March 19, 2024

Department of Ed is failing teachers, students

In a manner identical to the way the media and political theories completely failed to understand the depth of resentment in the country to current political thinking (as demonstrated in the recent election), the media and teaching theories completely failed to understand the depth of degradation of education the past sixty years (as demonstrated by NCLB and ESSA). Political theorists, backed by biased media reporting, ignored and/or blamed increasing numbers of victims failed by the system. Similarly, professionals in education theory, backed by superficial media reporting, ignored and/or blamed those being failed by the education system when it changed from concepts and their application to memorization 60 years ago. While the political system is working to reassess, unfortunately, the education system is still resisting change, particularly in Iowa, where the misperception has been very deeply ingrained. Educators still fail to understand it is not about a list of topics to be memorized for the testing and then teaching to the list. The national Common Core provides the basic concepts on which to build.

Iowa educators attempted to write their own curriculum, and demonstrated complete failure in all they wrote. Math and science could be straightened out through aspects of those disciplines not associated with education the past 60 years (such as engineering). Unfortunately, Iowa educators prevailed on reading, and results are showing a continued decline with Iowa educators having no explanation.

This September a study was released that addresses this: “The Dyslexia Dilemma: a History of Ignorance, Complacency, and Resistance in Colleges of Education” by Hurford D, Hurford J, Head K, Keiper M, Nitcher S, Renner L. (2016). According to a press release on this, the science of reading (with its five essential components) is not being properly taught because teachers are not being properly trained. Teacher training programs have failed to understand the need to return to the five components of reading — an absolute basis for other learning, especially math.

Desperate for improvement, teachers are going beyond memorizing sight words to memorizing phrases. This misses the point that new assessments of depth of knowledge of concepts and their applications find memorization too shallow. In addition, it does not work with certain learning styles (and ESSA says the children are not to be blamed). The U.S. Department of Education is now writing guidelines for training teachers to effectively teach the five components of reading. Why no press releases reported?

Sue Atkinson

Baxter