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<p>I’m not the leading advocate for educating poor minority children, but this advice makes me shudder. The ability to read is very important, and some children, unlike ours, schools will provide the only chance to learn to read. Almost everyone can learn to read at some level.</p>
<p>A few things to know about the situation in Philadelphia:</p>
<p>It’s hard to trust anyone. The current situation is rife with all sorts of cross-currents, and to some extent represents a “perfect storm” kind of phenomenon.</p>
<p>The District’s contract with the teachers’ union expired August 31, and everyone is negotiating a new contract. Much of the District’s actions probably represented negotiating tactics, and about 95% of all the hubbub and protests are union-generated. That’s not to say that there aren’t real problems and real concerns, but both the District and the union have an incentive to make everything seem catastrophic so that other parties (the state and the city) put more money into the system.</p>
<p>Pennsylvania’s governor will be facing re-election in a year and has the lowest approval ratings of any Pennsylvania governor in the history of polling (about 20% of likely voters say he is doing a good or excellent job). He is very vulnerable, possibly even to a primary challenge. The Republican primary voter base wants vouchers and union-busting, and a crisis in the Philadelphia school district helps that argument, too. So he has an incentive to prolong the crisis. And he has – by withholding promised state funds contingent on union givebacks.</p>
<p>The state controls the school district, by the way, and has for about a decade. The governor appoints three of the five members of the “School Reform Commission” that took over the district in response to a prior budget crisis (exacerbated by years of deceptive accounting by the District – no one trusts its numbers). The current governor has not done much to exercise that control.</p>
<p>The mayor of Philadelphia is politically weak and a term-limited lame duck. There is much jockeying going on among candidates to replace him. A lot of that jockeying is around just how to help the District, and in some cases how to curry favor with the teachers’ union. But it makes it hard to get things done, since getting any particular thing done will represent a victory for one candidate and a defeat for all of the others.</p>
<p>Everyone understands – and has understood for years – that Philadelphia has way too many schools for its population. But every school is a treasured asset to its particular neighborhood (which often has a different ethnic composition from the next neighborhood over), as well as a little fiefdom for its administrators and faculty. For the first time in forever the District has actually gotten serious about closing underused schools, but there is still tremendous anger about that (and lots of people trying to slow or halt projected future closings). That dynamic causes the District to create a crisis and parents, etc., to go nuts over things like crossing guards and walking routes. Also, of course, school closings mean reducing union employment, and raise the issue of bumping teachers with less seniority at other schools.</p>
<p>On the whole, and on the median, the Philadelphia school district does an inexcusably awful job of educating students. But there are substantial pockets of high-quality education throughout the system, and any parents who are reasonably engaged (and have students who are not serious disciplinary problems) can get their children places in schools that are really pretty good. So to a meaningful extent they are bought off, and have no particular incentive to crucify the District and force change. There are parent-led school reform groups that are not union fronts, but they are largely do-gooders or ideologues, not really the voice of the masses.</p>
<p>Sounds like Chicago, to some extent. Mayor of a large city is one place I’m slightly opposed to term limits. JMO</p>
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<p>I agree. If we do this, we don’t have to worry about these kids having any ideas about becoming well educated or going off to University. We all need people to shine our shoes, do our dry cleaning, serve our food, clean our sidewalks, pick up our trash, etc. We can guarantee we have people to do this, and at a very minimal wage, if we can only work out a system guaranteeing illiteracy to keep these people down in the gutter. (yes Mini, I know you were being sarcastic, at least I hope you were).</p>
<p>He’s not being sarcastic. He makes a lot of sense, too, if you get to hear the whole reasoned plan and why.</p>
<p>^^^ How could it possibly make sense to refrain from teaching people how to read. That is such a basic skill at all levels that it would be criminal negligence for the schools to not make this their priority one over anything else.</p>
<p>You might not understand how people actually learn to read and how they learn to read well and retain what they have read.</p>
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<p>Where is the research showing that more children learn when you don’t even try to teach them to read?</p>
<p>Sounds like some sort of government conspiracy to keep the economically disadvantaged down and to excuse failure.</p>
<p>^^ that is the mission of public education imho</p>
<p>waiting with interest for mini to post again</p>
<p>Just read an article in psychology today about students teaching themselves to read. Personally i believe this a nonsensical approach, especially when dealing in a culture where illiteracy is common.</p>
<p>“Sounds like a government conspiracy…”</p>
<p>Pretty much what they’ve been doing forever imho</p>
