn what aspiring teachers are taught about reading instruction. From a randomly selected, representative sample of 72 education schools, NCTQ reviewed 222 required reading courses, including evaluations of syllabi as well as 226 required reading texts. Schools were scored on how well their courses presented the core components of the science of reading. The findings are alarming. Only 15 percent of the education schools provide future teachers with minimal exposure to the science. Moreover, course syllabi reveal a tendency to dismiss the scientific research in reading, continuing to espouse approaches to reading that will not serve up to 40 percent of all children. Course texts were equally disappointing. Only four of the 226 texts were rated as "acceptable" for use as a general, comprehensive textbook. This distressing trend in teacher training demands attention from federal and state governments, professional organizations dedicated to improving and supporting education schools, textbook publishers, and educations schools themselves. The report closes with recommendations to ameliorate this serious failure in adequately preparing teachers in the best practices of reading instruction.

To see the complete report, please go to:
http://www.nctq.org/nctq/images/nctq_reading_study_app.pdf

For additional copies or the full version of this study, contact:

National Council on Teacher Quality
1225 19th Street N.W., Suite 800
Washington, D.C. 20036
Tel 202 222-0561, Fax 202 222-0570, Web http://www.nctq.org

Failing College: Why We Must Align High School Curriculum with College Expectations

Millions of high school seniors have signed college acceptance letters as of May 1, but does making it into college ensure academic success and a degree?

A new Policy Perspectives paper from WestEd argues that high schools and colleges haven't aligned their separate education systems enough to eliminate college remedial work, decrease college dropout rates, and speed the time toward earning a baccalaureate degree.

In What We Must Do to Create a System That Prepares for College Success, David T. Conley, founder and director of the University of Oregon's Center for Educational Policy Research, outlines the alarming indicators of a system that is not functioning as efficiently as it could:

• Between 30 and 60 percent of students now require remedial college courses, an increase over previous years.
• For those who make it to college graduation, on average, it now takes six years to earn a four-year college degree.
• While more companies now expect a college degree as a baseline for employment, the percentage of high school students who go on to earn bachelor's degrees has remained relatively constant over the past 25 years.

"If we are to address such problems," says Conley, "it's going to take a coordinated, concerted reform effort involving all stakeholders—policymakers, high school educators, college faculty and administrators, parents, and students."

Conley proposes several actions to smooth the transition between high school and college and ensure academic success:

1. States should align high school exit exams and other state assessments with college success standards so that scores on state tests also provide diagnostic information to students about their college readiness.
2. College campuses should utilize placement tests that are consistent across campuses and clearly connected with success in entry-level coursework, and then communicate to high schools the content, the cut scores, and the justification for these tests.
3. College and high school faculty should collaborate more, sharing course materials and student work across institutions.
4. High schools should prepare students for the independent, self-motivated learning environment they will encounter in college, and create environments that develop the intellectual maturity of secondary students in areas such as critical thinking, analytic thinking, persistence, and inquisitiveness.
5. High school students should learn how to actively monitor their own knowledge and skills and seek courses that ask more of them in writing, reasoning, research, and other key areas required in college.
6. Parents should be familiar with the general expectations for knowledge, skill, and work quality that their high school children should demonstrate to be college ready. For those parents for whom this is challenging or impossible, high schools should make a greater effort to make these determinations and to communicate to parents regarding their children's readiness for college.
    

According to Conley, such changes would send a consistent message to high school students about what they should be doing to prepare for college success, rather than setting up students for possible failure in a poorly aligned K-16 education system.

A free PDF download of this Policy Perspectives paper is available at http://www.WestEd.org/collegeknowledge.

Achieving Quality Middle-Level Education

The National Middle School Association (NMSA), the nation's largest organization focusing exclusively on the education of young adolescents, ages 10 through 14, has announced a national campaign to build collaboration between educators, families, and policymakers at the national, state, and local levels. The campaign is based on a just-released report, "Success in the Middle: A Policymaker's Guide to Achieving Quality Middle Level Education."

"For any type of educational reform to happen and be lasting, it must be based on a shared vision between educators, policymakers, and family/community members," said Sue Swaim, NMSA executive director in announcing the report. "The United States still does not have a cohesive national policy for the middle grades, which represents one-third of a student's K-12 education.

