After the section on Inclusion and Access (given
in my immediately previous article) of the Annual Letter from the 2020 Advisory
Committee comes the section on Literacy and Curriculum, with detailed committee
recommendations, which I present below in full before providing my own comments:
Literacy and
Curriculum
Early learning and reading at grade level
by third grade is essential in student success and a key indicator of being on
track for graduating college and career ready.
Minnesota’s Reading Well by Third Grade legislation (MN Statute 120B.12)
mandates that districts identify students by the end of third grade who are not
reading at grade level and provide interventions until they ae reading at grade
level.
In ST18, the 2020
Advisory enlisted panels of elementary teachers (PreK-5), literacy specialists,
and high school students from marginalized communities (including students with
disabilities, students who rare highly mobile, students of color, and students
of advanced learning) to share their personal accounts and expertise related to
literacy efforts in MPS. As a result our
advisory learned the following:
1)
Teacher prep programs are not preparing our teachers effectively to
teach foundational skills aligned to the literacy development needs of our
students.
2)
Student representatives informed us that student-adult relationships,
academic comprehension, and keeping students engaged at their individual
proficiency level is extremely important;
and that student behaviors that create complex classroom management issues
are how students communicate to teachers that schools are not meeting their
needs.
3)
PreK students are entering schools with fewer words than years prior and
lacking foundational reading skills, some with exposure to over 20,000 words
than their peers.
Advisory
2020 Recommendations--- Literacy and
Curriculum
>>>>> MPS must continue to host regular and
explicit professional development opportunities for teachers to ensure that
they can successfully engage students in quality and effective instruction
leading to improved literacy outcomes for ALL MPS students.
>>>>> MPS must ensure that ALL curriculum is
of high quality, culturally appropriate, and accelerates the learning of
students in all areas.
>>>>> Access to early education and High 5 is
an effective intervention and programming should be increased to add locations,
delivery models and availability, especially for our neediest learners.
>>>>> Develop a metric with the City of
Minneapolis and community partners to measure enrollment in high quality early
childhood programs.
>>>>> Provide support to the community
utilizing outside and community-based programs to educate parents/guardians
about the importance of early reading literacy and the availability of early
education and High 5 programming. (The
2020 Advisory Committee is aware of the district’s efforts and acknowledge the
Hybrid model referenced on page 8 in response to our 2017 letter.)
>>>>> MPS should utilize our legislative
lobbyist to express our concerns about teacher prep programs not educating our
teachers how to teach foundational literacy skills.
My
Comments
In
much of this section there is the same sort of repetitiousness and poor written
expression notable
at places
throughout the document.
But
there are also a couple of observations on the part of the committee that are
among my own
most important
emphases in describing the nature of the K-12 dilemma.
The committee notes
that “the 2020 Advisory enlisted panels of elementary teachers (PreK-5),
literacy specialists, and high school students from marginalized communities
(including students with disabilities, students who are highly mobile, students
of color, and students of advanced learning) to share their personal accounts
and expertise related to literacy efforts in MPS,” and that as a result the
committee learned the following:
Teacher prep programs are not
preparing our teachers effectively
to teach foundational skills
aligned to the literacy development
needs of our students.
That
such a comment was admitted by teachers themselves is very notable, and for
members of the 2020 Advisory Committee to get a sense of the inadequacy of
teacher training programs is very important.
As I mentioned in a previous article in this series and have discussed
in many places in the forums that I have created for expression of my views,
the wretchedness of teacher preparation programs generally and for prospective K-5
teachers particularly goes to the core of the K-12 dilemma. Not only does this matter pertain to the
issue of teacher quality, but also to the intellectual impoverishment of the
ideas spouted by education professors that K-12 teachers carry into the
classroom.
The committee also
conveys that
Student
representatives informed us that student-adult
relationships,
academic comprehension, and keeping
students
engaged at their individual proficiency level is
extremely
important; and that student behaviors
that
create
complex classroom management issues are how
students
communicate to teachers that schools are not
meeting
their needs.
The first part of the letter is deficient
in matters of grammar and written expression and emphasizes items that are much
in the conversational ether pertinent to relationships, engagement, and individual
student academic progress. But the
matter of students using perceptibly objectionable behavioral infractions to protest the inadequacy
of the education that they are receiving is very important. I have written and spoken in many places and
forums that when a teacher says, “Sit down and shut up” but then ain’t got
nothin’ meaningful to say, we go to the source of most behavioral disruptions.
Otherwise,
I direct readers’ attention to my view
of an education of excellence, undergirded by knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete curriculum and teachers retrained to impart such a curriculum. The spotlight should certainly be trained on
the multiple intellectual injuries inflicted by education professors on those
teachers whom they send forth into the public schools; in the meantime, decision-makers and program
designers need to embrace the responsibility to completely retrain teachers at
the level of the locally centralized school district.
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