MN Sen. Scott Dibble with winner Denisse Sanchez.

by Joe Nathan

Jack Wickenhauser, De’shawnte Taylor, Vincent Smith Jr. and Denisse Sanchez are eloquent young people.  They recently earned honors in a statewide Minnesota charter public school writing contest that attracted more than 2,200 entries.  Whether you are an educator or parent, I think you’ll learn a lot if you ask youngsters this question at the end of the year.

Wickenhauser, a seventh grader from Cologne Academy, wrote that his best day “was every day since the end of February. “ He started staying “after school by choice” to “help watch the little kids…I mostly look after one kid who has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) because I know what it’s like.  I try to help him to do the best…When I look in his eyes I see a younger me.”

De’shawnte Taylor  of Excell Academy in Brooklyn Park described the day an essay he wrote for the “D.A.R.E” program won a first place award.  “My mom came to the school to watch our D.A.R.E. graduation.  I felt so happy when I first saw her.  I gave her a huge hug.   It was very special because it showed me that she cared about me.”

Taylor’s essay was a forceful reminder that some of the most important things families can do for their youngsters don’t involve spending money on them…showing up can make a huge difference.

MN Sen. Sandra Pappas with K-2 award-winner.

Another powerful essay by a St. Paul second grader contained a surprise.  Vincent Smith Jr. of Urban Academy  believes his best day in school was when “I got suspended for punching a classmate.  I had not been behaving well in school.  I have been rude.  I have been talking and fighting instead of working.…”

He continued, “Getting suspended got me thinking.  My Dad is in prison but he often calls me.  He is good but he did something bad. I figured I was the same. I am good but I do bad things. Being bad is not cool.  The day I got suspended was my best day because it helped me change.  Now I stay away from trouble…It feels great to be a leader and not a follower.”

Wah Nay Moo, a sixth grader at the College Prep Elementary (CPE) earned top honors in her division.  She described the first day she attended CPE, in September, 2011.  “Prior to this day, I had never attended school in America. I had my first experience learning with materials that were in good shape, unlike my school materials in Thailand that were over 30 years old.”

Finally, Denisse Sanchez, a Minneapolis tenth grader earned first place among high school students.  Formerly, “I hated school and had all F’s.”  Then she and her English class read an essay by James Baldwin.  It reminded her that “Mom and Dad never finished high school and now are living the life of poverty….I want something bigger and better in life…the only way to do that is to get an education.”

Several leading state legislators, including Senate President Sandy Pappas and Senator Scott Dibble welcomed the students to the Capitol.

TCF Foundation co-sponsored the writing contest, and provided cash awards for the best essays. To see humor, honesty, insight and courage, read the winning essays at www.centerforschoolchange.org.

Joe Nathan, formerly a public school teacher and administrator, directs the Center for School Change. Reactions are welcome, and he can be reached at joe@centerforschoolchange.org.

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Vermont has released its fall 2012 standardized test scores, and according to the Burlington Free Press, there are encouraging gains in writing.  Molly Walsh reports that the rise in scores are especially optimistic among the younger groups.

Vermont is one of four states that gives the New England Common Assessment Program test. The test was developed with New Hampshire and Rhode Island in 2005, and Maine later joined its neighboring states. Reading and math proficiency are tested beginning in grade 3, through grade 8, and again in grade 11. Writing and science knowledge are both tested in grades 8 and 11, but for younger grades, science is only tested in 4th grade, and writing only in 5th. The tests are designed to go beyond multiple-choice questions, with some short-answer and extended-response questions. The science test includes some inquiry questions that require experiments or collecting data.

Scores in math and science did not increase over 2011. Vermont’s Secretary of Education expressed disappointment in this less optimistic result:

“High school mathematics continues to be high on the Agency’s and Governor’s list of priorities. While we only saw a slight increase in high school math scores, our educators are serious about improving our students’ understanding and passion for math,” said Secretary of Education Armando Vilaseca in a press release. “If Vermont’s students are going to be ready to continue their education beyond high school and be successful in the 21st century, they’re going to need stronger math skills and knowledge. A two percent increase is not enough.” Vilaseca said.

