Literacy - The gift that keeps on giving

Many Americans consider the time between Thanksgiving and the new year to be a season of giving. We find our mailboxes stuffed with reminders of those in need along with "free" address labels and a suggestion to support a cause. Similarly, during most any shopping escapade you are likely to experience the ringing bells of the Salvation Army. As a general rule, I am wary of donating money to causes for which I have no way to assess their accountability.

However, as someone with a language arts background and a love of reading, I have boxes of books from my last move. These are books that I've already read and probably won't read again. So, why am I keeping them? Well, I can't bring myself to through away a book, even a bad one. This year my wife and I have started looking for programs that can reuse these books to help the less fortunate. We got this idea after locating a local drop off program for books that are donated to prison libraries. I've listed and annotated some of the nationwide programs for book donations below. NCTE and its members have a wonderful history of donating books to the needy (most recently through our Tennessee affiliate at our annual convention and in the wake of hurricane Katrina). As you finish a book during the next few months, why not get a head start on a new year's resolution to increase literacy by donating your used books?

Here are some of the sites that I have seen. If you know of other donation ideas for used books, please leave a comment to this post so that we can all learn more about giving opportunities.

Books for Soldiers
http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/
Donate any type of media to any deployed soldier, airman, sailor, Marine, or Coast Guardsman who has an APO or FPO address.

Books Behind Bars
http://www.prisonpenpals.net/booksbehindbars.html
Help prisoners develop a lifetime habit of reading.

BookCrossing.com
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
Just leave a book somewhere in a public spot (an airport, train station, etc.) for someone else to pick up. You can even check the book's history on BookCrossing's website. See where it has been.

Ideas Needed for NCTE's 100th Anniversary

2011 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the National Council of Teachers of English. The Task Force on Council History and 2011 is working to plan events for this watershed year, and we need input from all interested NCTE members. What would you like to see highlighted and in what format during the Centennial year? Any ideas for publications, books, products, and convention events are all appreciated.

Send your ideas to:

Leila Christenbury, Chair, Task Force on Council History and 2011
P.O. Box 842020
School of Education
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284-2020
Email: lchriste@vcu.edu

The NCTE Legislative Platform

Establishment of an NCTE DC-area office last summer was only a first step towards expanding our organization’s influence on policies shaping literacy education. Over the past few months, the executive committee has taken a vital next step by carefully researching pending legislation, hosting hearings with key congressional aides, drafting, and approving a legislative platform. The platform will guide on-going work at the national and local levels to inform legislators regarding measures that can truly support, not inhibit, high quality teaching and student learning.

Building the Platform

Last April, a group of NCTE officers and staff leaders met with the government relations staff of the American Association of School Administrators, widely recognized as one of the most effective education groups in Washington DC. Bruce Hunter, their Director of Government Relations, described the process that they use to establish an annual legislative agenda. It involved inviting AASA executive committee members to a series of briefings and working sessions in Washington DC each winter to gather information, focus on the most critical issues to AASA members, and establish core positions for the organization. They invited experts and legislators from both parties to brief them, took several days to analyze and debate positions, then drafted a document that established positions on matters in which their members had both expertise and concern. Subsequently, they developed a field network to offer expert testimony on the issues, and to mobilize their membership to generate communications as needed to inform the legislative process.

After evaluating the AASA experience and practices of other leading education groups, the executive committee appropriated funds for members of the government relations subcommittee and NCTE Officers to come to Washington DC in late January to draft a first-ever NCTE legislative platform. In preparation for the meeting, the NCTE Federal Relations Director (Sandra Gibbs) and our Legislative Consultant (Ellin Nolan) scheduled a series of meetings at the Longworth Building with legislative staffers from the Senate HELP committee and the House Education and the Workforce Committee. They offered a full day of testimony and data about the future of matters like the Higher Education Act, No Child Left Behind Reauthorization, and emerging federal programs relating to high school reform and the American Competitiveness Initiative.

NCTE leaders then spent the better part of the next two days sifting the testimony and information, and drafting a platform document for consideration by the full executive committee in February. Eventually, two documents were passed—a more detailed, technical document for staff to use to advise Congress about specific legislative provisions, and a more thematic document for use with public audiences.

Platform Highlights

The legislative platform incorporates various NCTE resolutions and guidelines, and weaves them into a series of recommendations to Congress. While consistent, progressive themes are found throughout the document, it draws special attention to matters of immediate policy concern at different scholastic levels and in areas where we have greatest expertise (notably, teacher preparation, professional development, and research). Here’s a selection:

• Early learning recommendations call for a full, independent, study of Reading First to evaluate its long term effects and overall effectiveness. A restoration of full funding for Head Start is singled out for federal action.
• General K-12 recommendations focus on decreasing the emphasis on high stakes tests while investing in assessments that advance, not merely measure, student learning. Further exploration of “growth models” that incorporate longer term evaluations of student cohorts is advocated, as is greater support for English language learners, teachers in high-needs schools, and well-informed literacy coaches.
• Teacher preparation recommendations focus on the need for legislation to support teacher learning about subject matter content and pedagogy. It warns federal investment in only a narrow range of research methodologies or programs aligned solely with this research. It calls for full integration of new technologies in teacher preparation, and establishment of program assessments based on consistent, long-term data drawn from students who have completed teacher preparation study, rather than students who have completed other degrees.
• Professional development, and access to it, is a major focus throughout the document. The emphasis in the NCTE Platform is on support for career-long professional development that is designed to meet local challenges. Measures that expand access to mentors and literacy coaches are advocated, as is more funding for programs that promote the integration of technology and that leverage partnerships between universities, school systems, businesses, and non-profit organizations.

