WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2022
Did its descriptions make sense? In last Friday's morning's editions, the New York Times described Mayor Adams' plan for Gotham's public schools.
The city "is facing a literacy crisis," Times subscribers were told. Early in her news report, Lola Fadulu described the crisis in the manner shown:
FADULU (3/13/22): New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.
The lack of easily accessible academic support for children with dyslexia has been an issue that has been top of mind for the mayor. He has said his own dyslexia went undiagnosed for years because his mother didn’t have the necessary information to get him screened. He recalled “not wanting to come into school every day because I just couldn’t keep up.”
In grades 3 through 8, just 36 percent of black and Hispanic kids were proficient on the official state reading tests back in 2019. In his desire to address this problem, the mayor has proposed a "plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia," Fadulu wrote at the start of her news report.
Fadulu is a good, decent person; she's done everything right in her life. Our guess will be that she will go on to have a superb journalistic career.
Having said that, Fadulu is rather young—just five years out of college (Amherst, class of 2016). Also, she's a "general assignment reporter." For whatever reason, the Times didn't bother assigning an education specialist to report on the mayor's new plan.
As we've noted again and again, the Times tends to take this feckless approach when it comes to the problems confronting the mass of New York City's million public school kids.
The paper will assign its education specialist, such as she is, for front-page reports about the prospects and the treatment of the system's top few percent. When it comes to the masses of good, decent kids in the city's schools, this widely-known upper-class paper tilts quite strongly toward a policy of uncaring benign neglect.
Nothing we say in discussing this matter is intended as a criticism of Fadulu, a very bright young reporter. She didn't assign herself the task of covering this important new plan. Nor is it a criticism of Fadulu herself to say that she isn't an experienced education reporter or an education specialist.
Fadulu has done everything right in her life. When it comes to covering the interests of our good, decent low-income kids, her newspaper often fails.
It isn't Fadulu's doing or fault, but in the course of reporting the mayor's new plan, we think her inexperience and lack of technical expertise did repeatedly fail. Before we list some salient points, let's return to the role of the mayor.
The mayor is relatively inexperienced too. Also, he isn't an education specialist either!
We praise him again today for the focus he's brought to the needs and the interests of the vast swath of New York City kids. But does his proposal really make sense? Is it a sound proposal?
We have no idea how to answer that question. Meanwhile, the track record of such attempts at intervention is lengthy and fairly poor.
Tomorrow, we'll offer you a more detailed statistical assessment of the "literary crisis" which obtains in Gotham's schools. In some ways, that crisis may not be as bad as you might think.
In some ways, it may be worse.
We salute the mayor for switching our focus to the needs of the many kids, as opposed to the most favored few. Beyond that, we salute him for directing us to the pain associated with struggles at school—struggles he himself knew as a public school student. Here is the fuller passage from the start of Fadulu's report::
FADULU: “Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”
New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.
The lack of easily accessible academic support for children with dyslexia has been an issue that has been top of mind for the mayor. He has said his own dyslexia went undiagnosed for years because his mother didn’t have the necessary information to get him screened. He recalled “not wanting to come into school every day because I just couldn’t keep up.”
This mayor says he has been there. He understands that the pain of struggling in school can end up "haunting" good, decent children for life.
It isn't just that they may emerge from school lacking the academic skills which will help them in the workplace. Along the way, they experience the daily pain of classroom failure—the feeling of “not wanting to come into school every day because [they] just couldn’t keep up.”
Their reading difficulties rob them of the chance to lose themselves in the types of books which are written for children of their age and grade. They lose the chance to explore the world in the ways that other kids do.
The mayor seems to understand these things from his own childhood experience. But he's no more an education specialist that the young and bright Fadulu.
With that in mind, we pose these question:
Does the mayor's proposal make sense? And how about Fadulu's reporting of the mayor's plan?
It seems to us that Fadulu's inexperience—or the cluelessness of her editors—may have shown in various ways. For starters, riddle us this:
The mayor plan is built around the idea that Gotham's kids need to be screened and treated for dyslexia. Headline included, Fadulu's report starts like this:
Mayor Adams Unveils Program to Address Dyslexia in N.Y.C. Schools
Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.
School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs—one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx—with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.
Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.
Under the mayor's plan, almost every student will be screened for dyslexia. Also, school officials will create a new "dyslexia task force."
According to Fadulu's report, "national figures estimate that one in five children have dyslexia." She says there are no reliable figures for the prevalence of dyslexia among New York City's students.
Fadulu presents specific details of the mayor's screening plan as her report continues. That said, does anyone reading the New York Times actually know what dyslexia actually is?
We ask that question because the report never attempts to describe or define the condition. This seems like a very basic omission in a lengthy report of this type—though for all we know, Fadulu may have included a helpful passage addressing this point which her editors removed from her piece.
The failure to define dyslexia seems like a basic omission. Moving along, we were repeatedly puzzled by various parts of Fadulu's detailed report.
Start with Fadulu's third paragraph, as presented above. According to Fadulu's report, "literacy experts" say that "a phonics-based literacy curriculum" is "the most effective way to teach reading to most children."
If that's true, why does it fall to Mayor Adams to introduce this instructional approach to the city's schools? Why hasn't this type of curriculum been in effect all along?
Fadulu skips past this point. In fairness, no news report can address every possible question. But if you think the New York Times will ever double back to explore this obvious question, we'll suggest that you have no idea of the degree of disinterest the New York Times has traditionally brought to such basic points concerning the public schools.
The Times is concerned with the top few percent—with the kids who succeed in Gotham's schools, and especially with their race and ethnicity. The Times has rarely shown any interest in the world of those Other kids.
That said, the mayor's plan seems to be based on the idea that dyslexia—whatever that is—lies at the heart of the city's "literary crisis." For all we know, that assessment may be accurate! But if so, consider the highlighted part of this passage, which starts with Fadulu describing part of the mayor's plan:
FADULU: The Literacy Academy Collective will be piloting second and third grade classrooms at P.S. 161 in the fall, and each class will have 15 to 18 students from that school, said Ruth Genn, one of the co-founders of the nonprofit. The goal is to eventually open a separate school and work with children in kindergarten through eighth grade.
The Lab School for Family Literacy will be running the program at P.S. 125, where two grade levels—either first and second or second and third—will each have a separate class for struggling readers. Teachers of those classes will be trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach in a 10-day intensive program.
Schools Chancellor David C. Banks said the department would look to these schools for lessons learned as it expands dyslexia programming to other boroughs.
“They will be labs of innovation for us,” Mr. Banks said.
The full-day programs won’t be the first in the city. The Bridge Preparatory Charter School, which opened in Staten Island in 2019, is the state’s first and only public school created to help children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. City officials have worked closely with the school’s officials to learn more about the programming.
The chancellor and other education officials have also spent time studying the methods used at the Windward School, a private school with campuses in both New York City and White Plains that primarily serves children with dyslexia. Ms. Quintana said teachers from the Windward school would be training teachers from other schools in helping children with dyslexia.
Question! If twenty percent of the nation's kids are suffering from dyslexia; if the prevalence of dyslexia explains the literacy crisis found within the New York City schools; then why in the world haven't many pre-existing programs been "created to help children with dyslexia?"
Why in the world is the Bridge Preparatory School the only such public school in the entire state?
If dyslexia is such a widespread condition, it seems a bit odd, at least on its face, to think that no one but the city's new mayor has ever come up with the idea of addressing this problem. Why aren't there numerous programs, around the country and the state, on which the city can draw?
Writing with great competence as a dutiful "general assignment reporter," Fadulu composed a lengthy report about the details of the mayor's proposal. Because we've followed the introduction of many such ballyhooed plans over the course of the past fifty years, we were struck by some of the oddities which Fadulu tended to move past.
Dyslexia is the heart of the problem—but there seem to be virtually no pre-existing programs attempting to address it! Experts agree that phonics-based instruction is best—but it falls to this newly-elected mayor to tell the school system this!
Such peculiarities abound in Fadulu's report. Consider this unexamined note:
FADULU (continuing directly from above): Under the new plan, school officials will require principals, who can choose their curriculums, shift toward a reading program that is based in reading science. Many currently use one developed by Lucy Calkins, an academic at Teachers College, Columbia University, that has repeatedly come under fire.
