Colorado Ed Commissioner Nails It

 

Q. What do our government's leaders in education say about the future, and what we need to do to stay competitive in the international marketplace?

 

            According to William J. Moloney, the Colorado Commissioner of Education, we are falling farther and farther behind other countries because the way we teach reading in the early grades is flawed. In his state, a new emphasis on the proper teaching of reading is yielding significant results: in Bessemer Elementary School in Pueblo, Colo., for example, with nearly nine out of 10 children low-income and minority, only 12% could pass a standardized reading test and only 2% could pass writing. After one year of phonics-only reading instruction, among other changes in the school, those pass rates soared to 64% and 48%, Moloney said.

 

            In a recent op-ed for USA Today, Moloney reported that nearly one-third of all U.S. schoolchildren have serious literacy deficits, and he blamed ineffective methods of teaching reading. He chastised those who seek to blame poverty for the problem. It isn't just disadvantaged children, Moloney wrote: among first-year college students, one-quarter require remediation for literacy deficiencies.

 

            Moloney wrote, "Actually, poor children do quite well regarding literacy — as long as they don't live in the USA. As former U.S. Education secretary Rod Paige frequently pointed out, all of the generally impoverished English-speaking nations of the Caribbean have higher literacy rates than the USA's. Similarly, studies among poor children in Africa show levels of English literacy that would be the envy of any U.S. city. Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. economy not only sustained global dominance but provided satisfactory employment for the marginally literate. Today, that economy is being replaced by an increasingly complex information-based economy that will reward only those who have the skills to serve its changing needs."

 

            So Moloney points out the growing percentages of our population who are marginally literate, while our nation is nearly twice the average of those in European Union countries, and our population is not nearly as impoverished as those in the Third World.

 

            He recommends two recent books:

 

            The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Friedman, who contends that superior education systems in India and China will make those countries dominant over the United States in this century unless we do something, and now.

 

            The Knowledge Deficit by E. D. Hirsch, unmasks what Moloney calls "the faddishness, incoherence and hostility to research-based practice that characterizes most of the U.S. reading establishment."

 

            Moloney also cited a report of the National Council on Teacher Quality, "What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading — and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning." It examined 72 schools across the nation and measured them against the extent to which they teach the five common tenets of reading research:

 

n       phonemic awareness

n       phonics

n       guided oral fluency

n       vocabulary building

n       reading comprehension).

 

            The study found that nearly one-third of elementary teachers -- 31% -- use none of those tenets, and only 15% employ all.

 

            Moloney said these figures help explain the assertion of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that 85% of U.S. reading teachers were never properly trained.

 

            He wrote, "When those who teach our teachers are clueless about or even outright hostile to reading research, is it any wonder that our children become the victims of a monumental literacy deficit traceable not to problems of poverty or funding, but to an unwillingness or inability to grasp realities that have been clear to professional educators in every other industrial nation?"

 

            Solutions range from cutting off federal funding to all schools which fail to teach reading with those five facets in place, to giving parents their children's educational tax dollars in voucher form to spend in the public school, private school or homeschool they feel is most likely to produce high levels of literacy.

 

Homework: Read Moloney's testimony to Congress urging more flexibility with federal education dollars and more local control on http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/106th/fc/supflex52099/moloney.htm