Oregon Education Today

Solving the Reading Problem

Phil Robbins

Success in high school and later college begins in the first and second grades.  It is not only important that the child learns to read to TO READ WELL.  And herein lies the problem.  It is not easy for the average parent to determine how well his child is reading because there is little consistency between benchmarks or standards for measuring achievement in different schools, different schools districts, different states or on state and federal tests.  It is better to train your child to read well on all types of non-fiction material than to depend on test results.

To accomplish this,  one should first make sure that this child is well grounded in phonics, an important part of the English language.  In fact, in Parade Magazine's article dated September 23, 2007, "Can Bill Gates Fix Our Failing Schools?," Gates argues for using phonics to teach reading.  "When we gave up phonics," he says, "we destroyed the reading ability of those kids."

So what's the situation now?  The schools are teaching phonics along with the whole language approach, but often not very effectively.  In computer jargon they are teaching what we might call "Phonics Lite."  Most schools do not use a comprehensive, structured program.  Using this approach, if the child does not learn to read, they can blame phonics and not the way it is taught.

What can parents do?  First, get a good phonics program to teach their children. There are a lot of commercial programs on the market--Hooked on Phonics (lots of songs), The Phonics Game (card games), Zoo Phonics (uses animals for learning), Jolly Phonics (more traditional), Frontline Phonics (claims to be fun and exciting), and scads of others.

Then we have all the phonics materials produced by the major textbook publishers.  These are usually complete programs that include workbooks, flash cards, specially designed books to read,  sets of overhead transparencies, all kinds of computer software, and more.  Of course, the whole idea is to put together colorful packages of expensive printing that they can sell to schools for tens of thousands of dollars.  Even the commercial products often include special reading materials to justify the cost of the programs.  The sales pitch is that your child is at risk in learning to read unless the experience is fun, exciting, entertaining and probably takes place in some type of Fantasyland.  But when the kids grow up and fail to function in Realityland, everyone in the education system has a long list of reasons why things went wrong.

Parent's Guide to Teaching Phonics.  This is the program that I would recommend, not just because I developed it, but because it has a lot of advantages not found in others. Let's take a look.

• It is comprehensive and highly structured.  It comprises 16 units covering all aspects of phonics--short and long vowel sounds, initial and terminal double and triple blends in combination with vowel sounds, word families, digraphs and diphthongs (vowel combinations that make a variety of sounds), two-syllable words, common endings, unusual sounds and combination, words with silent letters, irregular combinations, and more.
• The course provides instruction using either written or sound files that walk the parent and child throughevery exercise so no prior knowledge of phonics or teaching is required.  Simple to use--just open the unit that you are studying; then open your media player and click on the appropriate sound file; finally, bring the visual unit back on screen while the sound file plays by clicking on the task bar on the bottom of the screen.
• Vocabulary lists including definitions , arranged by phonics unit and exercise, are another important part of the course.  What is the point of the child learning to read and pronounce words if he doesn't know what they mean?  A typical example of a vocabulary entry is: 

  fad (f²d) n. A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze.

The list for Unit 1 starts out with ant, apple, bad, bat, cab, cat, dab, etc.  Unit 2 starts  out with add, Al, am, an, at, Bab, ban, gap, etc.  The same thing is done with the other short vowels: e,i, o, and u.  Unit 3 starts out with bump, camp, damp, dump, lamp, lump, etc.  Needless to say, as the child progresses through the course, he learns thousands of new words far faster than he will in school.

These vocabulary lists serve two other purposes:  (1) The child can reinforce what he has learned just by reading the words in blue.  (2)  Children can be tested for their knowledge of phonics by having them read the works in bluue.  Parents can quickly tell whether their children need this type of training.

The parent and child can complete the entire course of 16 units in about 4 months spending 20 to 30 minutes a day.  The entire course comes on two CD's complete with visual course files, sound files and vocabulary files.  You can also teach the course without a computer by printing out the visual files and playing the sound files on any inexpensive CD player.

