Crank up the alibis and let our kids down

Our test question for today: Why can't Canada's biggest, richest province teach eight-year-olds to read? Please list as many alibis as you can.

It's not as if the education bureaucracy isn't trying. The Toronto District School Board, the nation's largest, is bursting with action plans. There's Developmental Reading Assessment, the Early Years Literacy Project, Reading Recoverytm, and LEAP. There's the Middle Years Adolescent Literacy Project, Later Literacytm, Mentoring for Literacy, and much more. It's not as if they want the kids to be subliterate.

But three years of good intentions and an avalanche of new acronyms have scarcely moved the needle. Most of Ontario's boys still can't read and write at grade level. By Grade 6, only 48 per cent are up to scratch in reading, and only 44 per cent in writing. The girls, as usual, do better. Sixty-three per cent of Grade 6 girls get a pass.

The province's independent testing agency said last week that there has been "little discernible improvement" since it began standardized testing in 1998. The French-speaking students actually got worse.

In the early days, people liked to blame our crummy scores on the tests (too hard; who knows who's marking these things?) and the diabolical Mike Harris government. (Testing was a plot to undermine hard-working teachers.) Now, even the schools admit they're letting the kids down. But old alibis die hard.

"My teachers have done an excellent job of implementing this impossible curriculum," groused teachers union president Phyllis Benedict.

Liz Sandals, president of the province's school boards association, raised the ever-popular poverty alibi. "We have to remember that kids who are hungry don't learn.

We have to think about how we support neighbourhoods at risk." And don't forget about ESL. Not only did the kids skip breakfast, they can't speak English.

The parent alibi always gets a mention, too. "Parents should be much more vigorously involved in their children's education," said Bette Stephenson, who is acting chair of the testing agency.

I thought of the South Asian moms I see each day walking their kids to school. They live in city housing. They barely speak English. They can't help with homework. But I guess when all else fails, you can blame the victim.

My favourite alibi is supplied by members of the progressive middle class. There was an example on our letters page yesterday. It goes like this: Standardized tests are useless. They only measure the ability to take tests, which is a highly unnatural act. They can't possibly measure the unique creativity of each individual child and, what's worse, are perniciously designed to stifle it.

This argument is invariably raised by people who will never have to sweep someone else's floors to make a living, and whose kids won't, either.

I guess it's cosmic justice that it was Bette Stephenson who, as minister of education back in the Bill Davis days, presided over the most disastrous experiment in educational romanticism ever inflicted on the young. We haven't recovered from it yet. We threw out all the ways to teach reading and writing that work, and invented new ways that don't. Ontario is now among the world's most notorious underperformers in public education.

Phonics and direct instruction have begun sneaking their way back into some classrooms. But the province's teachers colleges are still allergic to them. So are many of the experts in the government's own Ministry of Education. An entire generation of teachers is adrift, without a compass or a map. Don't blame them. They're victims, too. Blame the teachers who teach them, and ask them why our kids' crummy reading scores are not even on their radar screen. (The answer? See alibis one through six above.)

Does teaching make a difference? If you want proof, I offer you a tale of two schools. One is in one of those neighbourhoods at risk. Nearly all its students live in public housing. Only a few are white. Half the families don't speak English at home. All the teachers use phonics and direct instruction, and they start teaching kids to read in kindergarten. The school is called Maple Leaf, and its test scores were among the highest in the province last year. They probably will be this year, too.

The other school is down the road from me. Nearly all the parents are affluent white professionals who've read to their children since birth. They believe in educational progressivism, and so does the school. The principal bragged last year that their test scores were "right on the provincial average!" I won't name it, because all the other public schools nearby are just as mediocre.

Ask why they're not as good as Maple Leaf's. Do not settle for alibis. The answers should be interesting.

I have a theory as to why boys do so poorly. Years ago kids did not start school till they were 6 years old and they had to be 6 as of the day school started. This was particularly important for little boys because they thrive on unstructured play longer than girls do. Also, there was no such thing as junior kindergarten for 4 year olds. I know that in other countries, like Finland, kids don't start school till 6 or 7 but they are far from stupid, in fact they learn 2 or 3 languages. I suspect many of these ideas have come from the socialist "experts" in education and the union leaders. As for my own kids, well, I never liked school that much so mine didn't start school till they had to. They whined a bit because their friends were going but, unlike some people I know, it is what I say that matters, not what a child wants. We had fun doing other stuff instead. They all appreciated it in later years and were not one bit behind, especially in reading and math.

"I have a theory as to why boys do so poorly. Years ago kids did not start school till they were 6 years old and they had to be 6 as of the day school started. This was particularly important for little boys because they thrive on unstructured play longer than girls do."

They are lamenting, TOO LATE, that their 6th graders are doing poorly. The research shows that if a child does not learn to read by the end of first grade, it is a virtual certainty (.90 correlation) that he will not be a reader at the end of grade four! Conversely, the correlation between good reading skill at the end of grade one and good reading in grade four and beyond is .87!

Now then, if you apply inappropriate instructional techniques for the developmental level and learning style preferences of a large proportion of your kindergarten and first grade students, you are bound to turn out failures in the earliest primary grades at a staggering rate. And, at the risk of drawing flames from the "phonics for all phanatics" in this forum, this educational psychologist is here to tell you that there is no "one size fits all" educational strategy that will meet every child's needs! Many children who had heavy duty phonics instruction for as many as two and three years were among the reading failures referred to me for evaluation and recommendations for remediation during my twenty years as a school psychologist! They were NOT dyslexic, unintelligent, or lacking in parental involvement and interest. They were bright youngsters, trying their best to fit into a learning paradigm which was foreign to their inherent learning style. Over time, it took a major reorganization of my own single-minded pro-phonics philosophy to recognize that a large proportion of the school population (including my own grandchildren) do not learn easily in the earliest stages of reading from systematic phonics instruction, and whole language was (and continues to be!) even less likely to enable them to learn to read! Those children need a method that utilizes THEIR strengths, rather than the learning preference of their teachers or "attractive" curricular materials designed to catch the eye of curriculum selection committees.

During my career, I stumbled on and developed a method that meets the needs of those kids who are failing, and I give seminars at learning disability and curriculum conferences demonstrating that "ALL your students CAN READ!" but the people who sit behind mahogany desks in education centers are impervious to all arguments and heartfelt letters of gratitude from parents of autistic, Down Syndrome, dyslexic, dyspraxic, and other "special needs" children who learned to read using the method despite the predictions of the authorities that their youngsters would never read. You'd think the people pulling in big bucks for the job of finding learning methods to teach all the students entrusted to their care might be able to conclude that a method that enabled such seriously affected children to read would surely work like magic for ordinary "garden variety" kindergarten and first grade kids, wouldn't you?

Unfortunately, until parents begin to get sick enough of the reservoir of grief, frustration, and misery that is building up in the incredible numbers of failing children that they will take back control of their schools and demand that an eclectic program is employed to enable ALL students to have an appropriate early education, we are going to continue to read articles such as this one, year after year. The pendulum swings back and forth, and hits and disables large numbers of kids with every swing! How sad!

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