Education: A leftwing politician I agree with.

[IQS.RLOW]

Being the good right wing capitalist I am, my ice skates store in hell will be open for business soon.

I have written about this before here, where the education system has failed a generation or two because of some leftwing hippy claptrap who decided that learning from rote was failing a minority of stupid kids, so leftwing logic dictated to change the whole system to whole of word recognition and other post modernist garbage thus disadvantaging the median students and increasing the number of illiterate students who found what used to be a simple learning task into one so complex that it failed the students.

This should be the subject of a royal commission because our students have fallen so far behind the rest of the world, and the education system should immediately revert to historically efficient methods.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... 6745539975" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Post modern clap trap rules in schools

IT is a scandal that Australian education is being held to ransom by a few hundred academics and mid-ranking bureaucrats who prioritise their own careers over the literacy of our children.

The public is rightfully perplexed as to how Australia can pour so much money into education and yet keep hearing that our general literacy is declining.

The anecdotal evidence from employers and universities about poor literacy levels is verified by research. The result of the latest Progress in International Literacy Study showed Australians have the lowest literacy levels of the English-speaking nations surveyed.

And we had more than twice the percentage of students performing "below low" than Canada and the US. What is going wrong?

Quite simply, the academic institutions and state educational departments are largely controlled or influenced by those with career attachments to the "whole language" methodology.

It focuses on reading being acquired naturally, as with speech, rather than being taught systematically as a code to unlock sounds and structures. Phonics is not given the central focus and children are encouraged to guess words based on the context or pictorial clues.

While there are students who can learn to read in this way, many do not. It is an approach that particularly fails kids from lower socio-economic and Aboriginal backgrounds. It also appears to disadvantage boys.

There is overwhelming scientific support for the alternative approach of highly structured direct instructions of skills associated with decoding writing. This is the method that most Australians older than 45 would understand, as it was how they were taught to read.

For the past eight years, I have been deeply involved with Challis Primary School Cluster in Armadale, an outer suburb of Perth, and I have personally witnessed the transformation that can take place when courageous teachers take on departmental orthodoxy and embrace the science.

The big percentage of children in the Challis catchment were assessed in the very first round of Australian Early Development Index I 2005 as having an "above-average level of development vulnerability".

The reading achievement for children at Challis had remained steadfastly well below the state average.

Committed teachers tried every approved method to improve the educational achievements but not only did the kids start school disadvantaged, every year the gap between their attainment and the state average widened.

Then the principal started to investigate what science was telling us about how children actually learned. She read with excitement the seminal 2006 British Independent Review of Teaching and Early Reading, which found that a vigorous program of phonic work needed to be embedded in the curriculum, and saw the British National Literacy Strategy that was developed from rigorous inquiry.

She approached a first-year pre-primary teacher who agreed to try this "new" method - that class outperformed all the other pre-primary classes at the school.

Gradually, Challis persuaded and inspired teachers to embrace this way of teaching, returning and deepening their understanding and skills on the way.

By 2011, they had turned around the traditional disadvantage and, at the end of the pre-primary year, the gap between Challis children and the state average had closed.

By the end of last year, the pre-primary children had surpassed the state average.

The Australian government's National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy found in 2005 that literacy instruction should be "grounded in the basic building blocks of reading" - namely the set of integrated sub-skills that include letter-symbol rules, letter-sound rules, whole-word recognition and the ability to derive meaning from written text.

[Chard]

You want to improve primary education? It's easy. Stop coddling the little bastards and stop catering to the mediocre.

Raise standards and hold students and their parents accountable for poor performance. If Johnny McNumbnuts flunks a test you don't lower the test standard, you fail Johnny and make him relearn the information until he can pass. If he keeps failing get his parents involved. If the parents won't become proactively involved in their child's education the get the authorities to remove the child from his obviously neglectful parents.

Issue uniforms so there's no more bullshit about who's wearing what. Enforce grooming stardards for haircuts, jewelry, and facial hair for the older students. It's kind of hard to pick on each other when you all look the same.

Add a physical education requirement to graduate high school. The US and Australia are among the fattest nations in the world. Obesity is a fucking massive health risk, and slow and sendentary people make for slow and sedentary societies. PE should be a solid hour of exercise, stretching, calisthenics, weight training, playing actual sports. Set a physical fitness test every semester with a passing PFT required to graduate each grade. If your child has an actual documented medical condition that prevents them exercising, whatever, but the rest of those shits can go run laps. No one likes fatties.

Good thread idea, IQ. Education reform is a topic I can rant at length on.

[IQS.RLOW]

It's a per hate of mine because I'm watching my own kids go through it, and looking at the type of books they are handing out is deplorable. It's a struggle to understand the questions being asked whether its math or English. Rather than teaching them a ground work to build upon, even the ground work has been turned into some obscure IQ test designed to confound what should be a simply stated question + answer.

When I was a kid, learning your times tables meant reciting them...apparently that ain't the done thing anymore and I see my kids and their classmates struggling to figure out what 8x6 is in year 4, not to mention vowels, sounds etc for English reading.

