[PEN-L:30695] RE: War Against Literacy=$$$$

To: "'pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx '" <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [PEN-L:30695] RE: War Against Literacy=$$$$
From: "Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 08:57:14 -0700

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30692] War Against Literacy=$$$$

The Bushite teach-to-the-test Bushwa is a disaster (as is the whole "Leave No Child Behind" nonsense, which seems aimed at helping the private schools), but here's a good word for phonics: different children have different "learning styles," some learning to read better with phonics and others with other methods. The problem with phonics is _not_ really about phonics _per se_. Rather, it's about forcing all kids into the same mold. Here in California, the school system did the same thing with a different teaching method ("whole language") that may or may not have benefitted McGraw-Hill. We need more pluralism in teaching techniques, more individual-oriented approaches.

BTW, I wonder if BUSINESSWEEK and other McGraw-owned media outlets reported on this?
Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Jannuzi
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 9/29/2002 5:18 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:30692] War Against Literacy=$$$$

This one is going to make the ruling regime a lot
of money, too. In fact, Bush was giving some sort
phonics-based cheerleading session when word of
9-11 came in. He then fled to a bunker in
Nebraska.

---------------------http://www.guerrillanews.com/government/doc326.html

Hooked on Phonics
Savanna Reid, February 21, 2002
The McGraw publishing dynasty has closer,
longer-standing ties to President Bush than even
Enron's ex-chairman Ken Lay. While the country's
attention has been focused on the War on Terror
and the implosion of a little Houston-based
energy company, Bush and McGraw have quietly
pushed through a national education curriculum
that many critics fear may drive up drop-out
rates, further deepening the educational
opportunity gap between wealthy and poor. The law
is ironically called the "No Child Left Behind"
Act, and its mandates are coming soon to a school
district near you.

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be
able to pass a literacy test."
President Bush, at Townsend Elementary School,
touting his education reform plans, Feb. 21,
2001.

On January 8, Bush signed his Education Plan,
(the "No Child Left Behind" Act), into law. Its
critics assert that while not only will children
be left behind in record numbers, the act will
also principally serve as a windfall for
McGraw-Hill Companies, a publishing giant with
close family ties to the President.

Bush implemented a prototype of this plan in
Texas. Puffed with pride, Bush informed the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that, "In
1994, there were 67 schools in Texas that were
rated 'exemplorary' (sic) according to our own
tests."

Many teachers and education researchers have been
less enthusiastic about Bush-McGraw policies,
challenging the legitimacy of the program's
reliance on the science of 'phonics' and decrying
the punitive testing regimen that cracks down on
minority children.

Phonics is an approach to teaching reading that
emphasizes sound-bites over words as the
fundamental building-blocks of literacy. Loosely
based on phonetic linguistics and chock full of
scientific-sounding jargon like 'phonemic
awareness' and 'phonograms', research on phonics
emanates almost exclusively from sub-publishers
of the McGraw-Hill Companies.

Proponents call phonics instruction an
indispensable tool for 'decoding' (sounding out)
'whole language' (words). The system's detractors
point out that although 84% of all English words
are phonetically regular (easy to decode with
phonograms), the other (phonetically irregular)
16% are the words that appear with greatest
frequency in text ? about 80% of the time. These
statistics have been brushed aside as 'trivial'
by outspoken proponents of phonics instruction,
who insist that science is on their side.

'Scientific assessment' testing likewise made it
into national education reform legislation via
heavily-promoted research published by the
McGraw-Hill Companies. Congress heard
testimonials from professional consultants with
vested interests in overstating confidence in the
rigor and objectivity of research that links
high-stakes standardized testing to improvements
in public school performance. Objecting teachers
were accused of 'patronizing the poor' by setting
'low standards' for minority students

A Texas trial foreshadowed the grim outlook for
underprivileged students under 'test-mania'
infused education policy. The centerpiece of the
Governor Bush-McGraw testing program, the Texas
Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), was taken
to court in 1999 for discrimination against black
and Latino students.

Judge Edward C. Prado ruled that even though the
test clearly had a discriminatory impact
(minority graduation rates fell from 60 to 50%
after TAAS was implemented as a prerequisite for
graduation), TAAS was deemed "educationally
necessary" - so the policy was allowed to stand.

Forget Kenny-Boy: Meet the McGraws

The Bush and McGraw families have been close
since the 1930s. McGraw connections with the
Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy are
so extensive that the families seem to intertwine
seamlessly. Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his
brother in Texas both implemented radical
education reform policies at the state level to
virtually mandate the use of McGraw-Hill products
in public classrooms. John Negroponte, Bush's
ambassador to the U.N., comes from an executive
position in global marketing at McGraw. On his
first day in the Oval Office, Bush met with
McGraw himself, shortly before announcing an
ambitious national phonics-promoting education
policy.

In a close examination of the Bush education
policy's many favors for McGraw, The Nation's
Stephen Metcalf points out, "to teach phonics you
need a textbook and usually a series of items ?
worksheets, tests, teacher's editions ? that
constitute an elaborate purchase for a school
district and a profitable product line for a
publisher."

A survey published in the Elementary Reading
Market Update for January 2001 found that more
than 45% of phonics teachers polled used
supplementary materials in addition to the basal
series of books and supplies required to give
phonics instruction. Nearly half (43%) of those
surveyed bought these materials from McGraw-Hill
Companies.

