Latest News and Comment from Education

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Stephen Krashen Blog 7-19-14



SKrashen:





Compelling Evidence
Sent to the Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2014In "Test scores may move, learning doesn't" (July 12), Jo Craven McGinty says that there is "compelling evidence" that the US education system is inadequate, because American students "score below average in math and average in reading and science" when compared to other countries on international tests.  Not mentioned is

JUL 09

Literacy Education: Need We Start Early?
Literacy Education: Need We Start Early?Stephen KrashenLanguage and Language Teaching, Vol 3, number 2, issue 6: pp 1-7. 2014Most people are convinced that children will have a powerful head start in reading if they are introduced to sounds and letters well before they start school. The conclusions of this paper are these: For the development of English literacy, early explicit teaching fails, b

JUL 08

The input that matters most
Sent to the Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2014Joshua Lipshutz ("The legal road map to better schools," July 8) points out that "...the easiest inputs to measure are not necessarily those that matter most to student learning." Vergara judge used one that doesn't matter: Teacher quality as measured by gains on standardized tests.  A number of studies have shown that rating teacher

JUL 06

The Vergara decision: The big picture
Sent to the San Francisco Chronicle In response to: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/When-kids-sued-and-won-5599200.phpThe Vergara decision is part of a movement to eliminate the teaching profession.The other fronts of this war include the accusation that our schools are failing because of bad teaching, preferential hiring of Teach for America temps, flipped classrooms with most teaching do