Some dipshit in the education beauracracy decided what worked for the last 100 years suddenly needed to be changed and now we have not only kids struggling with learning, we have a generation of teachers who have had this shit pounded into them since their first day of uni and are wedded to it as a form of teaching.

[mantra]

It's a per hate of mine because I'm watching my own kids go through it, and looking at the type of books they are handing out is deplorable. It's a struggle to understand the questions being asked whether its math or English. Rather than teaching them a ground work to build upon, even the ground work has been turned into some obscure IQ test designed to confound what should be a simply stated question + answer.

When I was a kid, learning your times tables meant reciting them...apparently that ain't the done thing anymore and I see my kids and their classmates struggling to figure out what 8x6 is in year 4, not to mention vowels, sounds etc for English reading.

Some dipshit in the education beauracracy decided what worked for the last 100 years suddenly needed to be changed and now we have not only kids struggling with learning, we have a generation of teachers who have had this shit pounded into them since their first day of uni and are wedded to it as a form of teaching.

Exactly the same thing happened during my children's education which occurred during the ten years of the Howard government. Their education was deplorable. If I hadn't had a reasonable grasp of English and Mathematics - my kids would have been illiterate. I had to teach them the basics outside of school hours. They would sometimes come home from school with their correct spelling crossed out and the teacher's misspelt word beside it.

Forget Maths - the teachers didn't have a clue and they weren't taught their times table, grammar or how to write properly. Textbooks were second hand from private schools and there was one book between two kids.

The system was changed in the 80's and you can't pinpoint exactly which government changed it, but all successive governments have had the opportunity to do something about it, which they haven't.

[IQS.RLOW]

You can leave your "Howard hate" at the door Mantra, education is a state responsibility.

Who was the state govt in your area for the last 10 years?

[mantra]

You can leave your "Howard hate" at the door Mantra, education is a state responsibility.

Who was the state govt in your area for the last 10 years?

Yes it is basically a state responsibility in regard to appointment of teachers and buildings, but we have a Federal Education minister who is responsible for the national curriculum. The way children are taught now is a national issue. Teachers are also trained at universities - another Federal responsibility.

[mantra]

For Roach and IQ

In Australia today it is conservatively estimated that 20 per cent of Australian children are struggling with learning difficulties.

Some have a developmental learning disability like dyslexia; the rest are suffering from poor instruction. Reading academics call them 'instructional casualties'.

The Commonwealth Government has known of the systemic problems in reading instruction since the mid-2000s. In 2004, then Education Minister Brendan Nelson established a national inquiry into the teaching of reading at the behest of a group of reading academics.

The resulting report highlighted the importance of teaching phonological awareness (the ability to understand, identify and manipulate the sounds of spoken words) and phonics (the relationship between a letter and its corresponding sound ) — as part of an integrated reading program that supports the development of oral language, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension.

It stated:

There is now a strong body of scientific evidence that children are greatly assisted in learning to become proficient readers if their reading tuition is grounded in direct, explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

Yet the inquiry found that most schools were not providing such instruction due to a lack of teacher training and the dominance of 'whole language' pedagogy.

In a typical Australian classroom, 'whole language'-dominant instruction involves exposure to a rich and meaningful oral and written language environment (which is necessary), a focus on comprehension and sight word recognition (also necessary), and, more recently, to what reading academics call analytical or implicit phonics.

Advocates of whole language say that this is the teaching of phonics 'in context’; from the top down.

They also say that this type of phonics can be taught explicitly and systematically but the reality is that in many classrooms it is not.

Lacking decoding skills, students are taught to guess at words using the first letter of a word or the pictures in a book and are expected to just 'get it' through constant exposure to oral and written language and some limited phonics instruction.

While some students do just get it others don't and they languish.

Sadly, the hope offered to struggling students through the Nelson inquiry did not come to fruition.

Two years after it was released in 2005, Max Coltheart and Margot Prior released a report for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia which reported slow progress in the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations.

The authors stated:

As far as we know ... none of the Australian tertiary institutions which provide teacher training, nor any of the State Departments of Education except in Victoria, have yet acted in any way in response to the review and its recommendations. We know of no plans for the universities to improve the training of teachers in the science of reading, and in evidence-based methods for teaching reading and assisting children with difficulties in learning to read.

Six years on from this report, and again, not enough has changed.

While there are differences between jurisdictions and some progress has been made through Commonwealth and state and territory intervention, far too many schools have not yet integrated direct, explicit, systematic phonics instruction into their reading programs.

In some cases, the language of the policy documents has changed but the teaching in schools hasn't.

The situation in Australia contrasts with that of the United States and England where national reviews led to widespread changes in reading instruction. There is some evidence that these countries are now doing much better than Australia.

In the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) — which essentially examines reading comprehension amongst Grade 4 students — the United States came sixth out of 45 countries (in terms of mean scores) and England came eleventh.

By contrast, Australia, participating for the first time, came in at number 27 out of 45 countries, which was the lowest ranking out of all English-speaking nations.