"While policymakers have focused on high school reform they have skipped over critical middle-level reform, which is the gateway to successfully achieving high-performing schools at both the middle and high school levels.

"If No Child Left Behind legislation is to succeed, it must address the needs of these young adolescents and the educators who work with them. Middle level education policy can not be an add-on to either elementary or high school. The issues of middle level education are a distinct part and a crucial link of the K-12 continuum."

The report sets five goals for policymakers and provides specific action steps at the federal, state, and local levels. The goals are to:

• ensure that all middle-level students participate in challenging, standards-based curricula and engaging instruction, and that their progress is measured by appropriate assessments, resulting in continual learning and high achievement;
• support the recruitment and hiring of teachers and administrators who have strong content knowledge and the ability to use research-based instructional strategies and assessment practices appropriate for middle-level students;
• support organizational structures and a school culture of high expectations that enable both middle-level students and educators to succeed;
• develop ongoing family and community partnerships to provide a supportive and enriched learning environment for every middle-level student; and
• facilitate the generation, dissemination, and application of research needed to identify and implement effective practices that lead to continual student learning and high academic achievement at the middle level. The campaign, which began yesterday with a number of meetings on Capitol Hill, includes NMSA members and other middle-level educators taking this message directly to state legislators, departments of education, local school schools, governors, and other policymakers.

"The message in this report is essential for the 20 million young adolescents who attend our middle level schools every day," said Patti Kinney, NMSA president and principal of Oregon's Talent Middle School, during the briefing. "We know putting these recommendations on paper won't do the job. We must put them in the minds and hearts of the policymakers who are impacting middle schools."

A copy of "Success in the Middle: A Policymaker's Guide to Achieving Quality Middle Level Education" is available at
http://www.nmsa.org/portals/0/pdf/advocacy/policy_guide/NMSA_Policy_Guide.pdf

How Do Your State's Math and Reading Standards Measure Up?

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students to be "proficient" in math and reading by 2014 but allows each state to determine its own level of proficiency. Some states are leaving their citizens with a misleading impression of their accomplishments by grading students against low standards, while those states that have high standards may suffer by comparison.

Education Next editors Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess first revealed this discrepancy a year ago ("Johnny Can Read . . . in Some States," Education Next, summer 2005) by comparing states' passing percentages on their math and reading tests with their passing percentages on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Now, the Education Next editors have issued a new "report card" for each state.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

"We are not evaluating state tests, nor are we grading states on the performance of their students," explain Peterson and Hess. "We are checking for 'truth in advertising,' investigating whether state-announced proficiency levels mean what they say."

This year, a total of 48 states were assessed, including nine new ones. In the good news category, a handful of states have kept their standards rigorous for a second consecutive year, each assessing their own performance on a particularly tough curve. Massachusetts, South Carolina, Wyoming, Maine, and Missouri once again earned As.

Montana topped all others as the nation's most improved state, and Texas, Arkansas, and Wisconsin significantly boosted their proficiency standards over last year.

The bad news is that some states that had been in good standing are letting their standards slide. The biggest decline was in Arizona, with significant drops (in order of magnitude) in Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota, and Idaho.

In the "cream puff" category, states with already low standards have done nothing to raise them. Oklahoma and Tennessee both earned Fs because their self-reported performance is much higher than can be justified by the NAEP results. States with nearly equally embarrassing D minuses included Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

To learn your state's grade and how it was graded, go to http://www.educationnext.org/20063/28.html

Report on the State of American Schools Shows High School Students Challenged by Math and Science

High school students in the United States are consistently outperformed by those from Asian and some European countries on international assessments of mathematics and science, according to The Condition of Education 2006 report released today by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fourth graders, by comparison, score as well or better than most of their international peers, although their counterparts in other countries are gaining ground.

"While our younger students are making progress on national assessments and are ahead on some international measures, the same cannot be said at the high school level," said Mark Schneider, NCES Commissioner. "U.S. students do relatively well in reading literacy when compared to their international peers, but they are outperformed in mathematics and science and our 15-year-old students trail many of our competitors in math and science literacy."

The Condition of Education is a congressionally mandated report that provides an annual statistical portrait of education in the United States. The 50 indicators included in the report cover all aspects of education, from student achievement to school environment and from early childhood through postsecondary education.

The report shows that U.S. public schools have the most diverse student population than at any other time in history. In addition, more individuals are enrolling in postsecondary education, and more bachelor's degrees have been awarded than in the past.