The high school scores were generally discouraging. Writing proficiency dropped slightly, while math proficiency went from 36% to 38% proficient. Reading did better; 74% of 11th graders were scored as proficient in reading.

Younger students did not present much good news in math and reading. Math proficiency has been around 65%, and that did not change this year. Reading scores are similar to the 11th grade performance, at 73%.

However, 5th grade students did better in writing. The percentage who passed at a proficiency level in 2011 was 46%, and this went up to 51% for 2012. An even greater gain came with the 8th grade tests, where proficiency went up to 66%, from a previous 59%.

State officials said they were pleased with the gains in writing.

Michael Hock, director of educational assessment at the state Education Agency, said writing is the bright spot in this year’s results. “The importance of writing skills cuts across all areas of the curriculum,” Hock said in a statement. “For example, we know that our most successful schools have writing programs that focus on all content areas, even math and science. The impact of these programs is consistently evident in those schools’ test scores.”

Although Vermont’s schools hope to raise achievement in math and science, the state has an enviable graduation rate of over 90%. Its college graduation rates are also very high, and Business Journal ranks it 8th among the 50 states for educational achievement.

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Children lagging in reading skills is becoming a chronic problem in Australian schools, yet at least one small town in New South Wales has found a way to tackle it successfully. Raymond Terrace – little more than a village, and a struggling one at that – seems like an odd setting for an education revolution. But there, staff and faculty have found a way to turn around a trend with which the rest of Australia seems to be unable or unwilling to cope.

The solution seems to be in going back to the basics. Students who were found to be especially struggling were enrolled in an intensive phonics program which taught them how to connect letters with sounds and sounds with words. It is considered a backbone for the acquisition of reading skills, and children who do not master phonics by a certain age might be behind their peers in literacy for the rest of their academic careers.

Raymond Terrace Public School principal John Picton says the program, which is in its third year, has been a “godsend” with very positive results. The key thing, he says, is “the obvious focus on phonics and phonic awareness. You go back to basics and build that platform”.

Success in Raymond Terrace could serve as a guiding light to the rest of Australia, which this year found itself near the bottom in literacy and reading when compared to other developed nations. Even among those who have been sounding the alarms about the state of the country’s education system for years, the poor showing was greeted with surprise — and even with shock.

In 2011, Australia took part in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study for the first time, and the results – which were published earlier this week – were discouraging. The literacy skills among fourth-graders were found to be the worst of every single other English-speaking country. They were also behind countries like Bulgaria and Portugal.

“We should be hanging our heads in shame. It’s absolutely damning,” says literacy researcher Kevin Wheldall, an emeritus professor at Macquarie University who developed the phonics-based teaching system being used at Raymond Terrace Public School. Wheldall’s system, called MiniLit (Meeting Initial Needs in Literacy) was shown, in a study published last month about the program at the Raymond Terrace school, to be very effective in addressing literacy problems.

Despite the success that has been achieved deploying MiniLit in places like Raymond Terrace, it’s been slow to find adherents in other provinces, cities and schools. Instead, educators seem to continue their attachment to the Reading Recovery program – which is used in most of the country – despite the fact that recent research proves is it not very effective in helping children catch up their reading skills to grade level.

“I’m not saying it’s not effective but it’s not effective enough and certainly not cost effective,” he says. Wheldall says it works for only one in three children – one child improves, one doesn’t and one would have improved anyway.

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Since 2009, as part of the data collection effort for its reading assessment report on the nation’s students, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been administering a vocabulary test in an effort to determine if there is a relationship between literacy level and word knowledge for American kids.

Prior to 2009, a limited number of vocabulary questions were included as part of the assessment. However, 2009 was the first time that a vocabulary question framework was included in the assessment that was detailed down to the type of questions — and how many — that students should be asked.

The goal was to determine if understanding the meaning of words would bolster the students’ ability to figure out the meaning of a passage that contained those words.

This systematic assessment of vocabulary allows NAEP to more fully assess the impact of vocabulary knowledge on student’s comprehension and makes it possible to report on students’ vocabulary performance. In addition to the inclusion of vocabulary questions in the comprehension assessment, additional sections containing all vocabulary questions were also included in the assessment.

