Reading Rockets: Today's Reading News

Efforts to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law have failed to yield a bipartisan bill. There is a growing sense on Capitol Hill that the law enacted in 2002 under President George W. Bush will remain at least until next year, even though Obama pledged repeatedly as a candidate in 2008 to revise it. The law, which stresses annual standardized testing, is controversial in part because a third of public schools are now labeled as failing to meet standards. Despite pleas from Duncan and Obama, it also appears increasingly unlikely that the Democratic-led Congress will provide a bailout for schools this summer to prevent teacher layoffs and program cuts related to local budget troubles.

Never did the children's books "Brown Bear, Brown Bear," "I Love You Because You're You," and "Goodnight My Duckling" sound so heartfelt as when they were read by Sergeant Chase Sheda at 3/1's headquarters, Forward Operating Base Delhi. Sergeant Sheda was reading the books out loud while looking into the lens of a small video camera, a little nervously at first, but more fluidly once he got used to looking into a camera and not at his children — Chase (who is 4) and Jayden (who is 3).

As a second-grade student Laura Rodgers set out to read all of the children's books that had been awarded a John Newbery Medal before entering middle school. At age 10, preparing to enter fifth grade at Zionsville West Middle School, she finished all 89 books with time to spare. Laura wants to bring other students along on her journey as she starts the Mock Newbery Award Youth Committee at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library. The idea is for Laura and her peers in third through eighth grades to read books published in 2010 that could qualify, vote for their winner and see if it matches the committee's selection for the 2011 Newbery Award.

Writers of adult fiction have the luxury of being able to write for themselves, or at least for people like them. But children's authors can only succeed by become skillful ventriloquists for their younger selves. How to intuit that you've given this tech-savvy leprechaun a voice that a 12-year-old boy will find convincing? Would a pre-pubescent criminal mastermind really think this?

A new study finds that students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more. All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan picked 18 states and the District of Columbia to advance to the final round of the Race to the Top competition, where 10 to 15 grants totaling $3.4 billion will be awarded in September to applicants he believes have the boldest, most sustainable plans for education improvements. The list announced Tuesday includes all of the states that were finalists in the first round, along with five additional states. Top contenders are: Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. In the first round of the $4 billion competition, Mr. Duncan selected two states, Delaware and Tennessee, for a total of $600 million in awards.

Instruction today is both more progressive and child-centered — where literacy instructors are discouraged from assigning one-size-fits-all whole class novels and students are expected to be given maximum freedom to choose books that they're interested in — and more rote — where students are drilled in the practice of a dozen or so "reading skills" that attempt to teach comprehension as a stepwise process similar to multiplying fractions or performing long division.

For most schools, the goal is to have students recognizing letters and sounds and reading simple text by the end of kindergarten. At downtown Meeting Street Academy, all the students entering first grade are reading, and the same is true for about one-third of those starting kindergarten. Some of the incoming first-graders are so advanced they can read 60-page books. Meeting Street Academy enrolls students whose parents want them to have a high-quality education but can't afford private-school tuition. The goal is for these high-poverty students to graduate from high school and college and become community leaders.

The Library of Congress has chosen Curious George, the children's book character, to star in its new public service advertising campaign. Introduced Monday and distributed by the Advertising Council, the ads are intended to encourage parents to read with their children. According to Florida State University, this activity makes children more willing to read and increases the frequency of their reading.

American educators pushed phonics aside in the 1980s and 1990s in favor of the "whole language" approach, a sort of immersion philosophy that focused on reading for meaning and exposure to literature. It's sometimes called sight reading, or simply memorization. But whole language suffered a setback after California adopted it and test scores plummeted. A National Reading Panel, which Congress created in the late 1990s to evaluate the best techniques for teaching reading, confirmed the benefits of "systematic phonics instruction." Since then, many districts have adopted "balanced literacy," which incorporates elements of both whole language and phonics.

Eight civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, contend in a document released Monday the Education Department is promoting ineffective approaches for failing schools. They also claim the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition — a program with a goal of spurring innovative reform in states — leaves out many minority students.

Boston-based Strategies for Children commissioned a recent report that pointed out a glut of literacy programs supported by state grants. Often, success is measured by how many children are served, not test outcomes. But with only $4 million in state funding available this year for literacy efforts, education officials should settle on the one or two best programs.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced Friday that she has fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals under a new evaluation system that for the first time holds some educators accountable for students' standardized test scores. Dismissals for performance are exceedingly rare in D.C. schools — and in school systems nationwide. Friday's firings mark the beginning of Rhee's bid to make student achievement a high-stakes proposition for teachers, establishing job loss as a possible consequence of poor classroom results.

An expansive study devoted to examining the traits of effective school principals has found that high student achievement is linked to "collective leadership": the combined influence of educators, parents, and others on school decisions. The long-awaited study, published this week, is the largest to date to focus on the principalship, its authors say. It attempts to get beyond the broad statement that school leadership is important and digs into just what types of leadership appear to make the most difference when it comes to improving schools.

Teachers at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan tell Alexis Stewart that her 4-year-old son, Chase, is bright. Chase took the city test for the public schools' gifted and talented kindergarten program, but missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, she said. Ms. Stewart, a single mom working two jobs, didn't think the process was fair. She had heard widespread reports of wealthy families preparing their children for the kindergarten gifted test with $90 workbooks, $145-an-hour tutoring and weekend "boot camps."

In a new book, someone is killing the great chefs of Vancouver and Neil Flambe wants to know who. Flambe is a 14-year-old chef who runs his own restaurant and sleuths on the side. NPR correspondent Liane Hansen speaks with author Kevin Sylvester about his new novel for young adults, Neil Flambe and the Marco Polo Murders.

Fans of Ramona Quimby are either dreading or delighting in the fact that their feisty young heroine has gone Hollywood. The movie Ramona and Beezus comes out today, with Disney Channel star Selena Gomez as big sister Beezus and newcomer Joey King as Ramona. Ramona first appeared in the 1950s, as a minor character in Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins books. She was the pest, the well-intentioned trouble-maker, and she would prove such a force of nature that Cleary gave Ramona her own series, eight books in all.

In his five-year plan to turn around the lowest-performing schools in the Oakland Unified School District, Superintendent Tony Smith does not mention teachers, textbooks or test scores. Instead, Smith said his students most urgently needed social and health services, engaged parents and activities outside the classroom. Whether Smith can overhaul the schools in Oakland is a subject of intense interest among Bay Area educators. Oakland Unified has lost $122 million in financing in the latest cuts to California's embattled public schools. The city's endemic problems, particularly poverty and crime, have had a dramatic effect in the classroom.

A key cause of the problem is the lack of coordination between early education programs and the public school system. No matter how successful each is on their own, they need to work together to make sure children move seamlessly from one system to the other. We must work to combat the phenomenon known as "Head Start Fade," where students lose the gains they made in Head Start. By implementing the Casey Foundation recommendations, we can improve the transition from Head Start and other preschool programs to K-3 education and sustain the gains made during these critical preschool years.

Teachers and school boards should embrace comic books and graphic novels as a "gateway" literature, helping children transition towards more complex narratives and helping boys catch up with girls in reading achievement, according to a new study. The study, released Wednesday by the Canadian Council on Learning, reveals how comic books help develop a child's ability to follow a sequence of events, interpret symbols, predict what will happen next and connect narratives to the reader's own experiences.