                                           Proposal

The purpose of the following proposal is to give every student in Oregon, kindergarten through the second grade, and their parents as well as others an opportunity to try out the first three units of Phonics for Parents on CD for $7.00.  This is to cover the cost of manufacturing, packaging and mailing.  The CD includes the complete visual materials, sound files and vocabulary files for the first three units.  And if parents decide to purchase the whole course, we'll even subtract the seven dollars from the special promotion price of $50.00.  To order send $7.00 check, cash or money order to PAR Publishing Company, 8964 SE Bristol Park Drive, Happy Valley, OR 97086.

Finding Solutions to Oregon's Education Problems

Phil Robbins

It is one thing to define the problems and shortcomings of the education establishment; it is quite another to find solutions that work in the real world.  Let's summarize some of the problems previously discussed in this blog and then look at some alternative approaches to solving these problems.

• Inadequate reading instruction in the first and second grades leading to poor student achievement in the higher grades.
• Inadequate composition (writing) instruction in the junior and senior years in high school leaving large percentages of students incapable of doing college work.
• Both of these skills along with the inability to do higher math lead to expensive remedial courses in the first year of college that do not earn credit toward a college degree.
• Politicians pour billions of dollars into areas that have little or no effect on student achievement such as salaries, insurance, facilities, fuel and lowering class size.  With respect to class size, does anyone seriously expect that lowering class size from say 27 to 25 students will have any effect upon the student's ability to read, write or do math?
• Only one to two percent of most budgets are allocated to textbooks and teaching materials, the basis for student achievement.  A great teacher without textbooks and other teaching materials has as much chance of educating students as a first-class carpenter trying to frame a house without a hammer, saw and a square.

                 New Approaches to Solving These Problems            In this post I'll discuss a few of these problems in a general way and then specifically and in detail in future posts.

Reading                                                                                                        Reading instruction must have a strong, systematic phonics component if students are going to have a good foundation for reading advanced materials, becoming good spellers and developing extensive vocabularies.  For several decades there has been a great debate on the pros and cons of the whole language approach and the phonics approach to teaching reading with the whole language approach holding sway with the majority of educators.  Because of the dismal results, about fifteen years ago the public and legislatures began demanding a return to phonics, so today there is usually a mixture of both approaches being taught in most classroom, with mixed results.  It is not a question of whether phonics is taught but to what extent and how it is taught.  There is a better way, and I'll discuss a program that works in detail in my next post.

Writing                                                                                                     Writing well in college requires knowledge of composition, grammar, punctuation as well as the ability to think. In most school districts there are some language arts teachers that do an adequate job of teaching composition, but most do not.  How do we know?  It is reflected by the large numbers of entering freshmen failing college writing placement exams.

There are a number of reasons for this.  Whereas today schools tend to put a great deal of emphasis on reading and math, most schools do not demand the same level of excellence in writing.  Most language arts teachers are not writers themselves and do not have a strong first-hand knowledge of style principles, idea development devices or the various kinds of formatting used in report writing.  Not only that, few teachers want to spend endless hours reading and evaluating hundreds of pages of student writing, much of which is mind numbing and riddled with errors.

Furthermore, there is the problem of textbooks.  There are some schools where students are taught without textbooks in some subjects.  For instance, instead of assigning a student a grammar book, the teacher gives him a handout sheet with an assignment and a few instructions on it that was obtained from the Internet.  By the same token, teachers' lesson plans are often downloaded from the Internet for free or on a paid subscription basis.  One can only guess at the quality of this kind of curriculum planning and execution.

Schools as Information Repositories                                                    Schools, and public schools in particular, have an almost monopolistic hold on learning materials and the means of dispensing education.  At the end of a semester, a student goes on to another class or summer vacation, and the sources of his learning (textbooks, other teaching materials and teacher knowledge) remain with the school.  Nothing goes with the student; there is no way for him to review or reflect on what he has learned during the school year.  Thorndike's and Ebbinghaus's forgetting curves set in, and without reinforcement it is not long before he has forgotten most of what he had learned.