Among the report's other findings:

Elementary/Secondary Achievement

• U.S. fourth-grade students had higher reading literacy scores than students in 23 of the 34 participating countries, according to one international assessment. In mathematics, fourth graders' performance was better than their peers in 13 countries but lower than 11 others. In science, students in only three countries scored higher. However, while other countries made gains from 1995 in mathematics and science, U.S. scores were unchanged.
• U.S. eighth graders improved their standings relative to students of 21 other countries that participated in international assessments in math and science from 1995 to 2003.
• U.S. 15-year-olds had lower average scores in mathematics and science literacy compared with most of their peers from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries.
• Fourth graders showed improvements in math and science, with rising scores between 1996 and 2005 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
• Twelfth graders' performance in NAEP science declined between 1996 and 2005.

Postsecondary Education

• More students are enrolling in colleges and getting degrees, and the enrollment increase is projected to continue through 2015.
• The number of bachelor's degrees awarded increased by 33 percent between 1989–1990 and 2003–2004, while the number of associate's degrees increased by 46 percent.
• The sole decline among the top five most popular degree fields between 1989–1990 and 2003–2004 was in engineering and engineering technologies (five percent).

America's Students Today

• Nineteen percent of children ages 5–17 speak a language other than English at home.
• Minority students make up 43 percent of public school enrollment.
• Female college enrollment passed male enrollment in 1978, and the gender gap has widened and is expected to grow.

NCES is the statistical center of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. The full text of The Condition of Education 2006 (in HTML format), along with related data tables and indicators from previous years, can be viewed at:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe

Newsweek's Top 100 High School List Draws Criticism

I don't think Newsweek's "America's Best High Schools" list (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12532678/site/newsweek) lives up to its name.

Several schools in the "Top 100" reported half or fewer of their African-American students graduating. All of those schools are still on Newsweek's list this year.

For example, Atlantic Community High School, in Delray Beach, Florida, ranked #25 on Newsweek's list, reported a 50-percent graduation rate for its African-American students in 2004, according to its detailed NCLB report card from the Florida Department of Education.

http://web.fldoe.org/nclb/default.cfm?action=report2&level=School&school=0862&district=50

About 45 percent of the school's 2,000+ students are African American, and about 35 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. That's not an affluent, lily-white suburban school, like many on Newsweek's list, but it's not "high-poverty, high-minority," either. In fact, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at Atlantic Community is lower than the statewide average in Florida, which is 46 percent. Now, I think it's a scandal that nearly half of Florida's kids are economically disadvantaged, but does that mean we shouldn't expect the state's high schools to get more than half their black students to graduation?

Further, there are schools on Jay's own list that prove him wrong. For example, this year's school #87, YES College Preparatory School in Houston, Texas, has a student enrollment that is 92 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black, and has 75 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch—a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students than all but one other school in Newsweek's list. But YES reports a 93.9-percent graduation rate, and 100 percent of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges.

Atlantic may be doing great things for some of its students, but a method that ranks it higher than YES seems to defy common sense.

To see the complete article, please go to:
http://www.quickanded.com/2006/05/best-we-can-expect.html

States Invest Heavily in Data Systems, But Have a Long Way to Go

Research Center Grades the States on School Tech: West Virginia Leads Nation With an "A," Nevada Trails With a "D-"

While the No Child Left Behind Act has touched off a boom in school data collection, much work needs to be done before the vast amounts of student information can be harnessed to improve learning, according to Technology Counts 2006: The Information Edge: Using Data to Accelerate Achievement, a new report from Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center. The report is based on a systematic analysis by the EPE Research Center of the structure and quality of states' computerized data systems, and how those systems are being used. It comes at a time when states are under tremendous pressure to get technology systems and access to data up and running as genuinely useful tools to accelerate student learning on a broad scale.

In a survey of state education officials conducted for the report, the EPE Research Center finds that despite the federal government's push to make data central to instructional decisions, states are still far away from putting their electronic information into a form that local educators can easily use. . . .

