"Pushing young children to read is not good for them," says School Board Member

April 24, 2015- From TN-Edu Independent - "Pushing young children to read is not good for them." This comment was made recently by a school board member in Nashville. This comment reflects a policy view that would be detrimental to students across the MNPS system.

If anything, we have the exact opposite problem. We don't have the right policies and the appropriate execution of practices that foster the early literacy skills that so many Nashville students need.

Way too many young students in Nashville don't have adequate early literacy skills, and this deficit continues to hurt them in a big way throughout their K-12 learning years (if you can't read, it is hard to learn in other subjects or from other texts).

The American Academy of Pediatrics advocates for reading out loud to children (and is pushing their pediatric members to communicate that to parents).

It's somewhat shocking to me for a school board member to advocate for not pushing young children to read. While advocating for developmentally appropriate policies for children, which has merit and makes sense, this statement is irresponsible. If this was about making a political statement, related to the video below, and tied into the very skewed Diane Ravitch education policies (that is more about test opt-outs, everything should be play for children, etc), it's still irresponsible, and shows how allegiance to adult politics can trump rational and sensible policies for educating children.

A couple of thoughts stand out.

1. If pushing young children to read is not good for them, then we shouldn't fund the Reading Recovery appropriation in the most recent MNPS budget nor anything else related to early literacy instruction.
2. I'm basically a terrible parent for reading Dr. Seuss books with my 16 month old.
3. Dolly (and many others) have gotten it way wrong all these years by sending books to homes through the Imagination Library program.
4. The early literacy skills gap is a very serious issue that underpins a lot of our issues in K-12 education. This gap is particularly problematic for low-income and minority students. Note the reading gap (diamonds) among different income levels:
   
5. The above video showcased Mission Hill school in Boston (along with Matt Damon's mom - Nancy Carlsson-Paige).

The video is more about testing opt out issues, and an advocacy for an approach to education that is all about play based learning. To make the statement that we shouldn't push young children to read and learn early literacy skills is going way too far.

And when it comes to student proficiency levels in reading (English Language Arts), the approach advocated for in the video in the school that is highlighted isn't working very well. Only 1/3 of Mission Hill school students are proficient or advanced in English Language Arts school-wide. For some grades, it's extremely low (4th grade - only 8%), and they have a very high percentage of students in the "warning/failing" classification for English Language Arts.

Yes, Mission Hill is a Title 1 school, but so are many others in Boston that have much higher reading proficiency rates.

Pushing young children to read and develop early literacy skills IS GOOD for them!!

 

My Comment: If you were wondering which school board member said, "pushing young children to read is not good for them;" it was Amy Frogge. Go to her Facebook page and it is posted on April 19. Rod



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Edu $pending productivity: a novel concept.

From TN Education Independent -We often talk about money in the public education conversation. Rarely does anyone say we have too much. The conversation is often focused on we never have enough. There was some good discussion at the MNPS board meeting on ensuring that we're seeing the outcomes we want to see for students for the dollars we spend.

In the future, I see two larger things that will restrict the growth in education spending like we've seen in past years.

1. The demographic picture is changing in America. The population has a growing share of older people that may have no connection to schools systems or the desire to fund them. They'll want different services to be funded instead of public education. These are the individuals who tend to consistently vote, and I don't see them being for the taxes to pay for more education spending.

1a. In Tennessee we get a lot of our school funding from sales tax revenue. Older people don't spend as much on consumption (fixed income living and all).

2. City debt loads are already moderate to high in many municipalities. Paying back debt from a limited pot of money generated through local taxes makes it hard to free up money for more education spending in the present.

Little attention is paid to the question: Are we spending our edu-dollars as effectively as possible?

That's a general question, and the answer will be somewhat subjective based on who you are. The "return" part is likely to differ based on what you primarily value as the goal of a public education system.

If you care most about kids being nice and law abiding citizens, a high youth crime rate might tell you you're edu-money isn't being spent well. If you care about students demonstrating academic ability in core subjects, and your district's achievement scores are low, then you're edu-money could arguably be spent a lot better. There are many other primary values that differ among people.

There is common ground out there as well, but people have conflicting views on what public education should do for students, for the adults employed by that system, and for a city.

For whatever it is that school systems should be doing, the conversation largely centers on "we just need more."

Well...maybe...but more for what? If a district spends money ineffectively for whatever it is you believe that a school district exists to do for students - produce good citizens or graduate kids that know stuff - why give it more?

Why doesn't the conversation largely center on "how do we spend every dollar as best we can?"

Well, there's some data out there to look at to have more of this conversation. I wish we had a more formalized data set in Tennessee, and started looking at this data every year. Given all the challenges mentioned above with the future looking like it'll be constrained for more public education funding, we may be compelled to spend scarce education dollars in a more effective way.

The Center for American Progress has a report, found here: Return on Educational Investment: 2014.

And a corresponding interactive data set and map here: CAP interactive tool.

The report is from 2014 but the data on the interactive tool is a bit old (from 2011). Still, the analysis is worth considering, and it'd be even better to look at updated data on this. I wouldn't imagine some of the trends have changed that much.

Here's how they color code performance:

Some things stick out in using the tool:

• The highest cost and lowest achieving districts are different by urbanicity (mix of urban, rural remote, rural fringe geographies.
• You can be a low income district and still achieve green (Cocke County - 78% low income). Davidson Co fared most poorly among other large urban districts in Tennessee. Davidson Co was bright red (highest cost, lowest achievement), while Memphis was orange (medium cost, lowest achievement).
• Poorer districts appear to score lower on ROI measures.
• Size may be correlated with higher ROI (Memphis and Davidson Co are exceptions to this).

Bottom line: Across Tennessee, and in our two largest districts especially (now SCS and MNPS), we need to have a serious ongoing conversation about ensuring a high educational return for the money spent.

While many would like to jump to simply advocating for more money for public education, especially in these large districts, I'd prefer to spend our time and political conversations on how to get better educational returns. We spend a large amount of money already, and before asking for more, we ought to be confident that how we are allocating edu-dollars is actually working well for students.

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