A new study from the Center for Educational Policy says that boys are scoring consistently below girls in reading. Historically, girls score better at reading and boys score better at math, but while math scores have equalized, reading scores have not.Education weekquotes one of the study’s authors, Jack Jennings: “There is a consistent achievement gap,” he said. “Something is going on in our schools holding back boys.”I think the problem stems from the pressure to read in kindergarten, which hits boys especially hard. Many boys just are not developmentally ready to read at age 5, and it’s possible that the early academics are turning boys off and creating early, and easily preventable failure.

What a surprise - only 4% of New York City elementary schools are complying with state art education requirements, according to the New York Times.

The mayor notes that 98% of the schools have “some” arts instruction.

The fact is, there are only so many hours in the school day. And devoting most of them to reading and math doesn’t leave much time for other things. If science and social studies are cut, what hope is there for art?

Yet even pounding away at reading like that, reading achievement is essentially flat, according to national assessments. Indeed, there is evidence that cutting out science, social studies, and other subjects which build broad and deep background knowledge is exactly the wrong strategy for improving reading comprehension, as E.D. Hirsch writes here.

And cutting arts education is also exactly the wrong way to prepare kids to operate in the 21st century. Visual expression has never been more ubiquitous, and visual literacy impacts our ability to make good decisions.

The research is pretty solid on this point: understanding letter-sound relationships is key to learning to read for most kids. My objections to phonics-based curriculums are about the way they continue teaching phonics much longer than the research says is useful, and to the way over-emphasis on phonics crowds out every reason a kid would want to read - great literature, inspiring and fascinating content, and lovely use of language.

So, I think this article about synthetic phonics is pretty exciting.

The names of the letters are eschewed because of the confusion it causes among struggling readers, so only the sounds of the letters are taught.

Students learn their first six sounds in the first six days, which are the most commonly used sounds in English: s, a, t, i, p and n. By their second week of school, they can read words such as sat, at, in, pant, tin.

With more complex sounds, where two letters form one sound, the class might spend a couple of days to ensure the students have properly learnt it.

All sounds are learnt by the middle of term two, whereas under analytic phonics it takes three years to get through all the sound-letter combinations.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Entirely successful, according to early research results. And lots of room left in the day for story time.

When it comes to the chicken and the egg, you can’t have it both ways. Do you believe that rich spoken vocabulary, varied life experiences, and informal early literary experiences are the critical pillars for learning to read and succeeding in school? Or, do you believe that learning to read, via early, formal, intensive phonics, is the critical path to rich spoken vocabulary, making more of life experiences, and succeeding in school?

Here’s what I think the research says. There’s no evidence that early phonics and formal math does anything to close the gap between rich and poor. The pressure that the NCLB law puts on schools to clog kindergarten, even preschool, with formal reading and math seals the fate of children in poverty by robbing them of a chance to learn to read AFTER they’ve had crucial supporting life experiences. I’ve written before about what a real gap-closing kindergarten would look like.

Now Michael Winerip of the New York Times is sadly shaking his journalistic head with this article, “In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life,” about a new report by ETS, makers of the SAT:

The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

With so many important variables outside of school control, Winerip says, it’s no wonder that the achievement gap remains stubbornly stable.

But take another look at those four variables. The ETS report doesn’t say that poor kids have trouble reading because their parents aren’t teaching them their phonics. Poor kids aren’t failing at math because their parents aren’t teaching them their math facts. The ETS says that parents in poverty often don’t have the time or money to provide their kids with varied life experience, early informal literacy (like reading to kids), and complex conversations (hard for parents to get in a good talk about world events between shifts at three jobs).

So, why aren’t we working on providing these things in early childhood and kindergarten? Instead, we’ve virtually stripped school of everything except formal academics. That’s going in exactly the wrong direction.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has begun an “occasional series” on innovation in the classroom. It kicks off with this tale of teachers who dare to quit grouping kids by labels. Back in the old days, this was heterogeneous grouping, contrasted with “ability grouping” or “homogeneous grouping.”

Not only that, they’re teaching across subject area lines - reading and social studies together. Back in the old days, this was called subject-area integration or thematic instruction. The Post reports,

In three classrooms along a short corridor at Blue Ridge Middle School in Loudoun County, there were several scenes last week of educational convention turned upside down. Lemmert and colleagues Alisa Gladstone and Amy Wood decided last year to experiment with placing honors, regular and special education students in the same rooms, offering a course that unified social studies and English, and encouraging every child to reach higher than before.