Report Cards: Grading the States

For the first time ever, Technology Counts issues letter grades for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, ranking their efforts to improve access to and use of school technology and the ability of teachers to use it more effectively. While the nation earned an overall grade of C-plus, West Virginia and Virginia earned the highest marks, with grades of A and A-minus, respectively. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a small group of states is lagging behind. Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island all received an overall D grade, while Nevada ranked last in the nation with a D-minus. Grades are based on where states stand in three core areas of state policy and practice, including access to instructional technology, use of technology, and capacity to effectively use technology. They are contained both in the print version of the report and in new online-only State Technology Reports created by the EPE Research Center.

For the complete article, please go to:
http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/tc/2006/TC06_press.pdf

To access individual state reports please go to:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2006/05/04/index.html?levelId=1000

Got Math? High School Courses Especially Important for Low-Income, First-Generation College Students

Being able to take high-quality, high-intensity classes during high school can play a key role in the success of students whose parents have either lower incomes or lower educational levels. Though these students are less likely to enroll in college than students from more advantaged backgrounds, pursuit of rigorous classes in high school can help change that.

The relationship between high school math and college enrollment is particularly striking: just 27 percent of high school graduates in the U.S. whose parents did not go to college enroll in a four-year institution within two years. However, this rate jumps to 64 percent for students who take at least one math course beyond Algebra II.

The reason? Taking higher-level math most likely reflects a lifetime of high expectations, previous success with math, and a willingness to take challenging courses—attributes that are key to college enrollment and that students may have acquired from parents, teachers, other role models, or on their own. In fact, of all pre-college courses, the highest level of math taken in high school has the strongest influence on degree completion.

For tips on how to establish high expectations for students as early as middle school and for assistance in planning for higher education academically and financially, visit http://www.AIE.org.

TG provides this Web site as a public service to help all families and students achieve their educational and career dreams.

SOURCES: State of Student Aid and Higher Education in Texas 2006; National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Students Whose Parents Did Not Go to College: Postsecondary Access, Persistence, and Attainment, by Susan Choy, 2001
(http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001126.pdf)

About TG

TG is a public, nonprofit corporation that helps create access to higher education for millions of families and students through its role as an administrator of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP). As a public service, TG provides Edufacts, a publication containing current information about education issues, on a monthly basis. Edufacts is one of the many ways in which TG promotes awareness of education issues, advising the public on national and state trends in education and student aid, and serving as a premier source of information.

Educational Impact of Video Games: Indiana Teacher Reports Findings

A group of Indiana high school students traded in their textbooks for a multi-player video game and achieved higher test scores than students learning the exact same material the old-fashioned way.

Under the watchful tutelage of David McDivitt, an enterprising Social Studies teacher at Oak Hill High School in Converse, 64 sophomore students played "Making History," the historical simulation game from Muzzy Lane Software. Another group of students used their standard history textbooks along with the usual lectures and assignments that define a typical day in high school.

Both groups were attempting to learn the same material: the political and economic causes of World War II.

Both groups were tested on their knowledge of key events, such as the 1938 Munich Conference and their general knowledge of European geography.

One group—the students who played "Making History"—learned more facts and wrote more sophisticated essays in tests conducted after a week of game play. According to Mr. McDivitt, "Making History" also addresses several key components of Indiana's state curriculum guidelines for secondary education.

"For every teacher using a video game in the classroom there are probably a hundred others watching and wondering about the real educational impact of this technology," says Mr. McDivitt.

"I am not an expert in statistics unless it has to do with points allowed by my defense on the Oak Hill Golden Eagle football team. But what I am seeing here is the game players are doing better on assessment. The kids who played the game scored as well or better on every single test question we administered."

Mr. McDivitt applied a common set of questions to both groups of students prior to game week, and then tested the students with the same questions after each group had completed their learning cycles.

What he found was a noticeable and in some cases stunning difference in the degree to which the game-play students improved compared with the textbook students.

Here are some of the highlights (percentages indicate the relative increase in performance from the pre-lesson test to the post-lesson test):

• Identify the countries of Europe on a blank map outline:
  • Game Players: 70%
  • Non-Game Players: 45%

• Explain the significance of the 1938 Munch Conference:
  • Game Players: 90%
  • Non-Game Players: 55%

• Define the reasons for the start of World War II:
  • Game Players: 67%
  • Non-Game Players: 35%

"I am not saying that games are the panacea for all of education's problems," says Mr. McDivitt. "But there is no doubt anymore that the right video game integrated properly with traditional curriculum has a clear and meaningful impact on the quality of learning."