This need not be the case.  Many parents often do their best to have educational materials in the home.  This is most important in skill subjects such as reading, writing, math, grammar and punctuation--things that don't change much.  Modern technology makes possible putting whole textbooks on a 15-cent CD or a 25-cent DVD.  The real problem is that politicians at all levels perpetuate the traditional monopoly by their funding practices instead of looking for solutions outside the box.  For instance, why not put information, exercises and so forth on a CD and give it to the student to take home and keep?  Think of the range of possibilities?

      

High School Deficiencies Have Deep Roots

Phil Robbins

During the past year the emphasis in improving K-12 education has shifted from the elementary and middle school levels to high school.  In part this is due to standardized test results as well as criticism from the colleges and universities that high schools are not preparing students for college-level work.  And in general, these concerns focus on four areas: reading, writing, mathematics and science.

      Synergistic Relationship between High School and Lower Levels     One should not underestimate the effect of skills, study habits, curriculum and attitudes learned in elementary and middle school upon student performance in high school.  And the same is true of K-12 education and its effect upon the student's ability to do college work.  This is not a particularly difficult concept for most people to understand although we find many professional educators telling us how well students are doing in elementary school and how poorly they are doing in high school.  Their conclusion then is for us to overhaul the education program at the secondary level.

Let's take an example.  Schools test reading in the third grade, and we are told that the kids are doing great; 80% are meeting the benchmarks and standards that have been set for them.  Then their reading is tested in the tenth grade, and we learn that only 54% are meeting Oregon's criteria.  On the surface it appears that on standardized tests that the longer students go to school, the worse they do.  It doesn't make any sense.  There are a lot of possible reasons for this.  One can construct tests to get any kind of results he wants.  Maybe the tests are not measuring the same thing in the third and tenth grades.  Maybe the experts are measuring different cognitive levels as defined by Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  What is going on?  It is hard to tell.  No one tells the public.

Looking at the results of college placement exams may be of more practical value.  As I mentioned in my May 22 post, large numbers of graduating high school seniors are failing college placement exams--even those with high grades.  Some colleges blame this on the alignment of K-12 curriculum with college requirements.  For instance, some college officials note that 90% of K-12 reading focuses on fiction--short stories, novels and the like whereas college curriculum focuses 90% on non-fiction.

                         What Parents Need to Know                                             In spite of the fact that education experts try to impress the public with the complexity of education, it can be reduced to a few simple facts.  In school the student needs to learn two things: (1) skills and (2) content.  The basic skills are reading and writing.  We are not addressing specialized skills such as those required in medical practice (surgery), law (cross-examination) or various trade occupations.  Math is a subject that requires both skill and content.  The content courses are those like economics, history, social studies, biology, chemistry, physics, literature and so forth.  Obviously, a student is not going to do well in content courses without a good foundation in a skill such as reading.  And as the student goes up the education ladder through high school into college, he is primarily concerned with content courses.

Parents should make certain that their children learn to read well in the first and second grades that have a strong, structured phonics program.  If children haven't gotten this foundation by the end of the third grade, there is a good chance that their reading and spelling will be weak as they continue their education.  Also, if they are going to do well in college, they must get into a good expository writing course in high school.  Such a course should include the writing process, style principles, idea development techniques, formatting reports and much more.  Just emphasizing grammar won't get the job done.  My next post will explore this in more detail.

Funding K-12 Education

Phil Robbins

Apparently, the Oregon State Legislature is set to pass a $6.245 billion K-12 budget to fund schools for the next two years.  When added to local tax revenues, the means that K-12 schools will be getting about $9 billion dollars representing a 14 percent increase to spend on school operations.  Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that class sizes will be reduced or even more important that academic performance will be enhanced.

                                            Where the Money Goes

First, some districts will get more money, some less.  Those that have increasing enrollments will get more because funding is based on the number of students.  Portland and Lake Oswego will get less because their enrollments are shrinking.  Second, the money will be spent to finance full-day kindergarten classes, an idea obviously popular with parents, especially those who are working and have child care needs.  In the same way, hiring more teachers reduces class size.  A large share of new money goes into increasing salaries and benefits of teachers and others as well as higher energy and insurance costs.  Hopefully, districts will spend more money on textbooks and learning materials, things that directly affect student achievement.

