|
Last week I was given new insight into the definition of the word
busy. As I stepped into the office “complex” of the State Superintendent of Schools, I had the feeling she ruled a great empire.
People scurried around answering phone calls about test scores, handling last minute requests from Fox 5 News, and keeping a close eye on the clock to ensure Superintendent Cox adhered to her strict schedule. With all this going on, I was even more appreciative of the time she had allotted for an interview from the Literacy Lens.
Republican Kathy Cox, herself a teacher for 15 years, ran on the platform that school control should
be returned to the local school boards. In a November 2002 interview with Mark Niesse of the Associated Press Superintendent Cox said, “I know what works and what doesn’t from working with kids.
I can help reduce our dropout rate and that resonates with folks.” Cox went on to say, “When it comes to people and their schools, they want their local school boards to have the final say.”
When you access the Georgia Department of Education’s website there is a page for the
Superintendent. On this page Cox says, “As Superintendent of Schools, I will work with the Department of Education, the Board of Education, the Governor, the Legislature, and Georgia’s teachers,
administrators, parents, and students to significantly improve our state’s educational system.”
Part of working with Georgia’s teachers, as Cox refers to in this statement, is letting them know where she stands on reading instruction and programs like the Georgia Reading Endorsement (GARE) and that is exactly what she did in the following interview.
CC: If you could share with us your general philosophies for reading education from the child’s
perspective, what the child should be receiving, and from the teacher’s perspective, what the teacher should be providing.
KC: I’ve gotten a lot of my own education in reading in the last year, really, that I started the
campaign and found out a lot about what is going on in our state.
Of course, it has been a very quick study. I am certainly not the leading expert in the Department of Education on reading, but that doesn’t mean that it is not high on my priority list with what we have to do. It is essentially one of my foremost goals to make sure that in four years we’ve got the overwhelming majority of our third graders proficient in reading and math at grade level. Of course, No Child Left Behind, is also emphasizing these goals for 2013.
The focus that we’ve had on reading in the early grades over the last several years in Georgia, I think,
has been very good, a very good use of money, particularly in the area of staff development for teachers to teach reading.
Now we have had the “reading wars” in Georgia as well.
Where I come out on that, because I am probably not the expert, is I am kind of looking at the reading wars as the consumer. Both thinking of it as how I was taught, and then also thinking of it as a parent who does have an elementary age child and a middle school child. And I think, just like with a lot of things, we need to approach things with a balance. Schools and teachers went too far off with whole language or they go the opposite and only teach phonics. I was frankly a student who never got phonics. Still to this day, I could not tell you the difference between a long \a\ and a short \a\. I just never got it. So I think if you go too far with one strategy or one philosophy with reading, you end up harming the students. I think we need a balanced approach, and I think that is where Georgia is clearly headed. I think that is where our country is headed. And I think the science of teaching reading has been beefed up and that has become a strong element of our staff development efforts, where it does emphasize phonetics, but it also emphasizes fluency. I think that it is imperative in the early grades that a child truly learn to read and comprehend. And whether they are learning to read and comprehend in the content areas or with stories, I think sometimes the children can relate better to them and they are easier for them, should not be the big argument.
I think there is a real need though, when a student hits the third, fourth, or fifth grade, to start
reading instruction in the content areas.
I am a big fan of reading and writing across the curriculum. When I was a teacher myself, in a social studies department I started, I was the first department head that said eleventh graders will read historical novels as part of their history class. They read The Jungle and they read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one each semester. So I know that it is very, very important to increase the student’s ability to read throughout their grade and to link it to the curriculum.
I also don’t want us to head down the path of what I see so many states doing where they are just testing
reading and they are not testing language arts skills, which include the writing skills. I think it is very good that Georgia is going to continue to test those both and hold teachers and students accountable
for teaching and learning both. I think if we don’t, the kids are going to lose the ability to put their own thoughts on paper.
So there is no doubt that reading is the most important key. I have said many times that my tenth graders that I taught over the years, if all of them had been able to read and comprehend the history book that I had given them, wow, what I could have done with them?
But too much in this state we have just passed along and passed along and not had that science of really
being able to assess if a child can comprehend. I think the teacher training that is going on this state right now is terrific and we are gearing up in our department to continue that grand scale activity with
our school improvement activities.
CC: So when we think about where the state is moving with reading and we think about the Georgia
Reading Endorsement we see that it is not tied to any monetary incentive. There is no pay raise for the GARE and in many cases it doesn’t even mean the teachers will be better received for positions in their
schools that are directly related to reading, for example, EIP or Title I. When we look at EIP and Title I, how do you feel about paraprofessionals working with our struggling readers versus finding teachers
who have gone above and beyond and have gotten the GARE and are more qualified?
KC: I think what is going to happen is there is going to be so much pressure that will come about
with what we have to do for recording purposes for No Child Left Behind and for our own state accountability system.
I think accountability for schools and school systems and the disaggregation of the data is going to help in this area. I think that give it a year, give it two years and principals will be beating down the bushes to find reading specialists and people with the GARE because their school is going to be judged on it, and there is going to be no way to avoid it. And they are not going to just be judged on it from a one level look, they are going to be judged on how well they are teaching every kid to read. And you cannot solve the problems in reading by going about it the way we have always done it. I am already seeing that. I mean I am already seeing principals that as they become more and more an instructional leader of their school they are making better and better decisions about the use of their instructional dollars because ultimately they are going to have to get the biggest bang for their buck. The biggest bang isn’t going to be just meeting state law and separating kids, the biggest bang is going to be when they can show an improvement on test scores. So I think give it a year, give it two years, but I think you’ll see a very different philosophy about all that than you did just two years previous and that is going to be the beauty of this accountability. It really is going to help kids and it is going to help kids get trained teachers who have the skills to help them.