The results for our weakest students were bleak. Australia had 17 per cent of students that met only the low benchmark and a further seven per cent that failed to meet even this minimum standard.

Irrespective of who wins the federal election, it is essential that the federal government, in collaboration with the states and territories and university teacher training providers, reforms the teaching of reading in Australian schools.

This should include that, by the end of the next term of government:

reading tuition in every primary school includes direct, explicit and systematic phonics instruction as part of an integrated reading program;
every primary teacher training degree includes a substantial component dedicated to training student teachers to provide such tuition;
all practising primary teachers are trained in the required teaching methods; and
all state and territory education departments are able to verify high quality reading instruction in every school.

Deb Wilkinson is a writer and policy researcher.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-03/w ... ad/4931970

[wog_girl]

You want better education outcomes? Then quit electing the bastards that keep stripping us teachers of the little power we have left.

[IQS.RLOW]

For Roach and IQ

In Australia today it is conservatively estimated that 20 per cent of Australian children are struggling with learning difficulties.

Some have a developmental learning disability like dyslexia; the rest are suffering from poor instruction. Reading academics call them 'instructional casualties'.

The Commonwealth Government has known of the systemic problems in reading instruction since the mid-2000s. In 2004, then Education Minister Brendan Nelson established a national inquiry into the teaching of reading at the behest of a group of reading academics.

The resulting report highlighted the importance of teaching phonological awareness (the ability to understand, identify and manipulate the sounds of spoken words) and phonics (the relationship between a letter and its corresponding sound ) — as part of an integrated reading program that supports the development of oral language, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension.

It stated:

There is now a strong body of scientific evidence that children are greatly assisted in learning to become proficient readers if their reading tuition is grounded in direct, explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

Yet the inquiry found that most schools were not providing such instruction due to a lack of teacher training and the dominance of 'whole language' pedagogy.

In a typical Australian classroom, 'whole language'-dominant instruction involves exposure to a rich and meaningful oral and written language environment (which is necessary), a focus on comprehension and sight word recognition (also necessary), and, more recently, to what reading academics call analytical or implicit phonics.

Advocates of whole language say that this is the teaching of phonics 'in context’; from the top down.

They also say that this type of phonics can be taught explicitly and systematically but the reality is that in many classrooms it is not.

Lacking decoding skills, students are taught to guess at words using the first letter of a word or the pictures in a book and are expected to just 'get it' through constant exposure to oral and written language and some limited phonics instruction.

While some students do just get it others don't and they languish.

Sadly, the hope offered to struggling students through the Nelson inquiry did not come to fruition.

Two years after it was released in 2005, Max Coltheart and Margot Prior released a report for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia which reported slow progress in the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations.

The authors stated:

As far as we know ... none of the Australian tertiary institutions which provide teacher training, nor any of the State Departments of Education except in Victoria, have yet acted in any way in response to the review and its recommendations. We know of no plans for the universities to improve the training of teachers in the science of reading, and in evidence-based methods for teaching reading and assisting children with difficulties in learning to read.

Six years on from this report, and again, not enough has changed.

While there are differences between jurisdictions and some progress has been made through Commonwealth and state and territory intervention, far too many schools have not yet integrated direct, explicit, systematic phonics instruction into their reading programs.

In some cases, the language of the policy documents has changed but the teaching in schools hasn't.

The situation in Australia contrasts with that of the United States and England where national reviews led to widespread changes in reading instruction. There is some evidence that these countries are now doing much better than Australia.

In the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) — which essentially examines reading comprehension amongst Grade 4 students — the United States came sixth out of 45 countries (in terms of mean scores) and England came eleventh.

By contrast, Australia, participating for the first time, came in at number 27 out of 45 countries, which was the lowest ranking out of all English-speaking nations.

The results for our weakest students were bleak. Australia had 17 per cent of students that met only the low benchmark and a further seven per cent that failed to meet even this minimum standard.

Irrespective of who wins the federal election, it is essential that the federal government, in collaboration with the states and territories and university teacher training providers, reforms the teaching of reading in Australian schools.

This should include that, by the end of the next term of government:

reading tuition in every primary school includes direct, explicit and systematic phonics instruction as part of an integrated reading program;
every primary teacher training degree includes a substantial component dedicated to training student teachers to provide such tuition;
all practising primary teachers are trained in the required teaching methods; and
all state and territory education departments are able to verify high quality reading instruction in every school.

Deb Wilkinson is a writer and policy researcher.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-03/w ... ad/4931970

Thanks for making my point Mantra. It was in 2004 that the govt recognised that phonics whic had been discarded under leftwing acedemic numptys was a major contributing factor to the failure of student.

Thanks again Mantra for highlighting that point.

[IQS.RLOW]

Yet the inquiry found that most schools were not providing such instruction due to a lack of teacher training and the dominance of 'whole language' pedagogy.

Once again, pandering to the progressive left fails the whole of society and proves they are nothing but regressive because they are too stupid to know any better.