                                      Funding and Student Achievement

In my previous post I had high hopes that Senator Schrader and Rep. Mary Nolan of the Ways and Means Committee had found a way of guaranteeing student achievement by making funding contingent upon producing results.  My mistake!  Rep. Dave Hunt, House Majority Leader, explained at his town hall meeting, May 21, results are more likely to mean things like full-day kindergarten and lower class sizes, not higher levels of student achievement.  He said in effect that the legislature must walk a fine line between some degree of accountability and management of what goes on in the classroom.

Steven Carter of The Oregonian wrote in his article Legislators Agree on Schools Budget, May 25, 2007, "School leaders said it will take more than one budget cycle (2 years) for improvements to be measurable. Hunsaker, of the Oregon school administrators' group, said schools are committed to performance in exchange for the new money."  No one says how much improvement he hopes to make.  And it doesn't sound like anyone is in a hurry.  Meanwhile, kids weak in the basic skills continue to graduate, experience difficulty finding a decent job or going on to college and take expensive remedial courses because the schools didn't do an adequate job of educating them.

                      Why Throwing Money at the Problem Won't Work

Money going into salaries, benefits, insurance, heating fuels, and other overhead costs will not change student achievement one iota. School leaders say that Governor Kulongoski's 750 million dollars funding increase will have very little effect on education improvements (The Oregonian, 12-31-06, Bigger Budget Won't End Crowding).  In spite of the public's misconception that smaller class sizes automatically lead to better student learning, most research studies indicate that this is hardly the case.  This conclusion is based on over 1,100 studies as of 1999 dealing with class size and student performance.

In fact, Eric A. Hanushek, (Bio) a key researcher in this area, concludes: 

Existing evidence indicates that achievement for the typical student will be unaffected by instituting the types of class size reductions that have been recently proposed or undertaken.  The most noticeable feature of policies to reduce overall class sizes will be a dramatic increase in the cost of schooling, an increase unaccompanied by achievement gains.

Anyone interested in exploring this topic in depth need only type "class size and student achievement" in Yahoo or Google search engines. 

                                                                                                                           

                                                      

Poor college preparation costly to students

Phil Robbins

On April 25, I emailed a message to the Oregon State Legislature and many in education commenting on an article in the April 21 issue of The Oregonian by Scott Learn about how the Ways and Means Committee wants Oregon educators to actually show results for $260 million dollars that they were about to receive.  It read as follows:

                                                   Education Funding Now Demands Results

On April 21, 2007 The Oregonian published an article by Scott Learn entitled "Plan ties strings to extra funds for schools."  The education community and their lobbyists are up in arms about having to show measurable results for $260 million dollars received.  Apparently, Senator Kurt Schrader and Representative Mary Nolan of the Ways and Means Committee had the audacity to propose that educators actually produce results for the money received.  Bob McKean, Superintendent of the Centennial School District, said, "It was a bit of a shock."

One might want to consider the possibility that this is not "attaching strings" but merely requiring the education community to uphold its end of the contract between it and the taxpayers.  After all, most education money winds up in salaries, and there is no reason why the legislature should enhance educators' standard of living while lowering that of people who pay taxes.  Don't misunderstand me: those in the education field are entitled to fair compensation as determined by the labor market like everyone else.  Additional compensation should be based on concrete results by solving the many problems facing education today.

We have a large segment of our graduating high school seniors, who cannot read, cannot write and cannot think analytically, that goes on to college only to take remedial (pre-college-level) courses, a costly situation for students and colleges alike.