During the assessment – which runs every two years – data was collected from a nationally representative sample of over 110,000 fourth-graders, 103,000 eighth-graders and 44,500 twelfth-graders. In 2011, a larger sample of fourth-graders and eighth-graders was surveyed, although no assessment was run on kids in the 12th grade.

The vocabulary questions typically quoted a sentence from an included passage, with one word highlighted, and asked students to choose the meaning of the word from four options.

The NAEP reading framework acknowledges the association between vocabulary and reading comprehension. At its most fundamental level, reading comprehension (the ability to understand what one has read) requires knowing the meaning of words. To comprehend what they read, students must integrate their knowledge or sense of words as they are used in particular passages to understand the overall topic or theme. Understanding key words that support the main idea or theme and details that contribute shades of meaning further enhance comprehension to create a richer experience. This association is reflected in the results that show that on average students who performed well on the vocabulary questions also performed well in reading comprehension.

The results showed that high reading comprehension scores often went hand-in-hand with a good knowledge of vocabulary. At the same time, students who scored poorly on literacy and reading comprehension also frequently had poor vocabulary scores.

Fourth-graders who in 2011 tested in the top 25% of all students in literacy were also some of the highest scorers on the vocabulary portion of the assessment. The reverse was also true. Those whose reading comprehension scores fell in the bottom 25% had similarly low vocabulary scores.

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by Julia Steiny

Ah, the restorative powers of great art.

Too bad classical art is so hard to enjoy without understanding the historical context and culture of the time.  It’s difficult just to imagine people who knew nothing of TV and cell phones.

Julia Steiny

Trinity Repertory Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s King Lear was a stunner.  The old king howled his wrath when his truly devoted daughter refused to fawn over him in public, as his ego demanded.  In a drenching, on-stage rainstorm storm, distraught characters reacted passionately, with famous lines of poetry, to what we could all see in front of us.  Blood spurted from Gloucester’s eyes during the on-stage blinding.  And when the king realized what he’d done, his grief was massive.  Three jaw-dropping hours flew by.

But Lear is a tough play for an advertising-saturated audience hundreds of years away from the original production.  It was written for people with patience, people who pictured scenes in their heads as they listened, instead of seeing each cinematic detail.

Now, instant gratification dulls our taste for a long view.  Entertainment is king, and courses in Art Appreciation have gone the way of Home Economics.  Ever fewer people –  well, I can only speak for Americans — can appreciate how thrilling great classical art can be.

The beauty of the classics is not so much in the eyes of the beholder as in the eyes of the educated.

Which is one of the reasons that the new national curriculum standards, called the Common Core, are so upsetting.

The Core’s English Language Arts standards shift much of the focus from literature to non-fiction, or what they call, “informational text.”  The very phrase makes my skin crawl.  And yet, the Core’s defenders are correct when they argue that far too few students know how to extract facts out of history and science books — never mind the contracts and fine print they’ll encounter as adults.

The Core’s publicists emphasize that the attention given to informational text is only a starting point, a base from which educators can build.  Their goal, in their words, is “to ensure that all students, no matter where they live, are prepared for success in postsecondary education and the workforce.”  Presumably, once kids have mastered mining facts, their teachers can then build up students’ backgrounds so they can enjoy the rich language of Charles Dickens or George Eliot.  Not that teachers assign much of that sort of work any more.

The new Common Core will lead to a huge battery of new tests — a controversy in its own right, but for another day.  The tests will be online, which will be a relief to educators who want results right away.  The faster the results, the faster teachers can adjust their lessons to improve the next round of results.  Students will read and analyze several documents to write extended answers. or mini-essays.  But computer-scored tests make it all the more important to get the facts, grammar and punctuation right, according to a computer’s understanding.  Currently forty-five states have signed on to the project.

Curiously, among them is Massachusetts.  Pundits and researchers ask why on earth that that state would bother with the Common Core when its own standards are by all accounts far superior, very successful and steeped in literature.

Many of us think that teaching great literature well — not drearily — will produce the intellectual curiosity and broad background that will also, oh by the way, improve the over-valued test scores.

