Frustrating

I posted this on a Wagner listserv today after someone posted a recent article from the Times about schools slashing curriculum. I get frustrated when I see stuff like this because it shows how out-of-wack our incentive structure in education. Lets improve kids's reading ability by decreasing the amount of time in Science, Social Studies and Art. Because no reading happens in those subjects right? But if you're an administrator, teacher what-have-you you're responding to a very short-term measure and its going to affect your decision-making. It seems counter-intutive, but more time spent on drilling reading techniques and skills will yield only so much after awhile-what you really have to do is take that shit for a reading test-drive and content area texts give kids a chance to do that. Not to mention the joy you deprive students of when you limit those subjects.

Kim Marshall calls test-prep junk food, he also said something else interesting, that good readers simply have more "miles on the odomoter", they have the love of reading to put in those out-of-school hours and over the summer to make the jump in reading ability in those critical early years. A diversity of reading materials is more likely to allow that to happen.

I guess this is all an extension of that library grant I wrote last year-that a child should be immersed in literacy all throughout the school day but not just by the obvious and regressive strategy of extending reading block twice as much ("we'll be twice as effective with twice as many cooks in this small kitchen" unh...diminishing marginal returns...) unfortunately that seems to be the twisted logic that has taken hold. But by integrating literacy across diverse content areas and subject areas and reinforcing reading all day, a smart program is reinforcing literacy when you're reading primary texts in Social Studies, science reports and artist biographies, not just getting rid of them. I don't know, the research I did seemed to point to it all making so much sense, how a sound education can and should be an engaging one to be most effective.

Am I missing something?

"The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art"-NY Times

The damn shame in all of this is that there is a significant amount of research that demonstrates that student immersion in these content areas (Science, Social Studies and the Arts), asides from simply making school less dreary for kids (a worthy goal), forces them to engage challenging non-fiction texts. One result of this is that students acquire new vocabulary incidentally rather than through drilling. Vocabulary acquisition, especially at a young age (through 4th grade), has a huge impact on a child's development of reading skills but a child can only learn so many words in a year through memorization. After that, marginal gains in vocabulary acquisition come from repeated incidental contact with words in context, typically in content-rich texts, the type of texts kids don't often see in their literacy block whether its 90 or 120 minutes.

So for short-term gain on these instruments we focus on what Kim Marshall calls the "junk food" of test prep but what we're cutting are the resources and curriculum that, when strategically used, provide students enduring gains in literacy skills.