A solution to this problem calls for better management methods at all levels.  Principals and superintendents should  know what is taught and how it is being taught in all classes under their authority.  They should know if students are meeting the established performance standards.  They should know if all kids know phonics, can read, can perform arithmetic functions and are studying all the content subjects in elementary school.  In high school they should know if college-bound students are well grounded in writing, grammar and punctuation.  Impossible?  Hardly.  All it requires is a very simple management tool--biweekly or monthly activity reports that are passed up the line.  Corporations do it; no one thinks anything about it.  It's merely Management 101.  This is the only way for management to know what is happening in the organization--in this case each classroom.

Since then, I have set up a real blog and wanted to include this message because it is a subject that has very real direct and personal financial consequences for parents and students contemplating college which can amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars depending upon the college or university involved and how deficient the student is in the basic skills--reading, writing and math.  And for the money spent, the student gets no credit toward a degree or certification.  In short, the student goes to college but does not get a college education.

How does this happen?  Let's examine the process.  When a student enrolls in college, he takes placement exams to determine his ability to do college-level work in reading, writing and math.  If he passes each of these areas, he is deemed capable of doing college work and is enrolled in regular English and math. courses.  If he fails, he must take a remedial course, often euphemistically called a developmental or pre-college-level course, in those areas where the school considers him deficient.  All the while, the student or his parents pay full tuition and fees and usually run up student loans, without receiving college credit. Many schools will allow this only to go on for a year after which the student is dropped from enrollment.

This situation has be growing steadily worse over the years and is now approaching a crisis with over 50% of incoming freshmen winding up in remediation at some schools.                                              See http://www.illinoisloop.org/college.html or search "college remedial courses" on Google or Yahoo to get a complete picture of the problem.  Not only that, there are several trends that one should keep in mind.  Many four-year colleges want to make remediation the responsibility of two-year community colleges.  Increasingly, colleges and universities are holding K-12 schools responsible for the lack of college readiness preparation.  Colorado and a few other states have even considered charging K-12 districts for the cost of remediation.  There is also a growing interest in aligning high school curriculum with the needs of post-graduate schools.

What can parents do?  Check with teachers, principals, superintendents and school boards to find out what specifically is being taught in classrooms at all levels and demand that the basics receive emphasis.  This means a strong phonics program in first and second grade; grammar is taught at all levels; higher math is available for all college-bound students; and strong expository composition training including the writing process, style principles, idea development methods, pagination, and report formats is given in high school.  Emphasis on creative writing such as poetry, short stories and the like will not help with the type of report writing demanded in college.    

Oregon Education Today joins discussion

This is my first blog.  Frankly, it is a new experience for me.  So bare with me if it looks like I don't know what I'm doing.  What pray tell is RSS 2.0?  What is syndication?  Do I really want to become another Ann Landers?  That might be cool.  Well, in time all of this may become clear.  After all, I understand that there are millions of bloggers out there so with odds like that I may be able to figure this out.

However, when it comes to education, I'm not exactly a novice. Years ago, I wrote a book called How to Make Better Grades, published by Grosset and Dunlap, New York.  It was in print nine years but is no longer on the market.  I've been an employment recruiter for nine years in the corporate world so I know a little bit about the relationship between education and getting a job.  I have even published a newsletter called Today's Collegiate Job Search Guide that went out to 800 colleges and universities in the western part of the United States. I taught high school 17 years and was advisor to the school newspaper for 14 years, a paper that had a strong editorial page covering a great variety of education issues that still exist today.  Since I don't believe in just complaining about problems without offering solutions, I have been working on projects along this line.  I currently publish a reading and vocabulary course for first and second graders called Parents Guide to Teaching Phonics and am working on a writing curriculum slanted toward non-fiction report writing for high school and college students.  This is just a little bio information to let you know where I'm coming from.

I don't know who is going to read this blog.  I hope somebody does.  My preferred audiences are: parents and students, elected government representatives, and people who are working in education.  Many of our current education issues are steeped controversy; hence, what any of us write is bound to be critical at times and ruffle a few feathers.  This blog is not likely to be any different.  I just hope that people will keep in mind that we don't have to agree with each other's ideas, but everyone gains by keeping an open market for them.  I look forward to your comments--the good, the bad and the ugly.