As it happens, I was a professor of theater arts in a prior life.  So at Lear the other night, while settling into our seats, my companion asked me to give her the “Cliff Notes” on the play.  Okay.  Both the main plot, about Lear, and the sub-plot, about his friend the Earl of Gloucester, are stories about parents who misjudge their children.

A fun trick with Shakespeare and his contemporaries is to peel back the characters’ names to find allegorical clues to the theme and structure of the play.  When I taught college, I loved telling students that Lear’s oldest daughter, Goneril, was named after a venereal disease.  Regan is just an echo of her sister.  And at the center of the play is the ideal heart, Cordelia — coeur is French for heart, and “delia” is a favorite Shakespearean anagram for “ideal.”

Then I’d ask my female students:  When you walk past a construction site, what do the male workers do?  They’d answer that they whistle, hoot, and make rude noises.  But inevitably, the student trying to figure out where the teacher lady was going would exclaim “leer.”  Bingo.  They leer.

Ah, so the play is about sight — insight, clear versus rain-pelted vision, blindness.  Excruciatingly, Lear finally sees that he’s rejected the true love of his adoring daughter.

Just because we reviewed a bit of cultural background, both my friend and I clearly heard every word of the dialogue that exalted the virtues of clear sightedness.  Especially seeing love clearly.  That life lesson can not be rendered into informational text.

This new focus on non-fiction is about improving the quality of workers for the economy.

But I’m betting that our money-skewed vision is blinding us to what it means to be truly educated, with a culturally big and historically rich background.

So beware the Common Core.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

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The latest round of the Nation’s Report Card tests has revealed some surprises about the quality of student writers. According to the report released by the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the exams, students who regularly use computers as part of their school work are more likely to have strong writing skills than their peers. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the report also shows merely a quarter of the country’s 8th and 12th graders have good writing skills.

In total, 27% of essays in both levels were considered by graders to be well-developed, organized, and showing a strong grasp of proper grammar. Overall, 24% were deemed “proficient” in those categories while 3% were considered “advanced.” Unfortunately, the remainder were found to be lacking in one, two, or all three of these areas.

Some perspective on the data was offered by Mary Crovo, the deputy executive director of NAGB, who pointed out that the essays should be considered “first draft” writing, and that the students’ opportunity to edit was very limited. On the other hand, students who took the test last year enjoyed the advantage of having access to a computer that provided both a spellchecker and a thesaurus — something their peers from previous years did not have. Prior to 2011, the students wrote their essays using a pencil.

Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, some 33 percent of eighth-grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.

Crovo said most students already use such technology as spell-check on a daily basis. Without those tools, she said, “It’s as if years ago we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser.”

For those who thought that access to a spellchecker should result in a markedly better score, Crovo explained that expectation was unreasonable. Test graders focus less on proper spelling and word usage and more on the ability to organize ideas, make an argument and defend a point of view. When it comes to grading, grammar also takes priority over spelling.

Still, students who’ve shown that they had experience using the provided tools – the number of times they hit the backspace key and queried the spell-checker was also tracked and used as an indicator – produced better essays than their peers. Students with scores in the lowest quarter were more likely to come from homes without an access to a computer. Only 87% of those in the bottom quartile had personal computers, compared to 99% of those in the top quartile.

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It is to students’ advantage to become masters of two styles of writing, explains Michael Drennan in The Guardian — one style dense but dry, full of declarative sentences and most useful when writing an exam essay or finishing up a term paper; the other is more fluid, emotional, and expressive, to be used for communicating ideas to others. As an experiment, Drennan had his GCSSE and A-level students focus only on these two types of writing exclusively by taking sample tests when in class and writing blogs when at home.

A month into the experiment, Drennan’s students exceeded both his and their own expectations. The range of topics covered was immense: from local news to current affairs, to the most controversial issues of the day. Students used the blogging format to examine natural and man-made phenomena, analyze experimental data they sourced themselves and by their classmates. They engaged with each other by commenting on each other’s blogs and writing their own responses to posts written by their peers.

Because the students’ writing was always available online, there were no barriers like those imposed by traditionally written material on critiquing and reviewing other people’s work.

This is all massively more powerful, and infinitely easier, than collecting exercise books for monitoring and restricting peer-feedback within the classroom, and a source of far less hassle/conflict than fixed small-scale written homeworks with exact deadlines. Parents can be directed to helpful information, to the evidence of what their child has achieved, and to comparative students’ work from within the same class.

