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Schools plan fails accountability test But there needs to be more than rhetoric that every child can learn. And I am certainly dubious about President Bush’s “accountability” proposal to test students in grades three through eight in reading and math. I might even give him an F. Most school districts receive less than 10 percent of their budgets from the federal government, yet President Bush wants the federal government to hold the power over states for accountability of student learning. Whatever happened to teachers and administrators being accountable to school boards, and school boards being accountable to the state legislature and the state superintendent or education secretary? Test design is a monumental task at the state level. Do I dare ask what it would be like at the national level? For starters, these tests will lead to a de facto federal curriculum. If schools fail to improve, then they also risk losing some government funding. In short, the accountability buck needs to stop at the state level. President Bush and I do not agree on accountability, but I certainly understand his frustration, and agree with him that our public schools need to do a better job of teaching reading and math. So I give President Bush an A+ for his proposal that all children will learn to read. His goal is that all children will be reading by third grade. But I ask, why wait until third grade? A noted author on literacy acquisition, Connie Juel, notes, “The probability of remaining a poor reader at the end of fourth grade, given (that) a child is a poor reader at the end of first grade, is .88.” Marilyn Adams, a well-respected reading expert, adds that “The likelihood that a child will succeed in first grade depends most of all on how much he or she has already learned about reading before getting there.” I believe that the President’s goal should be that all students will learn to read by the end of the first grade, and will be reading to learn by the third grade. My own state of Washington requires that each child be tested at the beginning of the second grade, and plans for intervention be made with a child as needed. President Bush’s literacy program builds upon investing in scientifically based reading instruction programs in the early grades. A highly respected April 2000 report on reading, prepared by the National Reading Panel, concludes: “...effective reading instruction includes teaching children to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words (phonemic awareness), teaching them that these sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet which can then be blended together to form words (phonics)...” In other words, the failed experiment of progressive education, “whole language,” is out, and phonics is in. Former Education Secretary William Bennett recently stated in the Wall Street Journal that schools need to teach phoneme awareness, phonics, fluent word recognition, vocabulary and comprehension. But teaching phonemic awareness and phonics requires teachers to have adequate resources as well as expertise. Notes Louisa Cook Moats, one of today’s leading reading experts, “Licensed teachers must themselves demonstrate phonemic awareness, have a working knowledge of the speech sound system and know our orthography (putting letters together to spell sounds) represents spoken English.” Teacher preparation programs in our institutions of higher education will need to take responsibility to ensure that teacher training includes mastery of the above skills. No, I may not agree with President Bush on where the systemic accountability lies, but we do agree that individual educators must do a better job of preparing children to read. I often think of Elaine McEwan, the author and educational consultant, who makes the point that each day going by without a child being able to read is a day in which the knowledge and joy that can come from reading is lost. Indeed, “no child left behind” as a presidential goal is an admirable one – and much better than watching children continue to fall through the cracks. Ken Evans is a sixth-grade teacher in Vancouver, Wash. He is also a member of Teacher Choice, a national association of teachers and educators who support choices, accountability, and reduced regulation in education. The group’s web site is http://www.adti.net/teacherchoice. |
