Marie Clay Dies at 81

From the Los Angeles Times:

Marie Clay, 81; her plan for helping poor readers in first grade caught on
By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
April 19, 2007

Marie Clay, a New Zealand psychologist whose efforts to identify and help struggling readers before they finished first grade profoundly influenced educators in the United States and other countries, died at an Auckland hospice Friday after a short illness. She was 81.

Three decades ago, Clay turned her ideas about early remediation of poor readers into a program that became known worldwide as Reading Recovery.

The program focuses on helping first-graders in the bottom 20% of their class catch up to their peers and maintain grade-level performance. It challenged educators not to wait until second or third grade to tackle reading problems.

More here.

On Standards, Cut Scores, and Expectations

Here's a piece from The St. Petersburg Times about tenth-grade reading tests in Florida. It does a pretty good job of trying to untangle some of the complexities of testing. (Who would have imagined we'd reach a point where this is considered of interest to the general public?)

Suddenly, 10th-graders are FCAT flops
A moving bar makes failures of students who tested well once and still outrank U.S. peers.

By LETITIA STEIN and THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published April 15, 2007

Florida's 10th-graders look like terrible readers. Their FCAT scores are the worst in the state.

Yet those same students are among the best readers on a test that compares Florida students with their peers across the United States. They also score well on the FCAT math test.

Why the confusing results?

Blame an FCAT system that holds students in different grades to very different standards.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in high school, where the bar is highest. Only one-third of Florida's 10th-graders met FCAT reading standards last year. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of seventh-graders passed.

The disparities have consequences:

More than half of Florida's elementary schools earned A's last year, compared with fewer than 20 percent of high schools. Elementaries received $81-million in FCAT reward money. That compares with $23-million for high schools.

"We do not make kids dumber when they come to high school," said Jeff Boldt, the principal of Chamberlain High School in Tampa, which has earned straight C's since school grades debuted.

State officials acknowledge the standards are far more rigorous for high school students, but say they need to be to prepare them for college and work.

But some testing experts say large inconsistencies between grades and subjects can undermine confidence in the system.

Kristen Jackson, an 11th-grader at Tampa's Alonso High, has narrowly failed the FCAT graduation requirement in reading twice. But by another reading test, she can read as well or better than 96 percent of her peers nationally.

"I was actually crying when I failed," said Kristen, who earns A's and B's. "It tortured me. It was a horrific experience."

More here.

Software, Teacher Quality, and Frog and Toad

Two items from the new issue of Education Week:

Major Study on Software Stirs Debate
On whole, school products found to yield no net gains.
By Andrew Trotter

A long-awaited federal study of reading and math software that was released last week found no significant differences in standardized-test scores between students who used the technology in their classrooms and those who used other methods.

Representatives of the educational software industry immediately took issue with aspects of the $10 million study of 15 commercial software products, arguing that its findings did not mean that classroom technology had no academic payoff.

Scholars Suggest Policies to Bolster Teacher Quality
Approaches range from pay incentives to better training and conditions.
By Lynn Olson

While many scholars say surprisingly little solid evidence exists on exactly which public policies are most likely to enhance the quality of teaching, a new volume by the Washington-based Brookings Institution points to ideas that research suggests may be more effective than others.

Among the approaches highlighted in “Excellence in the Classroom,” and discussed at a forum at the think tank here March 28, are: selectively loosening up certification requirements for those entering teaching; targeting large pay incentives for highly effective teachers in hard-to-staff subjects and schools; redesigning professional development; and making it easier to dismiss poorly performing educators.

And an essay about scripted reading programs from the Spring 2007 Rethinking Schools:

'I Just Want to Read Frog and Toad'
By Melanie Quinn

One mid-September night, when I was tucking my 5-year-old son Eamonn in bed, the standardization madness came home to roost. With quivering lip and tear-filled eyes, Eamonn told me he hated school. He said he had to read baby books that didn't make sense and that he was in the "dummy group."

Then he looked up at me and said, "I just want to read Frog and Toad."

I am an experienced elementary teacher and college professor, with a long-standing disdain for "ability" grouping, dummied-down curriculum, and stupid, phonics-driven stories that make no sense. And yet here I was, seemingly unable to prevent my own child from being crushed by a scripted reading program of the type so beloved by No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Reading Recovery and NCLB in the News

A couple of items of interest in the news today, one from Education Week on the appearance of Reading Recovery in the Department of Education's "What Works Clearinghouse" and the second from the Christian Science Monitor about the politics of NCLB.

Education Week
Tutoring Program Found Effective, Despite Cold Shoulder Under Reading First
By Debra Viadero and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Reading Recovery, a popular tutoring program for struggling 1st grade readers that has been a target of criticism in recent years from the Bush administration, has received a rare thumbs-up rating from the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse.

'No Child Left Behind' losing steam
GOP lawmakers are among the biggest critics of Bush's school reform program.
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON
Support for No Child Left Behind – President Bush's signature education reform – is fraying as it heads into reauthorization this year.

The heaviest criticism is coming from within his own party. Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate introduced bills last week that allow states to opt out of most of the law's requirements, while keeping federal funding. Backers of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) say that move would gut the law.