Some teachers are reluctant to make blogging a part of the academic experience because they are afraid that by doing so, they are opening themselves and their schools up to liability in cases when students post defamatory information or engage in internet harassment. But Drennan believes that the rare instances when such things occur is no reason to deprive students of what could be a powerful academic tool. Inappropriate posts are a behavioral problem, Drennan writes, and should be handled in a way a teacher handles a misbehaving student: which is not to punish all for the sins of the few or even just the one.

Use of strong language is moot. A2 sociologists this year persuaded me to allow them to use it in political/satirical posts; tellingly, they did so freely early on, but then it fell away – its casual use disempowers it and makes writing appear lazy. Students came to reflect that they should choose words more carefully. “You don’t hear Polly Toynbee saying ‘What a dick’ in her articles, even though she clearly thinks Cameron is one,” concluded one perceptive wit, to general agreement. Language is a thorny issue, so I share this story without imposition. Child protection issues are minimal. Teach e-safety once, well, and take firm action when needed – but don’t lock kids away from the world. My students were delightedly amazed to discover postgrads in Germany, travellers in South-East Asia and Occupy activists in the US liking, commenting on and following their blogs.

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Even among kids who are motivated enough to improve the quality of their writing by attending summer enrichment, there’s a noticeable degradation of quality that can be traced to the popularity of social media, writes Walter Pacheco in the Orlando Sentinel. Kids, conditioned by the constricted sentence structure imposed by Twitter’s 140-character limit, and the difficulty of using proper grammar when sending text messages, are losing the ability to write long and complex sentences.

The summer camp, held at University of Central Florida, aims to bring together middle school students who are looking to expand their writing ability via short fiction and script writing — students like Shelby Hill, who attended the camp earlier this summer. Hill admits that in addition to her prolific blogging, she also makes extensive use of Twitter and considers herself to be “a texting whiz,” but doesn’t believe that this has any impact on the quality of her academic writing. Her instructor at the camp, Terry Thaxton, however, disagrees.

“Just the other day, I asked my students to write four lines of dialogue they had over the weekend,” said Terry Thaxton, a University of Central Florida English professor who runs the summer writing campShelby attended earlier this month. “Three of them reached for their phones to read their text messages. They said they couldn’t remember any face-to-face conversations.”

The writing camp at UCF Continuing Education focuses on helping students ages 9 to 18 enhance their writing skills by working screenplays as a team, developing characters and interpreting writing as an act of imagination.

A 2010 report by Clarion University seems to back her point of view. The data showed that social media contributes to the popularity of “informal written communication techniques, along with formatting problems, nonstandard orthography and grammatical errors.”

But not everyone agrees that the popularity of texting necessarily leads to degradation in quality of all student-written material. Susie Robertshaw, who organizers the writing tutoring program at Rollins College, says that although the use of Twitter and Facebook is on the rise, it hasn’t had as much of an impact on writing quality that people seem to think.

“For the most part, this type of writing is more like an informal spoken language in written, unedited format,” Robertshaw said. “People are focusing more on content and catching the drift of what was written and not how it looks, especially if you’re sending it quickly on an iPhone or iPad before reviewing it.”

And students themselves take pains to make sure the worst abuses of the English language present in text messages and status updates don’t make their way into traditional writing. Luke Reggentin, a 14-year-old from Winter Park’s Trinity Prep, says that although he uses popular acronyms like “LOL” on Facebook, he knows that it isn’t appropriate to likewise use them in a term paper.

Thaxton said despite some of the bad habits and shortcuts to writing encountered in social media, the challenge for writers will be to “keep the art form pure while also embracing new forms.”

“Social media has certainly brought attention to the poor and declining writing, communication, and critical-thinking skills that teachers have seen for a long time,” she said. “But it’s also helping writers develop experimental ways of writing narrative while enhancing their writing skills. That’s exciting.”