Taking Action

To bring our platform and related issues to the attention of key policymakers, two major undertakings are scheduled for April. During the latter half of the month, a series of email invitations to schedule appointments with Congressional Representatives in their home offices will be sent to NCTE member activists. It will include links to our platform, supporting research briefs, and logistical advice on scheduling and making the meeting count. For those who want to meet key office-holders in Washington DC, we are hosting English Language Arts Advocacy Day on April 27. The day will begin with briefing from Congressional Aides, NCTE staff members, and our legislative consultant (Ellin Nolan). In the afternoon, participants will be invited to share their perspectives on literacy education issues through meetings with their Congressional Representatives and Senators.

What’s Next

As we move ahead, members can expect to find more frequent briefings on the Squire Policy Research Office web pages and more frequent calls to action through the emailed action alerts and announcements in the NCTE Inbox. This is a critical period in the history of our organization and a time of opportunity for the larger literacy education community. We have the experience, research base, and energy needed to improve education legislation and learning outcomes in English language arts classrooms. Our challenge today is to develop the grassroots organizational capacity to bring our expertise and carefully-considered messages to policy makers. With the active participation of members at local and national levels, we can resist one-size fits all “solutions” and make a positive difference for teachers, students, and their families.

On Outsourced Grading

The Inside Higher Education story on outsourced grading has started a lot of comments thrown back and forth about the value of outsourced grading of student papers. I spent over 35 years in English and English studies classrooms—most of that time with a heavy load of composition courses. When I left the classroom to take a cushy office job, the thing I missed most was reading student papers. When I would mention this to colleagues, most of whom were still in the classroom, they would look askance until I would say, “I miss reading student papers, but I don’t miss the stacks of papers that I had to get back to students by tomorrow morning.” And then they would see what I meant. But even the stacks were fun. Yes, we all learn how to pace ourselves so that we can read a stack in the time our job demands, but the pleasure and privilege of working with another person as they struggle to voice something profound to them is the center of teaching composition. And it is what makes for good composition instruction.

The threads of discussion following the story show that most people not intimately involved with teaching composition do not understand, as we do, that assessment is not grading, that assessment is how we help our students improve—it is coaching.

Good teaching, as in good coaching, only works when there is a continual response, a continual communication, between student and teacher. A teacher separated from responding to student work is like a coach trying to improve performance without seeing the performance or giving feedback.

We need to clarify to other academics, to our administrators, and to the public that we do not grade papers. We respond to our students’ work. Yes, in the process, we make judgments that we share with our students, and we use writing assessment as a way of determining value in addition to improving work, but the heart and soul of composition instruction (and it should be of all instruction) is the person-to-person response of the teacher to the student. Students do not improve their writing skills through error counting, but they do through good assessment that is more often in the frame of a response than a grade.

The NCTE framing statement on assessment and the CCCC statement of assessment of writing make that abundantly clear. Print them and use them on your campus to help your campus community understand that improving student writing will not happen with outsourced grading. And that is the real bottom line. No education program is economically sound if it does not foster student improvement.

NCTE Weighs In on the TEACH Act

Over the next few weeks, members of Congress will be hearing from NCTE about provisions of the Teacher Excellence for All Children Act (TEACH Act) of 2005. The bill was introduced in the House (H.R. 2835) by its author Representative George Miller (D-CA), and in the Senate (S. 1218) by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL). It’s an ambitious piece of legislation that seeks to amend the two most powerful laws influencing education today—the Higher Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind). And, in its current state, it has no chance to become law.

So, why bother? Why tie up NCTE resources to improve a bill that almost certainly won’t revolutionize NCLB, access to higher education, or regulation of teacher education programs?

I think it was that wise sage Woody Allen who once said that 80% of success is just showing up. When you look at some of the legislation enacted this decade, it’s easy to see how this old maxim applies in Washington DC. Just this week, an energy bill that had failed in two consecutive Congressional terms suddenly became law. Passage of a bill like No Child Left Behind would have been very unlikely in the mid-1990’s, but by 2001, it was the law of the land (as we know too well!). The policy pendulum will, inevitably, begin to swing the other way. So, we must not only be present, but influential, when opportunities for real reform emerge.

The TEACH Act could be a blueprint for substantive changes in how federal monies can be used to support student achievement, entry into the teaching profession, and lifelong learning across a teaching career. A group of NCTE leaders gathered at a summer meeting of the College Forum to discuss the merits of the TEACH Act, among other matters. They offered suggestions to Anne Gere, Director of the Squire Office for Policy Research in English Language Arts, and Anne backed their points with research culled from recent policy studies. Working with NCTE legislative consultants Ellin Nolan and Lyndsay Pinkus, with Federal Relations Program Officer Sandra Gibbs, and me, Anne pulled together this letter and research summary that will go to Congressional leaders next week.

In the past, this was as much as NCTE could do to "show up" in deliberations about federal policy. But since we opened our Program Office in Alexandria, Virginia in early July, we are now positioned to do much more. In August, program officers Sandra Gibbs (Federal Relations), Paul Bodmer (Higher Education), and Barbara Cambridge (PreK-12 Education) will be arranging meetings with congressional staff to help them understand our positions on the TEACH Act, the Higher Education Act, Striving Readers legislation, and other pending bills. We can all learn from their experiences by monitoring their blogs, and the blog maintained by the NCTE West Office Director, Dale Allender.

You’ll still be hearing from me, too. NCTE will only really begin to show up on the policy radar when we get active at the grassroots. So watch for calls to action, newsletter postings, and e-mailed invitations to join us in helping our professional community begin to steer literacy policy (rather than being run over by it!). Many thanks for doing all that you can to ensure that the knowledge and sensibilities of English language arts teachers shows up in federal policy on literacy education.