Officials will require principals to choose from a handful of phonics-based curriculums to include as part of their comprehensive reading programs, such as Fundations, Really Great Reading and Preventing Academic Failure, said Ms. Quintana.
Say what? If Cakins' reading program "has repeatedly come under fire," why have so many principals been using it? Also, riddle us this:
FADULU: Once children are identified as at-risk, they will be recommended for a neuropsychology evaluation. Some schools have partnered with a nonprofit group, Promise Project at Columbia University Medical Center, to help low-income families afford the assessment, which can sometimes cost thousands of dollars.
The students will then receive either additional support at their current schools or enroll at one of the two new programs, which will open this fall.
The additional support includes more intensive instruction steeped in the Orton-Gillingham approach, which teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts. District-based coordinators will work with all schools to adjust instruction and provide intervention for those students.
We were surprised to see that the city's public school parents will apparently have to pay for the assessments in question. That said:
According to Fadulu, the Orton-Gillingham approach "teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts."
Does that mean that the method teaches kids to break words down into syllables? (In fairness, we note the inclusion of the term "hands-on.") Also, the Orton-Gillingham approach has been around since the 1930s. If this approach is so successful, why isn't it in widespread use around the country today? Why isn't it already in use in the Gotham schools?
Is Gotham turning to Orton-Gillingham? We know nothing about the approach, but when we turned to the leading authority on the method, we found it telling us this:
An overview of all reported studies of Orton-Gillingham derivative methods, such as Alphabetic Phonics or Project Read, revealed only a dozen studies with inconsistent results and a variety of methodological flaws. Despite these conclusions, the article does provide a detailed overview of the available research, which viewed most favorably would show some evidence of benefit from classroom use of OG methods with first graders, and use in special education or resource room settings with older children with learning disabilities.
According to a review of the literature in 2008, its efficacy is yet to be established.
In July 2010, a US Department of Education agency reported that it could not find any studies meeting its evidence standards to support the efficacy of Orton-Gillingham based strategies.
If you care about Gotham's good, decent kids, that's a gloomy assessment. If you think the Times will ever examine this matter, we have a bridge to M.I.T. you might want to lease, rent or own.
New York City's public schools are full of good, decent kids. When these children struggle in school, they're losing large chunks of their happiness and their sense of worth. The wider world is losing part of its greatest resource.
"We don't have a single person to waste," one successful politician used to tell the public. The same is true of our nation's kids, including the giant numbers of good, decent kids found in Gotham's schools.
Fadulu is young, and she isn't a specialist. Through no fault of her own, she works for a newspaper which rarely seems to give a flying fig about the "lower 98" percent of kids in its city's schools.
Fadulu is young, and she isn't experienced. Older, more experienced people may know and understand this:
Many prophets have stepped forward with ballyhooed plans to turn around our low-income schools. These plans have tended to come and go with the seasons and the winds.
Experienced reporters would understand that. Our blue tribe pretends that black kids matter, but the Times rarely seems to care.
Tomorrow: How serious is that crisis?
"For whatever reason, the Times didn't bother assigning an education specialist to report on the mayor's new plan."
ReplyDeleteAnd when the NY Times wrote about Abbott's problems producing baby formula, they didn't assign a baby formula specialist either. And when they wrote about the new agreement for equal pay for female soccer players, they didn't assign a soccer specialist or a gender specialist or a gender equity specialist. That's because reporters who are on general assignment don't have specialities. They are trained and expected to write about a variety of stories, asking the questions they need to in order to report the details of whatever they are asked to cover. Because that is how journalism works.
This objection of Somerby's has always been specious. When Somerby was hired to teach elementary school, and when he taught math, he was not a math major in college. He wasn't even trained in education or teaching or anything useful to his career. But they let him teach anyway, even though he was youngish, not even 5 years out of college, as Fadulu is now. Has Somerby ever acknowledged his own incompetence? By his standards, he was grossly unqualified for his job, and remained so until he had the good sense to quit and do what he was actually suited for, bullshitting in a public forum.
"Fadulu is a good, decent person; she's done everything right in her life. Our guess will be that she will go on to have a superb journalistic career."
ReplyDeleteHere we see Somerby usual disclaimer. He seems to think that if he says something nice about a reporter, he can go on and say whatever negative thing he wants, true or not.