Now sometimes, if a paraprofessional is our only choice, in other words for some of our smaller school
systems that struggle just to find personnel, to pull those kids out and have them work one-on-one with a paraprofessional, it might even be a parent volunteer, is probably better than nothing.
But you are right, there is going to be a demand for these reading teachers and hopefully education can respond like a market, where there is demand and there is no supply the stakes get higher for those people and hopefully there can be some incentives. There was never any incentive for the gifted endorsement other than you got to work with gifted children, but we may have to have some incentive for teachers getting the GARE or having a reading specialist’s and that is a public policy issue that this department will certainly be looking into if we face a shortage. We have to follow the laws of economics and if there is a shortage and the market is not responding we have to ask why. Well, maybe there is no incentive for the market to grow to meet the demand and so we will have to look at that. But I think all teachers, especially elementary teachers, are going to need help with reading instruction because they are all going to be judged on it.
CC: So coming out of this program it seems like it would be nice if the GARE were tied to our
recertification.
When we look at InTech, we have to have this training and show that we are proficient in the area of technology for our recertification and I think, how are children ever going to learn to get on the computer and navigate their way around if they cannot read. So shouldn’t it be equally important that we are proficient in teaching reading not just in the primary grades but at the middle and secondary levels as well.
KC: I agree, I would sit there and I am certified to teach seventh through twelfth and if I had,
let’s say I did teach middle school and I had a seventh grader, I wouldn’t know where to start. I have never been instructed, I have never had training and as I have said to the home-schoolers who are teaching
their children to read, “More power to you,” because I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I think you raise a valid point, tying it to certification is a very good potential path for our public policy in
Georgia. I think you are going to see some very positive steps in all those directions.
I was talking to a teacher a couple weeks ago who was telling me about her daughter who is a music teacher and the music teacher is having to integrate reading and is having to take a reading course because everyone, the principal decided, would take a reading course — even that music teacher. And the mother questioned that and I said, “I don’t think it is bad.” I really don’t think it is bad for everyone in that school that comes in contact with kids, whether it is an hour a day or six hours a day, to know how to teach kids how to read and integrate reading into their curriculum whether P.E., music, whatever.
And it is a lot like the InTech issue, but I think there are fewer teachers that have the skills when it
comes to reading then skills when it comes to the computer. I think you would be educating a lot of educators putting them through a reading endorsement.
CC: What advice do you have for teachers that go through a reading endorsement program and learn
best practices, learn how to balance instruction, learn how to differentiate instruction and then are faced with going back to a county, going through a new language arts adoption, and being given a basal and told
you have to use this to teach reading. I am not saying anything against the basal. I think the basal is a tool and if that meets the needs of a group of children in my classroom then I will use it, but I
am going to have children that come to me in first grade, for example, reading on a third grade level so the basal is frustrating for them because it doesn’t provide any challenge and for children that come to me in
first grade that still by January don’t know all the letters and letter sounds, not to say they haven’t improved, but they just had so much more to gain for whatever reason, so while they have made great gains they
still can’t read the basal.
So if all I have is this tool and the county is saying this is what you have got to use, but I know best practices, I know I can put a child in text at their instructional level whether it be a pre-primer level or a third grade level and yet I am mandated by my county to use the reading series. Where do you stand with these types of mandates and frustrations they can create?
KC: I think there are two issues.
I think one, too much of what we do in Georgia is driven by text books and not by our own curriculum, and I think the work we are trying to do to truly overhaul the QCC and make it a useable document for teachers is going to help us as teachers, as county level curriculum people, as anybody, and get away from the idea that there is a textbook we teach from. Whether it is in reading, whether it is in math, whatever, the textbook should not be driving instruction, and in far to many cases it is. Now the issue of one reader, you are right, I think again you are going to see some real dynamic changes happening in Georgia as teachers and particularly principals become instructional leaders of their schools. And as principals are better educated about the science of teaching reading and the things that kids really need they are going to help their teachers fight that battle of it’s this one textbook or nothing. Schools I have been to around Georgia where they are greatly improving reading scores whether it’s a Georgia’s Choice, America’s Choice, or it’s just some incredibly innovative principals that know what needs to be done to teach reading, who have done it on their own with their county’s permission, they are all getting away from that (basal only) with all the leveled books.
I think that you are going to see a huge room for that in the state particularly if the curriculum helps
drive that.
So that if we roll out our curriculum that tells a second grade teacher the way to judge fluency is that a student can read a level M book, and then you have a list of level M books and that is in our Georgia curriculum again, we are going to be driven by a curriculum and best practices and not by here’s the textbook we bought and this is what you have to use. So if I were talking to a teacher, here’s what I would say, be patient because you are going to be excited with where we are heading with all this, not just for reading, but for every subject matter. We are serious about giving teachers a useable working curriculum that can be a guide. That should be the guide. It shouldn’t be something you look at, get the reference numbers, and put it on the shelf. It should be guiding our instruction and it should be the tool we use to develop our tests and it should be the tool we use to decide which textbooks fit our curriculum best, but in Georgia, we have it completely reversed. Too much of what we are doing is driven by textbooks and by what the test says, and not by what our curriculum says. So I would tell teachers, get ready, be patient with me, but we are heading in a direction that they would very much applaud.
Thank you, Superintendent Kathy Cox, for your time, patience, and thoughts on reading instruction in the
state of Georgia.
|