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A study by the publisher Pearson has found that concern in schools about children’s reading ability and desire is widespread. By the age of 11, when children move from primary to secondary school in the UK, teachers claim that over 40% of students fail to read for pleasure. While a decline in the amount of time spent reading recreationally is to be expected in a modern world that holds more competing objects of attention such as television and the internet, having so many children abandon books completely is potentially troubling.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, the author, said: “It’s worrying to think that so many young children are not being inspired to pick up a good book and get lost in a story.

“According to Unesco, the biggest single indicator of whether a child is going to thrive at school and in work is whether or not they read for pleasure.”

The problem with children not reading is that reading tends to correlate with development and maintenance of attention span. If children have diminished attention spans they will struggle to absorb and integrate new information and thus have problems with their academic studies.

The survey by Pearson was commissioned alongside the launch of a new set of classroom reading books and had 400 secondary school English teachers as respondents; two thirds of which identified lack of coolness as being a major cause of the terminal decline in recreational reading amongst pupils. 75% also believed children’s attention spans to be shorter than they have been before.

The poll revealed that teachers believe parents are not doing enough to help, with 97 per cent claiming mothers and fathers should be encouraging their child to read more.

This is far from the first time that a decline in childhood attention spans has been linked to diminished interest in reading. It was noted by the Telegraph in February that many modern children were unable to focus on the books of Dickens, a view espoused with some horror by the biographer Claire Tomalin.

“What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant,” she said.

“The only caveat I would make is that today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

“Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity.”

Of interest is that teachers noted recent book and film series such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins could spark pupils’ interest in reading. While Ms Collins is far from being the literary equivalent of Dickens, at this point having children interested in reading anything should be seen as a win and a foundation to build upon. The biggest concern is that the lack of parental encouragement when it comes to reading in the home will only get worse when the current non-reading generation of children grow up to have children of their own.

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Sandra Stotsky, a co-author of the Massachusetts Standards for English and Language Arts, believes that David Coleman, one of the movers behind the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, might be misguided in enforcing such a rigid 50/50 ratio between the time spent in the classroom on informational texts versus the time spent on literature texts. The balance is skewed even further after fifth grade, when 70% of students’ time will be spent on informational texts.

Coleman’s rationale behind this guideline is his belief that, currently, elementary school students spend nearly 80% of their time on activities like story time, with scant attention being paid to broadening their knowledge base and improving the skills needed in later stages of education. But how can this be the case, asks Stotsky, if math alone takes up at least an hour of instruction time at most schools. Elementary schools allot 2.5 hours of every elementary school day to “literacy” time, but even then, as most teachers would be happy to confirm, reading stories doesn’t take up the entire block.

Coleman also claims that, as a result of the badly balanced school days, history and science instruction is being left by the wayside.

 If anything, elementary teachers reduced reading instructional time after the 1960s to make more time for writing and revising experience-based stories. Over the years, sales of history, science, grammar, and spelling textbooks declined for a variety of reasons. Education schools stressed hands-on science (which most elementary teachers were not trained to teach) and “more engaging” history materials, much of which came to be written in story form for the sake of struggling readers.  Reading instructional series (A.K.A. basal readers) then integrated spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and composition study as part of their programs to make the language arts cohere with what students were reading.

To say that all that happens during a literacy block is story time, is to mischaracterize how that period is truly being used. Reading comprehension and ability to not only absorb but also effectively express what one has learned, is a necessary first step before any kind of instructional material could be tackled. Teachers are spending class time in improving literacy in children, but even then, the texts often used are informational in nature.

By the upper grades in a self-contained elementary classroom, language arts time was used for high quality children’s literature. Reading instruction focused on comprehension strategies, while reading and discussion of informational material, as well as projects based on them, took place in the rest of the school day. In other words, informational material involved a considerable amount of time during the school day, and it was likely that high quality children’s literature got much less time than it deserved.

By the time children leave elementary school, their day is no longer divided into literature time and informational time. Students take on the schedule familiar to anyone who’s attended a school: a day divided into subject areas, each focusing only on the material mandated. Although the literacy and reading comprehension instruction continues in English class, teachers of other subjects can’t afford to pause to make up the gaps in that area of student knowledge. Without allowing elementary school teachers sufficient flexibility in deciding how to tackle the teaching of these skills, students risk being left unprepared for higher-level coursework.

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