[Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about readi

[richardallington at aol.com]

 David
The collapse of reading in scores in CA dates back to the passage of proposition 13 (under Reagan as gov) which limited property taxes to whatever you are paying today as long as you don't sell your house and also limited the tax levies school districts could levy. five years after prop 13 passed scores were down and have stayed down, even with the passage of new laws requiring a phonics based curriculum Iimplemented in last basal adoption where Open Court and H-M were only options) and phonics testing of teachers (virtually all passed). 

It is also wrong to call CA curriculum as whole language since it was a literature-based basal adoption and I know of no WL proponents who recommend a basal approach. Additionally, about one in ten classroom teachers ever received any professional development on the new curriculum model. So what I saw there was basal lessons using excerpts from children's books. Nothing really much different from the lessons before WL curriculum.

 

Dick Allington
University of Tennessee
A209 Bailey Education Complex

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Olson <dolson at oise.utoronto.ca>
To: richardallington at aol.com
Cc: richardallington at aol.com; tsticht at znet.com; reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk
Sent: Mon, Feb 1, 2010 3:38 pm
Subject: Re: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about  readi


Dear Colleagues:

Can anyone help refute the claim in S. Duhaene's "Reading in the Brain" that "the reading wars culminated in 1987 when the state of Californa... pass bills favoring the whole-language apprroach... and reading scores plummeted" in 1993 and 1994.  Hence, they went back to phonics training.  Perhaps it is true but I would be surprised if the case were that clear.

No doubt children must learn letter-sound correspondence; need they always be "taught explicitly"?  Perhaps they can be taught on a JIT (just in time) basis, ie. when they are needed.  I suppose this was what drove the combattants into the trenches (I hope not again).  

David Olson


 
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