Well, I have a few things to say about this. First, it’s nice that these teachers have found a safe harbor where they can quit making advance decisions about which kids can learn what material. But it’s sad that rebellion against labeling and tightly sequenced instruction is so rare that it’s called bold innovation when it happens.

Such innovations are uncommon in U.S. public schools, given the old pressure to conform to tradition and the new one to raise standardized test scores. But plenty of teachers still find that if they are seized by an idea, as Lemmert, Wood and Gladstone were, and can convey that passion to supervisors, they have a chance to see what happens when they go in a different direction.

It seems to be working out OK, too. Although kids can choose books at any level, they keep surprising their teachers by reaching higher.

In the second year of their experiment, the three teachers said the tendency was for students at or below grade level to try books and projects considered above them. “It’s more challenging for the kids,” Lemmert said. “They bring themselves up to these new expectations, rather than someone dumbing down all the work for them.”

The teachers also note some breaking down of stereotypes among the students, and some nice social behaviors.

So, upon reading this article, a parent on one of the listservs I follow complained that there was no research here, that teachers can’t reliably evaluate their own experiments, and that teachers take over-much pleasure in a few scattered peer effects. In short, we need science, not anecdotes, to make broad policy.

Which is missing the point entirely, because broad policy is exactly the problem. These teachers knew they could teach passionately and effectively this way. They knew that giving up some classroom strictures would make them better teachers, and would make their students better students. So they asked if they could teach differently. And the principal said yes. Seems like everyone’s happy with the results.

Does that mean that their model should be replicated, scaled up, imposed on every teacher in the district? Of course not. Because there are other teachers who can create a classroom that is every bit as intellectually vibrant while teaching a traditional course in literature.

One of the many ugly sides of the accountability movement is its view of teachers as cogs in a vast unthinking machine that moves students relentlessly toward ever-higher test scores. A teacher who knows that teaching is an exercise of intellect, judgment, and passion gets cast as a rebel. That’s a pretty good way to repel bright people from the profession.

Jerry Weast, the superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland noted recently that it has become common practice for states to lower standards to increase their odds of meeting NCLB 100% proficiency requirements. The Post reports:

Weast said the state curriculum, the statewide Maryland School Assessment and the High School Assessment all measure a minimal level of academic proficiency. The reason, he said, is that Maryland and most other states have leaders who want their kids “to look good” on such assessments.

This is called “dumbing down” the curriculum, and it drives parents nuts, especially highly educated ones. Many consider it the ruination of public schooling.

But a larger peril to the public school system comes from another kind of test-driven dumbing down - the dumbing down of the teaching profession. Increasingly, schools are responding to NCLB pressure by dictating, down to the word, how teachers teach every day in their classrooms. That creates the kind of work environment that’s pushing the best teachers out of the system.

The Seattle Times reports that teachers in the Bellevue School District must adhere to daily lesson plans designed by a committee, and deviation from the plan by more than a day or two requires committee approval.

The article claims that this level of standardization is rare, but it’s really not - it’s built into many popular scripted reading programs. For a chilling bit of propaganda, watch the video, “Why Use Scripts” on the Institute for Direct Instruction website. The ditzy but strangely appealing teacher in the video gives her heartfelt testimony:

If you don’t follow the script, I don’t think you’re going to see results as quickly. I think it’s incredibly important that you practice at home before. I remember I took home my manual before we started teaching, and I would hold it up to the mirror…

This is someone’s twisted vision of teaching, where teachers spend their after-school time practicing a script.

What it all comes down to is a fork in the policy road. Down one path, teachers are low-skilled workers trained to deliver someone else’s words, without deviation, to large numbers of children all taught identically. Down the other path, teachers are highly trained professionals who use their intellect, knowledge, and experience to efficiently and effectively match instruction to child. Path One is cheap, but is that what you want for your child?

And dumbing down the teaching profession leads inevitably to the dumbing down of the curriculum. Teachers who are discouraged from thinking, creating, or making professional judgments will never be able to produce intellectual excitement in the classroom, no matter what the script says, because they are experiencing intellectual death with every moment of teaching.

That would indeed be the ruination of public schools.