Somerby has no idea whether Fadulu has "done everything right" in her life. Her parents may have wanted her to become a doctor. If he had his way, she wouldn't be permitted to go on to a fine career -- given that he is doing things to sabotage it right now. She has 5 years experience now, as a journalist. Her education is more recent than Somerby's, which means she is better educated than he is, with his D's and F's in philosophy. She is demonstrably putting more effort into her reporting than Somerby puts into his blogging. But he damns her with overblown praise and then goes on to criticize, deflecting the personal nature of his remarks onto a supposed mistake by the NY Times, for assigning her to this article.
And why? I suspect it is because she is a black, female reporter who has the temerity to succeed in a job he himself wanted to do, styling himself as an education reporter because he wrote an op-ed about cheating on standardized testing in public schools, back when such testing determined school funding and whether administrators kept their jobs. But, being a one-trick pony isn't how you get a job in journalism. You have to be able to write on a variety of topics, as Fadulu is being criticized for today.
And then Somerby has the nerve to blame the Mayor for having too little experience and expertise too! Because only Somerby knows what is what about dyslexia, never mind that the Mayor lived with it himself. Can Somerby be a bigger ass? I doesn't seem possible.
"The Times is concerned with the top few percent—with the kids who succeed in Gotham's schools, and especially with their race and ethnicity."
ReplyDeleteThat's why the NY Times is publishing an article today on dyslexia and the lower percents who are doing poorly at reading. Because it only cares about the top performing kids? That makes no sense at all.
“Why hasn't this type of curriculum (phonics-based) been in effect all along?”
ReplyDeleteIs this supposed to be a criticism of the reporter?
From Chalkbeat:
“City officials said teachers will be required to implement one of the education department’s recommended phonics-based curricula for kindergarten through second grade as part of the initiative. This shift is a major change in approach, as the department traditionally defers to principals on curriculum choice, with widely varying results. “
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2022/5/12/23069423/nyc-schools-dyslexia-phonics-curriculum-eric-adams
Somerby criticizes Fadulu, but then he goes to Wikipedia, not an educational source, and claims that because there are few studies of the effectiveness of this specific approach (which stresses that it is not a program or methodology or technique), that Fadulu should have pointed out the deficiencies of Orton-Gillingham. What Somerby neglects is that there are not any competing approaches with better success or more study, and that ALL use the same approach of multisensory, hands-on work by a compassionate teacher.
ReplyDeleteAnd Somerby never discusses the merits of doing nothing (resulting in today's low reading success rates) compared to intervening to help dyslexic students.
Instead of examing the complexities of the subject himself (I believe he cannot do it), Somerby then spends more paragraphs trashing Fadulu, repeating that she is inexperienced and untrained (so is Somerby, who is by no means a reading specialist).
Instead of treating the Wikipedia article as saying that the literature is inconclusive about the benefits of this approach, he pretends it has said that the method doesn't work. That is far from established when the approach has been insufficiently studied, when it has been implemented in different ways in different places, and when it does not claim to be any of the things Somerby treats it as (e.g., a system, technique, method, program), and when it has been included in most actual programs with acknowledged success over decades of use.
Somerby seems to want Fadulu to accuse the city of using unproven methods, but that isn't what Orton-Gillingham is. It may be Fadulu didn't explore the issues Somerby raises, or it may be that she accepted the judgment of actual education specialists and saw nothing wrong with its use, an improvement over doing nothing to help NYC kids. Somerby doesn't know what was in her head, so his surmises are unfair to Fadulu. But what else is new? That is likely the purpose of today's post, trashing her, since Somerby has said nothing about inproving reading scores up to this point. And he doesn't seem to know what the dyslexia advocacy organizations have been saying about this issue.
Somerby's confusion and inconsistencies align well with his mandate to manufacture ignorance.
Delete"We were surprised to see that the city's public school parents will apparently have to pay for the assessments in question. "
ReplyDeleteBut the article says:
"Some schools have partnered with a nonprofit group, Promise Project at Columbia University Medical Center, to help low-income families afford the assessment, which can sometimes cost thousands of dollars."
This means that the low-income families will not be asked to pay for the assessment.
