Tuesday, April 11, 2006

WELCOME TO A NEW EDUBLOGGER

DIANE PHILIPSON has started a new blog here and has a lot of interesting posts up already. Here is what Miranda Devine recently had to say about Diane:

"Diane Philipson is a former primary school teacher who spends her days at home in Newcastle coaching children who are struggling to read. This week she had phone calls from two desperate mothers who say their sons, one aged 12 and one aged eight, feel life isn't worth living. "The eight-year-old told his mother he'd rather be dead than have to struggle so much with reading," Philipson said yesterday. Philipson is one of a number of backyard operators across Australia to whom anxious parents have turned to teach their children to read when school has failed. They invariably use a method that involves direct, explicit, systematic phonics. This is the inexplicably politicised way of teaching children that letters in our alphabet are associated with sounds."





The Echo Chamber on Liberal Campuses

Professors are stereotyped as pinko, tree-hugging, world-order globalists intrigued by same-sex marriage, obsessed with the environment and besotted with anything non-Western. Admittedly, I overstate the public image somewhat. Still, when consensus does occur among colleagues at my faculty "lunch table," it generally falls left-of-center, so perhaps there is some validity here.

One study, by a team that included GMU communications professor Robert Lichter, provides more tenable evidence of a liberal inclination among today's professors. Survey responses from faculty members at 183 American colleges and universities show that "liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins" and that liberals generally teach at the so-called better institutions.

There is some variation by academic discipline. English literature professors, for example, turn out to be 88 percent liberal and 3 percent conservative, whereas business professors are 49 percent liberal and 39 percent conservative. Overall, however, 72 percent of professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent as conservative. That's almost a 5-1 ratio.

Another interesting point: The percentage of faculty members who are liberal increases with the academic ranking of the school. The study postulates that anti-conservative discrimination in hiring and advancement may push conservative professors out of elite schools. So, if you are looking for a conservative academic, try the business department at an institution not considered top-tier. You will need some luck, however, because the odds are still against finding one. Okay, academic faculties are generally liberal. So? What's a liberal faculty anyway? Well, according to the study, faculty members agree with these statements in the percentages shown:

* Homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles are equally acceptable (67 percent).

* Women have a right to an abortion (84 percent).

* Extramarital cohabitation is acceptable (75 percent).

* Government should guarantee employment (66 percent).

* Government should reduce the income gap (72 percent).

* The environment should be protected even with higher prices and fewer jobs (88 percent).

But I think there's more to this. I would argue that there is an implicit mainstream campus credo. Dissent is heresy, so stay in the mainstream unless you are tenured. Here are the principal tenets.

* Diversity, particularly linguistic and theological diversity, binds and unites a culture.

* Proportionate representation of races within a student body justifies corrective discrimination by race.

* All cultures are morally equivalent.

* Social justice may require unequal application of equal protection laws.

* The dearth of women in science screams gender bias; the dearth of men in nursing does not.

* Diversity promotes classroom learning -- except in English composition, for which foreign-born students must have their own section.

* Hate speech (racial, sexual and religious slurs) has no place on college campuses. Some words should never be spoken.

* No one should ever have to pay for health care -- or condoms.

The American professoriate is sexually tolerant, culturally sensitive, environmentally conscious and socially collectivistic. It leans hard to the left, but that is not the important thing. What is important is that many perspectives on every issue should be presented and examined. Right now, liberal bias is so extreme as to threaten the only campus diversity that matters, the diversity of ideas.

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell worries that students may be exposed to just one side of issues and that they may graduate with neither skill nor competence in intellectual argumentation. "These 'educated' people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues . . . learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe," he wrote. I worry, too, but at least a study has identified the problem and quantified the challenge. Now if we could just hire and retain a few conservative professors, we might expand classroom debates, teach students to evaluate conflicting arguments -- and just maybe tilt my lunch table back toward the center.

Source






Ignorant Australian teachers still holding out against phonics

Reactions to the report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Teaching Reading, published in December last year) have been mixed. Many teachers and parents have welcomed the report's emphasis on the central role of phonics in the initial teaching of reading, but many educators have either questioned the importance of phonics or are of the view that teachers already employ sufficient phonics instruction within a "balanced" approach to literacy teaching. In Britain, the Rose report, released last month, also strongly favoured phonics, first and fast, for early readers.

Those least convinced by the findings of the two reports are those traditional educators favouring the well-entrenched "whole language" approach to the teaching of reading. "Whole language" advocates believe that reading is acquired naturally, in much the same way as we learn to talk, and that little or no phonics instruction is necessary, and may even be harmful.

Those who support phonics are perceived as uncool at best and reactionary at worst. Whole language exponents, on the other hand, are portrayed as children's champions in the fight for liberty and equality. Yet phonics instruction, rather than subjecting (if not subjugating) students to mindless, robotic drill, is actually powerfully liberating for children.

Those who advocate phonics share the views of whole language supporters on the importance of phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension, and the fact that students need to be able to read fluently and easily, not laboriously. Together with phonics, to which even some whole language advocates pay lip-service in a minor role, these elements have been identified as the five critical components of any effective reading program by the National Reading Panel in the US and reiterated subsequently by the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in Australia. No one, to my knowledge, believes that phonics is the only answer.

So, advocates of phonics and whole language actually agree on far more than they disagree on. The point of departure lies solely in the importance the two camps attach to explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words. The whole language side says children will discover this for themselves by being exposed to a rich literacy environment (and some children do), while those associated with phonics instruction argue that, to ensure the majority of children learn to read easily and quickly, systematic, explicit instruction in phonic decoding is essential. This is especially important for those experiencing difficulties.

A second misconception is that phonics advocates seriously suggest that once we have learned to read phonically, we continue to read that way. Not so. Phonics instruction provides a self-teaching mechanism by which children can teach themselves an increasing number of new words, initially by sounding them out. With sufficient repetition, and this varies for each child, these words are learned as sight words; they do not subsequently have to be sounded out each time they are encountered in text. Self-teaching is truly liberating because it allows children to learn new words without a teacher or parent even being present.

A focus on reading for meaning alongside systematic, explicit phonics instruction means the self-teaching mechanism also gives children an in-built check on the accuracy of their decoding. This is not to deny for a moment the vital significance of reading for meaning for its own sake.

It is not just educators advocating a whole language approach who want children to read critically. We all do. We all want children to be able to differentiate fact from opinion, and the ironic from the literal, for example. But to do this, students need to be able to read fluently first. If a child cannot read the actual words on the page, there is no possibility of being critical.

So the main point of departure is essentially one of priorities. To become a critically literate member of society, you need first to be able to read fluently and with understanding. To attempt to teach critical literacy before children have learned to read fluently is to put the cart before the horse. In the early years of schooling, the main emphasis should be on teaching accurate, fluent decoding with the aim of the vast majority of students being able to read well by year 3.

Explicit, systematic instruction in phonics is the best way to achieve this so that students can then read by themselves a variety of texts and hence have access to a variety of opinions, views and perspectives: phonics for freedom, in fact.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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