When Will Enough Be Enough??

Have the teachers woken up and smelled the coffee yet??

Teachers have been treated like second-class citizens for a long-time now, and it's about time that they rise up and say, "Enough is enough".

Very few people stood up to the Reading First "police" when they came in with their bogus research motivated by unethical conflicts of interest. Very few people have taken a stand against outside program improvement teams coming into schools and forcing them to partake in low-level types of education for our precious children. Very few people have stood up and protested the narrowing of the curriculum that has been a result of intense high-stakes testing called for by No Child Left Behind. There has been little public outcry as many bilingual programs have been dismantled before our eyes. The voices that have spoken out against the governor's mistreatment of education have been few and far between over the years.

I'm hoping that those whose jobs are on the line as well as those who support them are finally ready to stand up for their rights as professional educators. It's so much more than just the fact that people might be "losing their jobs". It's more about the dismantling of the public education system that we have held near and dear to our hearts. We have to take action NOW, and fight for our public education system, our professionalism as educators, and the right for all children to receive a quality education.

In honor of truth, courage, and activism, I would like to remind everyone of a famous poem:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Now is the time that we have got to speak up and take back our public schools. We can no longer be silent.

Prepositions and All That Nonsense

That fat cat. That fat cat sat. That fat cat sat at the mat.

Haha! Did the overweight cat sit "at" the mat?

So much for the benefits of decodable text, right?

Will You Allow It To Happen?

The state of the budget in California is sad indeed. The budgets of school districts are being cut drastically.

We can't even turn the news on or open a newspaper without headlines jumping out informing us of the teachers who will be laid off at any given moment.

HAVE YOU ASKED YOURSELF HOW MANY OF THE TEACHERS BEING LET GO ARE READING FIRST COACHES?

Over the past year, the Reading First budget has been cut by 60 something percent due to the controversy over the unethical conflicts of interest. Is your school district cutting back in proportion to the cut in Reading First funding? In other words. is your district making cuts to Reading First coaches? If you dig deep enough you will probably find that the jobs of Reading First coaches are spared, while their funding has been cut at the same time.

Will you sit quietly by as teachers are laid off, while your cherished class sized reduction is dismantled, and all the while the positions of Reading First coaches are protected? Make your voice heard!

The Evolution of Educational Malpractice

The systematic destruction of quality education began long before you were  sitting in your "Reading First" literacy training learning about the "correct" and absolute way to teach reading. The myth had already been elaborately designed over a significant amount of time, but at the time you believed the propaganda.

The problem became exacerbated when your Draconian Reading First literacy coaches took away your own professional judgement and entered your life with their propaganda of "blending routines",  "fluency", and "decodable books". 

You contributed to the problem when you began picking up your Houghton Mifflin or Open Court textbook and "teaching to the script".  You sat by silently as you watched literature books being thrown away, were told that independent reading of books was "bad" and feared your Reading First coach as if they were an actual administrator.  

When was the first time that you began to question the validity of blending routines, decodable books, "systematic phonics" being taught in isolation? When did you begin to notice that "words per minute" was not the solution to it all? Was it when your students who read more than one hundred words per minute bombed the reading comprehension test on the state reading exam?

This blog is dedicated to all educators, parents, politicians, and other interested parties who bought into the lies of the Reading First camp. This is also a community of Truth, a place where unsuspecting parents and educators will learn to question and challenge the forms of educational malpractice that are being forced upon our innocent children. Please feel free to add your comments and spread the word to other interested people. 

We must resist the educational practices that are currently damaging the lives of our children. Compiling the information in a central location is the first step towards public consciousness of this serious problem. In the future, we will add articles, teacher testimonies, newspaper and research articles, book links, videos, and all other necessary information. If you would like to be a guest blogger or have a suggestion for something that should be added to the blog, please email your suggestions to educationalmalpractice@yahoo.com.