McGraw-Hill garnered high praise from the
education marketing sector for taking the Texas
text-book and test publishing markets by storm.
Bush in turn took credit for saving the state's
education system, as Texas assessment test scores
rapidly climbed from dismal to 'exemplorary.' But
the widely-touted dramatic rise in TAAS scores
under Governor Bush's first experiment with
assessment policy may have been a symptom of
failure dressed up as a marker of success.

Texas students showed marked improvement on the
state-mandated tests, without matching
improvements on nationally normed tests like the
SATs. In a position statement of the Alliance for
Childhood, Columbia University Professor Jay
Heubert, director of the National Academy's High
Stakes study, explains that, "Test scores often
increase, especially during the years after a
test is first introduced, because teachers
increasingly 'teach to the test,' that is, focus
on subject matter and formats that appear on the
test." The resulting test scores reflect only a
distortion of students' learning accomplishments,
yet these statistics are increasingly used to
assess school performance. Under the new law,
these faulty assessments may lead to cutting off
school funds wherever teachers refuse to 'teach
to the test'.

Business Leaders Take Charge of Developing 'Human
Capital'

In "A Business Leader's Guide to Setting Academic
Standards," the Business Roundtable calls for
"incentives to reward teaching achievement,
day-to-day decision-making at the operating level
(including authority to hire, fire, promote,
reward and transfer), the lack of assurance of
life-long employment, and the expectation that
when customer goals are not met, you go out of
business."

This statement echoes IBM (and former RJR
Nabisco) CEO Louis Gerstner's (1) policy paper,
"Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in
America's Public Schools," wherein teachers are
characterized as sellers of mass-produced
information in a memetic marketplace, and
children are coldly defined as human capital.

Peter Sacks, author of "Standardized Minds: The
High Price of America's Testing Culture and What
We Can Do to Change It," pounces on this penchant
of the test-promoters for describing American
youth as raw materials to be fashioned into a
function-proficient labor-force. "You will
frequently hear business leaders tell state
legislatures something like, 'We are the
customers of your products.' Is that why we go to
school, to become products for American
business?" Interviewed by Alan Stoskopf,
associate program director of the Boston-based
group Facing History and Ourselves, Sacks
attacked the anti-intellectual thrust of this
profit-driven testing culture. "Prepping for
tests rewards certain limited kinds of thinking
and penalizes deeper and more sustained
reflection."

Testing experts recognize that numerical test
scores can create an aura of precision around
assessments that are actually extremely
error-prone. For instance, at the fourth-grade
level, reading test scores tend to vary widely
for the same child taking the same test on
different days. Programming errors in
computerized scoring modules and inappropriate
extrapolation from poorly-designed assessment
tests have misrepresented the abilities of
millions of students, prompting strong reactions
in the press a year ago.

Because of the serious impact that an erroneous
assessment could have on a child's future
educational progress, the American Education
Research Association specifically discourages
making "decisions that affect individual
students' life chances or educational
opportunities" on the basis of test scores rather
than grades or other measures of academic
performance.

The National Center for Fair & Open
our business plan").

Critics expect the "No Child Left Behind" Act to
devastate poorer communities where parents cannot
afford supplementary or alternative private
education programs for their children. Juggling
twenty or more work hours per week on top of
homework and class attendance, a disproportionate
number of overworked minority children do not
perform up to par on tests. These students may be
blamed for slashed school funding by local
administrators. School officials struggling to
raise the average scores of their classes tend to
pressure consistently low-scoring students to
leave. Furthermore, talented teachers will want
out of impoverished districts, to avoid
punishment under performance evaluations framed
in terms of test scores that correlate to
students' socioeconomic backgrounds. But the
hardest-hit families in poor districts are not so
well equipped to mobilize against the state. Most
will not stand behind test-boycotts, afraid that
their children might be punished or held back for
refusing to take the tests.

McGraw-Hill's Michael H. Kean, Ph.D., Vice
President of Public and Governmental Affairs,
concludes the company's formal statement of
educational assessment principles with a sober
admonition, "We should not permit unvalidated
tests - especially those with high-stakes
outcomes - to be administered to students."

Unremarked upon is this publishing corporation's
unsupervised position as the validator of its own
testing materials. The source of most research
studying phonics education programs produces and
markets the very teaching materials called for by
such programs. President Bush, true to form, has
acted as the conduit of this twofold corporate
policy-shaping coup. When asked by Rethinking
Schools to cite any credible expert opinion in
favor of standardized testing for children under
nine years old, a Milwaukee School Superintendent
responded, "You mean other than George W. Bush?"

Notes:

1. Gerstner first came under fire a decade ago
for simultaneously leading an education policy
reform movement and heading RJR-Nabisco, the
corporation behind Camel's youth-targeted
marketing of cigarettes.

His "Reinventing Education" Program treats
schools from RJR Nabisco's "Next Century Schools"
Program as models for change. More recently,
education policy analyst and author Gerald Bracey
denounced Gerstner for grossly distorting
statistical evidence in his public presentations
on the state of education in America, in an
effort to drum up desperation for some kind of
policy reform.

Savanna Reid is a Baltimore-based freelance
writer. GNN regulars know her as Gavin_Rose.