This commentary is by Susan Ohanian, a resident of Charlotte and a fellow at the National Education Policy Center who has written more than 20 books.
As Vermont searches for a new secretary of education, we should look far beyond devotion to phonics or NAEP scores. Plenty of researchers who never seem to get quoted in the media point to the limitations of phonics. And Tom Loveless, senior fellow at Brookings Institution, declared, “Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea.”
I hope the new secretary of education will find time to listen to teachers and to students.
A couple of years ago, I felt compelled to drive 300 miles to attend the surprise 50th birthday party of a woman who was in my seventh-grade corrective reading class eons ago. She was a fan of our daily note exchange, a critical part of the curriculum.
I wrote a short note in every child’s little 3×5 spiral notebook, and when the student answered, I wrote another note. The small paper size was deliberate — so students wouldn’t be intimidated by a huge blank page.
I frequently wrote about my cats’ behavior or soup I made. In the spring I asked students to watch for the appearance of asparagus ads in the daily paper. (I’d persuaded the paper to gift us seven copies every day, another important part of the curriculum.)
Students would see me on hall duty, reading notebooks, and call out, “Read mine yet?” One of my favorite student notes was, “This is the 83rd note I’ve written to you!!!!!!!!!”
I got the birthday invitation because as a student Amy was such an avid note writer that she continued writing a few times a year — for decades — following me through multiple address changes. Her parents figured I should be there and found my address.
Students gave permission for me to show their notes at parent conferences. One set of parents, worried about the difficulty their son had in adjusting to a new school, read his notes to each other, and decided everything would be OK.
Maybe it was because I didn’t cite any experts, but the article I wrote about this daily note exchange was rejected by both the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. When It was finally published by “Learning,” a newcomer publication, the publisher received 1,500 enthusiastic responses from teachers — and offered me a job as staff writer.
Books, of course, were at the core of my curriculum, and when I was hired for a new reading program funded by the state, I persuaded my boss, a transplanted social studies teacher who was an avid reader himself, to look at the ugly material someone had purchased for the program. He agreed to let me use the reading curriculum budget in a unique way. Every month, I gave each student a ticket to redeem for a paperback book at the local bookstore.
To launch this effort, I took each class of students on a field trip to this bookstore, which was fortunately just six blocks away, and showed them how to browse. None of these kids had ever been in a bookstore. Nor had they ever been invited to choose a book to keep.
Families got involved. Mary reported fighting with her mother over just whose turn it was to read the book Mary had chosen at the bookstore.
My boss, pleased by the student and parent enthusiasm, noted, “Let’s just hope the board of education never finds out about this. We’d both be fired.”
I didn’t get fired but state funding ended, and I was transferred to a third-grade classroom, where 22 students with the lowest reading scores, some repeating the grade, some in special ed, were clumped together. Before long, these students were enthusiastic about the daily note exchange. Getting them to sit for an hour with a book took longer, but by December, the books they chose won out and they complained when I called an end to each day’s silent reading after an hour.
Every child but one scored on grade level or above on the standardized test at the end of the year. They also scored extremely well on spelling and grammar results, which I attribute not to direct teaching but to all that reading.
My message to the new secretary of education: Invite teachers and kids to make choices.
