Iowa educators cannot explain why reading assessments are not improving (as more states pass us by). The assessments are written outside of Iowa because Iowa educators are unable to design assessments that probe for how well students grasp concepts and apply them, due to their 60-year total focus on shallow memorization of factoids as a pseudo education. After several email exchanges with Deborah Reed (Director of the Reading Research Center) and some at the Department of Education, I can tell them why the summer reading program failed to improve proficiencies and why Iowa schools are failing to get proficiencies up on the NAEP exams (as eleven states did better on the 2015 testing).
When we “aging baby boomers” were in elementary school, we used the dictionary for phonics lessons because inside the front cover were all of the phonics rules that covered every word in the dictionary — so there were no exceptions to the rules that had to be memorized. As we worked our way up through the elementary grades, we did a variety of activities that eventually covered all five of the reading concepts for elementary, thus providing reinforcement of the concepts continually. I have compared the Iowa Core with the Common Core, and the outcomes desired by each were being achieved prior to the “big changeover” to a system of memorization about 60 years ago, but Iowa educators are using memorization.
With the exception of the states presently out-educating Iowa, the phonics system being used by most schools lacks rules to cover all letters and combination of letters, making memorization the fallback used by teachers. These individuals have no educational experiences that would lead them to even question whether or not there is a better phonics program out there — which there is.
The other big mistake being made — that continues to put U.S. 15-year-olds behind seventeen other countries on the 2015 international PISA exams in reading — is interpretation of “sight words.” Today’s poorly educated and poorly trained teachers perceive “sight words” as memorization. What we did with this, prior to the “big change” sixty years ago, was do increased exercises in the application of the concepts until we recognized quickly what a proper response was without having to give it much thought. This is the skill today’s assessments are looking for, but today’s educators think memorization is faster than actually learning how to apply the concepts quickly.
Sue Atkinson
Baxter