Judy Blume’s comments on Accelerated Reader

I love it when I hear from teachers that they've read the Fudge books aloud to their kids and how this has started kids on the path to wanting to read. "I want more funny books. Who else writes funny books like this?" There are certainly many, many, many wonderful books to recommend. I love to hear that they can use a book like Blubber or another one of my books in the classroom and that this works. Or guide a child who may be in need of a book about a certain subject to that book.
What I don't like and what I really don't like — intensely hate, you could say — is the Accelerated Reader program, even though many of my books are in that program, because they rate books, not on emotional content or emotional readiness. They're rated by machine — how many words in a sentence, how long is a paragraph. Nothing to do with character, nothing to do with subject and again, nothing to do with emotional readiness. So that a book like Then Again, Maybe I Won't may have fourth reading level. I get letters from angry parents who say, "My child read your book in Accelerated Reader," and that's a terrible thing.
"He wasn't ready. He's reading on a fourth grade level, but he's only in second grade." Well, what do I say? I try to explain this and I encourage the parent to go to the school and explain why Accelerated Reader doesn't work. It's an easy way for a teacher to run a reading program. It's not the way I think, it's not the way that I would hope that a teacher would run a reading program. Don't take the easy way out, I would say to teachers.
Another thing that I think is that kids shouldn't be penalized for reading a book that's rated younger then what their reading level is supposed to be, nor should they be prevented from reading way beyond. They should be encouraged to just read and if they're reading a picture book and they're in fifth grade because they really want to read this picture book or it's funny, why not?
What's wrong with that? They will read more widely if we allow them to and we encourage them to and we don't reward them for how many books they've read, so that they'll read more books that are short than one book that's long, that's not what it's about.

http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/blume/transcript/

hat tip > California librarian Robert Joyce

Does Accelerated Reader promote altruism?

Stephen Krashen


Accelerated reader (AR) is a reading management program in which students take quizzes on what they have read, and are awarded prizes for the points they earn on the quizzes.

Despite the failure of research to demonstrate that AR) promotes literacy development (Krashen, 2003, 2005) and the negative attitudes many students have about AR (Smith and Westberg, 2011), there may be one redeeming feature: Smith and Westberg (2011) interviewed children from grades 3-8 who were participating in AR programs; among their comments was were these:

“A Grade 5 student said, ‘We take quizzes for each other sometimes if we really need to get our points in. We know each other’s pin numbers so we can help each other out.’ Other children commented that it was common for students to take a quiz and then write down as many questions as they could remember and then tell friends what questions they needed to know.” (pp. 4-5).

AR thus appears to encourage the emergence of clever strategies that allow students to help their classmates with no benefit to themselves. In fact, helping their friends in this way places students at personal risk.

This behavior is not only altruistic; it reveals a very high form of selflessness.

Krashen, S. 2003. The (lack of) experimental evidence supporting the use of accelerated reader. Journal of Children’s Literature 29 (2): 9, 16-30. (Available at www.sdkrashen.com)
Krashen, S. 2005. Accelerated reader: Evidence still lacking. Knowledge Quest 33(3): 48-49.
Smith, A., and Westberg, K. 2011. Student attitudes toward accelerated reader: “Thanks for asking!” Current Issues in Education, 14 (2): 1-6. http://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/632

The "middle skills" shortage: The common core will make it worse

Sent to the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2014

"German robots school U.S. workers" (Sept. 10) is the most recent of a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal on the substantial shortage of job applicants with "middle skills," requiring less than a college degree but more than high school. Instead of increasing apprenticeships and investing more in vocational education for young people interested in this path, we now have the common core standards, which will make things much worse.

Schools should include literature, but as Susan Ohanian points out, the common core elitist language arts standards are clearly designed for college English majors. Forcing all high school students to read and dissect works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses will be useful and interesting only for a tiny minority.

John Gardner, Former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, tried to warn us years ago: “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

Stephen Krashen, PhD
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Outraged at the core

Sent to the Washington Post, September 9, 2014

The Post says that progressives are "uncomfortable with the role of the Gates foundation and new tests associated with the (Common Core) standards" ("Common Core 2.0: Common Core by another name," Sept. 10).

Uncomfortable? More accurate would be "outraged."

Outraged not only at Gates' role in the Common Core, but also because the Common Core imposes a sequence of standards totally unsupported by research,  with no plans to test it.

Outraged because the Common Core is requiring more standardized testing than we have ever seen on this planet, despite research showing that increased testing does not increase student achievement.

Outraged because there is no need for this expensive boondoggle: Studies show that the real problem in American education is poverty: When researchers control for the effect of poverty, American students score at the top of the world on international tests.  

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/common-core-20-common-core-by-another-name/2014/09/09/

Amount of testing: Krashen, S. 2011. How much testing? Posted on The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post blog: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/
Increasing testing: Nichols, S., Glass, G. and Berliner, D. 2006. “High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Does Accountability Pressure Increase Student Learning?” Education Policy Archives 14 (1). <http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/72/198> (accessed October 14, 2013).
Control for the effects of poverty: Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report. Berliner, D. 2011. The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., & Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17. Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. 2012. http://www.epi.org/).

My response to Bill Nye (The Science Guy"): Standards OK but not the Common Core Standards

Response to Bill Nye (“Science Guy”), Posted Sept 2 at: Could Common Core be the antidote for Creationist teachers?
Bill Nye: If I were king of the forest we would have math in the core curriculum. Science would be in the core curriculum. English in the core curriculum. Elementary science is where you get scientists. Everybody in the space program, everybody who's a doctor got interested in science when he or she was seven or eight years old, before they were ten, not when they were 16 or 18. That's where you spend your money is science education in elementary levels. Now, people are opposed to core curriculum I believe for two reasons. One of them good and the other just not.