Somerby asks why dyslexia programs are not more widespread, but then he seemingly answers his own question with this quibble about the costs of assessment. It seems likely, having read the description of the Orton-Gillingham appraoch, that the schools have had difficulty affording the resources to treat dyslexia, coupled with the costs of identifying kids' problems. When cost is involved, there must be the will to spend the money.
Why does Somerby not acknowledge this very obvious answer to his own questions? Further, Somerby should know that there are difficulties getting teachers to switch from using a familiar program to using one that requires training and extra work by teachers. Teachers resist that kind of change, especially when they have been asked to adopt new programs without proven effectiveness many times during their careers. Schools are a way for the developers of materials to make money at public expense. Testing the efficacy of such materials is costly and difficult, so very few come with studies proving their effectiveness. Somerby doesn't tell us that either.
Somerby pretends there are not many existing programs addressing dyslexia. He is wrong. There are not many public programs, likely due to cost and resource issues, but there are several private schools. They do use approaches like Orton-Gillingham. They also cost a lot of money that low-income families cannot afford, and they require expensive assessment. There is no big mystery for Fadulu to solve in how ever many words she was alotted for her article.
Somerby almost implies today that dyslexia itself is bogus, else why wouldn't the schools already be addressing it? He does no one a service by suggesting that. He implies that addressing dyslexia via teaching methods is a waste of time, else why wouldn't they be doing it? He is wrong about this.
"It is one of the most common learning disabilities to affect children. Myth: Dyslexia is rare. Fact: In the United States, NIH research has shown that dyslexia affects 20%, or 1 in every 5 people. Some people may have more mild forms, while others may experience it more severely."
And then there is this summary of controversies over use of the term dyslexia, from Great Britain but relevant here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/17/battle-over-dyslexia-warwickshire-staffordshire
Clearly, there is no room for Fadulu to revisit this in her article, focused on NYC efforts to help children with difficulty reading, but Somerby desire to introduce such controversy helps nothing and no one. Kids who are struggling need help, and a loosely defined approach involving hands-on manipulation and multisensory work with a compassionate teacher, seems likely to help in the absence of a one-size-fits-all-dyslexics program that Somerby seems to expect.
"Experienced reporters would understand that. Our blue tribe pretends that black kids matter, but the Times rarely seems to care."
ReplyDeleteIt would be inappropriate for Fadulu to introduce Somerby-style skepticism about this program, as her own opinion, into a factual news article about changes in the NYC schools.
Somerby has no reason to believe that Fadulu doesn't know what happens as initiatives come and go in our schools.
Somerby pretends to wish for a new way to help struggling students, but he mostly bemoans what he sees as a situation that cannot be solved, the fact that poor kids are doomed because the NYTimes doesn't care about them.
How silly is that when the entire focus of education from the universities to the teachers on the front line, is to help improve learning for ALL students so that they can have better lives. Opposing efforts to do that as incomplete or imperfect or doomed to failure helps no one, and it doesn't demonstrate greater caring on Somerby's part. He left the field himself, and that doesn't suggest greater dedication than those still working to help children in our public schools.
You would think that Somerby, as an advocate for low achieving children, would be happy that the Mayor of NYC wants to do something to help them. Instead, he complains because the schools are now actually doing something, when before they did nothing. He claims there must have been a good reason for doing nothing to help the kids who have trouble with reading, so why is the Mayor rocking the boat?
ReplyDeleteSomerby's targets today do not seem to be helping kids at all. They are (1) the new Mayor, (2) Fadulu (for being inexperienced, not an education specialist, and for getting herself this assignment), and (3) the NY Times, because it cares about the upper 1% of students and not just those who can't read good, and don't forget (4) dyslexia and the parents who want something done to help their kids.
Is Somerby actually arguing that nothing should be done in schools without it being nailed down 100% that it works? This isn't a matter of arguing over which dyslexia approach works best. It is arguing that doing nothing is better than implementing an approach with strong support in other dyslexia programs in private schools, and that consists of a pretty common sense no-lose set of practices with little apparent down side and likely utility with a wide variety of kids struggling for different reasons.
Another complete misreading of what was written. You're unbelievably stupid.
DeleteYou're a total psycho.
Delete