<p>I agree with the post by JHS. One of my colleagues telecommutes from Philly and has two daughters. The youngest is still at the Lab School run by U of P and the older is beginning high school at a large magnet high school… so he says that is entire situation is a political issue between the governor and the mayor and a way to reduce the union by separating any non-classroom teacher from the union… librarians, guidance counselors and so on.</p>
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<p>My eldest son is gifted and figured out how to read simply from his mother’s reading to him. This is common for gifted children, as browsing a gifted discussion forum would show. But most children are not gifted.</p>
<p>I don’t think learning to read from being read to is a function of giftedness, but rather a function of interest in learning to read. That interest, I believe, is due to environment more than anything else. In a household where reading is fun, children usually want to learn to read as early as possible… unless they always have someone available to read to them and figure out that it will be a long time till they can read the books they are interested in and deliberately refuse to learn for that reason… because, in their minds, time is better spent listening to someone else read the “real” books rather than learning to read the “baby” books.</p>
<p>I also think something goes on with their vision. It takes a while before they can comfortably cope with small print. Another reason to prefer being read to and why my older friends with age impaired eyes are starting to go to very large print or audio.</p>
<p>The public schools are competing on an unfair playing field with the charter schools, many of which are for-profits. PA. in particular provides excessive funding to for-profit cybercharters, many of which are showing poor results, but are politically connected. Those charters are currently trying to get the state government to divert another $100 million from public schools to them, through an interpretation in state regulations.</p>
<p>I think some of you folks misunderstood mini’s argument, but I will leave to to him to defend himself. What I will say is that it’s clear to me that he WASN’T ADVOCATING PERPETUATING ILLITERACY." I think he wants a new way or a better method of instilling literacy in young children.</p>
<p>First of all, we have ample evidence that teaching reading perpetuates illiteracy. I have never met an illiterate person (in the U.S.) who wasn’t “taught to read” in school. Actually, though, true illiteracy in the U.S. is relatively rare. What we have as a nation is a population that reads poorly - all following being “taught to read” in school. The evidence just stares you in the face.</p>
<p>Secondly, probably the most important expert on reading in the country, Dr. Frank Smith, retired now from Columbia Teachers College, and author of the single book that is probably the most read (or at least most purchased ;)) in schools of education across the country - [Amazon.com:</a> Reading Without Nonsense (9780807746868): Frank Smith: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Without-Nonsense-Frank-Smith/dp/080774686X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378761665&sr=8-1&keywords=frank+sm]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Without-Nonsense-Frank-Smith/dp/080774686X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378761665&sr=8-1&keywords=frank+sm) - argues that it is not possible to teach anyone to read: at best, one provides the opportunity where that might happen. (I can post a long dissertation on Smith’s work, but I’ll refrain.) And further, thinking otherwise is one of the root causes of functional illiteracy.</p>
<p>Again - the evidence stares you in face. Now the reality is that we have known how to get kids - especially poor kids - to read for more than 100 years. Maria Montessori, in 1906, working with 3-5 year old poor kids - and I mean poor, as in 5 year olds taking care of 3 year olds on the street with no parents whatsoever - found a way for ALL of them to read. No dyslexia, no learning disabled, no special ed., no “poor home conditions” preventing reading (because some of them didn’t have homes at all). They all read by the age of five. All of them. She didn’t set out to teach them to read, (in fact, until after World War I she had no particular interest in that whatsoever); they just asked her. We KNOW how to do it - we just choose not to.</p>
<p>The first rule of the Montessori method is NO TEACHING. They ALL read - every last one of them, they all read, before age 5.</p>
<p>I could post some of my dissertations on this subject (I lecture nationally on this), but I’d probably have an audience of two, and I don’t have time.</p>
<p>What kids can’t do for themselves (in post-industrial society) is find their own food, and take care of their own health care needs. Schools are well set-up to do just that.</p>
<p>Finally, I do think reading is an important tool. Not as important as public presentation, public speaking, getting along with others, leadership, but important. Look at the fancy prep schools and see the emphasis they put on reading, relative to these other tools. No one except those who make tapes for the blind makes a living from reading. It’s just a tool, like so many others.</p>
<p>That is interesting Mini, but you supplied not ONE cite or source for your assertion, nor did you explain how a child teaches themself to read without someone, at the least, reading to them . . which is the same thing as teaching them to read of course.</p>
<p>Who said anything about not reading to children, or having them walk the streets around parking meters with signs on them, or highways with signs on them, or in the house with flyers that come in the mail, or sheet music that has the words printed underneath (which is how my younger one learned to read)? If you are that interested, you can buy my books or those of Frank Smith. (whom I did cite, by the way).</p>
<p>The only assertion I needed to make is the one incontrovertible fact you have experienced firsthand, namely, every functionally illiterate person you have ever met was “taught to read in school”.</p>