Trelease Site Contents

• • • ISSUES IN READING EDUCATION • • •

Who's right about reading on the Web? Here are some encouraging Web-reading views as well as some troubling (googling) trends.
Principals: Tired of those empty parent programs? Here's how one principal packs 'em in every time.
What happened to Japanese reading when video games and laptops arrived on commuter trains?
Top U.S. corporate leaders share how they overcame their DYSLEXIA in a Fortune Magazine cover story.
About those audio books: Is that reading or cheating? And the prediction in 1894 that Alexander Graham Bell's phonograph would be the end of books.
What is it about comic books like "Archie" that allows them to last and influence? And what about that "comic curriculum" from Columbia University's Teacher's College?
"Incentives" for learning—they're cropping up across the nation, from Accelerated Reader's point system to cash awards. Do they really work?

A look at nonreaders' nonreading teachers!
American Educator magazine devotes an extraordinary issue to "Early Childhood Language."
Another parental exploitation IT device: counting their words-to-baby and see how they rank with other families—the LENA.
How to turn public radio's huge sound archives into an education treasure chest, complete with links to hours of author and expert interviews.
The "smoking gun" in the reading gap between rich and poor students: Researchers point to "summer setback."
The new pediatric research is connecting some serious learning disruptions to heavy early childhood TV-viewing.
When the superintendent says the teacher must construct sets of questions for before, during, and after reading-alouds—does he have a research leg to stand on or is it just a means to block read-alouds?

"Reading First" / No Child Left Behind: essays and issues

For years there were rumors about conflicts of interest (i.e., textbook-publisher ties) at Reading First, and the Inspector General found 51 pages worth. Then the Department's researchers started digging and it got even uglier.
Reporting weaknesses in the NRP and No Child Left Behind Act: Is such reporting 'unpatriotic'?
The NRP Report: What went wrong? And what's this about SSR doesn't work?
There would be no NCLB Act were it not for the Nation at Risk report. Here's a sobering look at Risk on its 20th anniversary.
In light of the NRP report, what recourse does a teacher or district have to resist the mandates and do it legally?
Long-time education writer and teacher Susan Ohanian takes stock of NCLB in "Bush Flunks Schools" in The Nation.
Wrestling with the mandatory "tutoring" element in NCLB: Will changing the teacher, change the scores or is it just after-school money-grabbing?
A "national superintendent of the year" finalist, William J. Mathis examines NCLB and finds that beneath the noble promises lurks a price-tag well beyond the range of the 10 states he studied. Here online in the May 2003 issue of Phi Delta Kappan is his study, "No Child Left Behind: Costs and Benefits."

Heard about the 'Texas education miracle' — a 'zero' dropout rate in Houston high schools? Sorry, not a miracle; just "smoke and mirrors," number changing, and "incentives" that brought new meaning to the term education mandates. What U.S. reporters and "60 Minutes" dug up in Houston.
What if the NCLB research is as flawed as the intelligence was on those "weapons of mass destruction"?
Are 'whole language' folks the only ones upset by the NRP report? Try long-time researcher Dick Allington.
The Bush/McGraw-Hill family ties that bind Washington to testing.
If 'carbo-loading' works for athletes, could it work for test takers? Desperately seeking higher scores, Virginia tried higher carbs and Gadsden (AL) nixed kindergarten naps.
POVERTY is the five-ton elephant in the classroom that nearly always leaves its children behind, but NCLB ignores it.
The connection between learning to read and learning to ride a horse: the advantage of owning a horse or book, and why those who have the fewest books are left behind.
The witty but insightful parody called "No Dentist Left Behind."
A long-time middle school principal in Ohio offers an apology for all that his students missed while in pursuit of higher school scores (at an "excellent-rated school").