The first reason, my perception is they are afraid having these core curricula, these standards, prohibits teachers from having time to do other stuff that they're good at. It takes away from other things that a teacher brings to the party. And by that I mean what is your favorite thing about your favorite teacher? And it's his or her passion. It's his or her like I'm so excited about this I want you to get excited about this when you're a little kid or when you're any student at any level, even if you're a 58-year-old guy going to the Smithsonian to take a course in oceanography for fun. It's the passion of the person presenting it that gets you going. So, by having too many standards that have to be met too rigorously, the concern is, and I understand this, that you'll keep students from having any fun and getting excited about anything.

But the other reason people seem to be, my perception of what people don't like about core curricula is that it forces them to learn standard stuff when they could be teaching their kids things that are inconsistent with what we know about science. I'm talking about people that want to teach creationism instead of biology. And that's just bad. And the excuse or the justification is you don't want the government telling you what to do. We all have to learn the alphabet everybody. I'm sorry, if we're we're going to have a successful society, it's not an arbitrary arrangement of letters, you got to learn it. Sorry.

And the same way if you're asking me everybody's got to learn a little bit of physics, chemistry, mathematics and you got to learn some evolution. You've got to learn some biology. I mean the idea is obvious right? You have a certain minimum that everybody's got to meet. What? Everybody's got to learn the alphabet. Everybody's got to learn to read. The U.S. Constitution is written in English so everybody's got to learn to read English. It would be great if you learned some tonal languages, some romance language that would be good, but our laws are written in English. Everybody's got to learn to read English. Everybody's got to learn math. Everybody's got to learn some algebra. Everybody's got to learn some biology including evolution. So what's not to love? But I know there are people opposed to that.

MY RESPONSE: The opposition to the standards movement today among many professional educators and researchers is NOT based on an opposition to having standards. It not based on an opposition "to make sure students learn to read English, learn some algebra, and learn some biology." 

It is an opposition to a specific approach to standards known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) described by education writer and former teacher Susan Ohanian as as “a radical untried curriculum overhaul” and “nonstop national testing.”

Educators have pointed out that the standards themselves are developmentally inappropriate, were created without sufficient consultation with teachers and research on learning, and their validity has never even been
investigated. In a recent article in US News (Sept 2), the standards are described as a "poison pill for learning."


In addition, the CCSS imposes more testing than we have ever seen on our planet, despite research showing that increasing testing does not increase achievement.

All tests are to be administered on line, which which promises to be a boondoggle that will never end – billions to make sure all students are connected to the internet with up-to-date computers, followed by billions for constant upgrading, billions for constant replacement of obsolete equipment, and billions more for the never-ending new technologies. Moreover, there is no evidence that the brave new technology result in better
 student achievement. 


Finally, CCSS does not address the real problem in American education. Critics complain about our unspectacular scores on international tests, but when researchers control for the effect of poverty, American
test scores are near the top of the world. Our unimpressive overall scores are because the US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%).


Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. Study after study confirms that all of these have a profound negative impact on school performance. The best teaching and best standards in the world will not help if students are hungry, ill and have little access to books. 

Instead of protecting children from the effects of poverty, the common core is investing billions in inappropriate and harmful standards, and useless massive testing.

Stephen Krashen
Original article: http://bigthink.com/videos/bill-nye-is-the-core-curriculum-the-antidote-for-creationism

Debate Over Free Reading in Schools Dates Back Decades

Published in Education Week,  Oct 22, 2014.

The Curriculum Matters blog post “N.Y.C. Chancellor Pushes for Schools to Reinstate Independent Reading Time” (www.edweek.org, Aug. 27, 2014) states that there has been “little media attention” given to the issue of free reading in school. There has, however, been a great deal of attention paid to this question in professional educational publications.

Contrary to the conclusions of the National Reading Panel in 2000, study after study supports the practice of sustained silent reading in school. Some of my responses to the panel were published in Education Week, and others appeared in the Phi Delta Kappan and Reading Today. I also discussed the panel’s errors in the book The Power of Reading (2004).

In short, the panel missed many studies and misreported several others. In my first response to the panel, published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2001, I reported that sustained silent reading, or ssr, was as effective or more effective than comparison groups in 50 of 53 published comparisons, and in long-term studies, ssr was a consistent winner. Since then, quite a few more studies have been published supporting ssr in first- and second-language education. 

Stephen Krashen

original article: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2014/08/chancellor_farina_makes_readin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CurriculumMatters+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Curriculum+Matters%29
hat-tip: Donalyn Miller

Common core doesn't fix the real problem of education– poverty.

PUBLISHED in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly Magazine, September 15, 2014

Common core doesn't fix the real problem of education– poverty.

Arguments for opposing the common core presented by Gov. Jindal ("Common Core: Bobby Jindal says Obama forcing a national curriculum," August 27) do not include the

reasons many professional educators and researchers oppose it.

A central argument is that there is no need for a radical change in curriculum or testing. Substantial improvement will come only when we deal with the real problem: Poverty. When researchers control for the effect of poverty, American test scores are near the top of the world. Our unspectacular overall scores are because the US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%).

Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these negatively impact school performance.  Instead of protecting children from the effect of poverty, the common core is investing billions in an untested curriculum and massive testing, despite research showing that increasing testing does not increase  achievement.

Stephen Krashen

Professor Emeritus

University of Southern California

This letter at: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Readers-Respond/2014/0913/Readers-Write-Education-s-real-problem-is-poverty-more-women-needed-in-parliament

Original article: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/0827/Common-Core-Bobby-Jindal-says-Obama-forcing-a-national-curriculum-video