AmericanEnglishDoctor

Two decisions by the Supreme Court caught my attention this week:

1) Raping a child does not justify a sentence of death;

2) Everyone has a constitutional right to carry a handgun.

What does this have to do with education? Everything.

The first decision reflects a total obliviousness to the effect of sexual abuse on children.

According to the thinking of the majority opinion, a child must be killed in the process of being raped in order for the justice system to consider the perpetrator deserving of a death sentence.

Never mind the fact that the child rape survivor has been damaged as a functioning human being for the rest of its life. The child survived, so the rapist must be free to live and rape again.

It’s bad enough for an adult woman to be raped. She knows about the sex act. She knows there are evil people looking for opportunities to harm others.

A child trusts its universe. It trusts adults to be kind and protective. Sexual abuse pollutes a child’s life and short-circuits its ability to trust. Often the abused child becomes an abusing adult because of the experience.

How can those grown-ups on the Supreme Court doubt for a minute that the adult who rapes a child deserves immediate death? I’ve thought so ever since I heard of a man who raped a nine-month-old infant. I didn’t know until now that some states thought so too.

The only dissenting opinion came from Justice Scalia. I’m disappointed that the Court’s sole woman member voted with the majority.

The second opinion, that everyone has the right to carry a handgun, points to the fact that even people in high places cannot–or refuse to–use context in order to understand the written word.

The first ten amendments to the American Constitution were written in 1791. They were voted on by men who anticipated a conflict with the British and wanted to be sure that state militias could be seen to be acting legally by arming themselves.

To interpret this amendment relating to militia service in time of revolution as applying to American life in 2008 when we already lose 13 children a day to gunshots, deliberate or random, is insane.

Life in the United States is dangerous enough without this latest ruling. Soldiers survive Iraq only to be shot while sitting on their neighborhood doorsteps when they come home.

Here are some statistics from the Bureau of Justice’s own website:

• According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in 2005, 477,040 victims of violent crimes stated that they faced an offender with a firearm. 


• Incidents involving a firearm represented 9% of the 4.7 million violent crimes of rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault in 2005. 


• The FBI’s Crime in the United States estimated that 66% of the 16,137 murders in 2004 were committed with firearms.

• According to the 1997 Survey of State Prison Inmates, among those possessing a gun, the source of the gun was from -

• a flea market or gun show for fewer than 2%
• a retail store or pawnshop for about 12%
• family, friends, a street buy, or an illegal source for 80%

NY Times story (you may have to log in):

“Reading First,” the $1 billion dollar a year No Child Left Behind reading initiative, has failed in its intended purpose of improving reading skills among students from low-income families.

The verdict comes in a report from the Institute of Education Sciences.

About 1.5 million children in about 5,200 schools have been participating in Reading First programs. After several years and billions of dollars, the verdict is that children in the program read no better than children not in the program.

Proponents of the so-called “Whole Word” method of reading instruction are suggesting that the initiative has failed because of “too much” emphasis on “decoding skills” and not enough on “reading comprehension.”

Here we go again! As if the beginning reader could get “too much” phonetic information, or as if “reading comprehension” were a kind of alternate to the ability to “decode.”

Reading is a secondary skill. First we must learn to speak.

A child who comes to school lacking language is not going to understand the point of reading.

I had a neighbor once who told me that she never talked to her first baby. She was waiting for him to start talking to her. He never did learn to read very well.

I heard about a child in England who got to school believing that her name was “Shut Up Samantha” because that’s what the adults in her family mostly said to her.

The foundation for reading is laid at home. Children who are not talked to do not acquire much vocabulary. Children who lack vocabulary lack “listening comprehension.” How can they be expected to acquire “reading comprehension” if they don’t know what the words mean even if they can sound them out?

According to the article I read about the failure of the Reading First initiative,

Teachers in Reading First classrooms spent about 10 minutes more each day on instruction in the five areas emphasized by the program — awareness of individual sounds, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension—than colleagues in schools that didn’t receive program grants…

Ten minutes.

Parents, if you don’t teach your children to read at home, if you depend on the schools to teach them, you are taking the chance that they’ll never learn.

The people who run our schools have been arguing about the best method to teach reading for more than a hundred years and have yet to come up with a consensus.

Learning to read is not difficult for a child who has been spoken to, read to, fed regularly, and generally paid attention to during the first 4-6 years of life.

The dreadful fact about American society is that millions of children spend those early years being ignored, abused, or deprived of essential nutrients.

Parents struggling to support a family on meager incomes tend not to spend a lot of time interacting with their children.

Parents who never learned to read or who find reading a chore, are not going to read to their children.

Men and women involved in criminal activities tend not to be nurturing parents.

According to 2006 census bureau figures, 55% of the population earned $35,000 or less. (Members of Congress seem to think that $75,000 is an “average” income.)

According to the Food Research and Action Center, more than 35.5 million Americans lived in food insecure households (2006).

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 721,500 State and Federal prisoners were parents to 1,498,800 children under age 18 (1999).

These statistics are relevant to discussions of beginning reading instruction.

Language-deficient children who come to school from backgrounds of poverty and neglect require something other than ten more minutes of whatever it is that works with children whose parents have laid the groundwork.

To be effective, a federal program of beginning reading for at-risk children would have to begin long before the child reaches the public school. It would have to begin when the baby of low-income parents leaves the hospital. It would have to begin with the parents of these children.

Meanwhile, if you want to be sure that your child learns to read effectively, you must see to it yourself.

I’m in France at the moment and I continue to be amazed and embarrassed by the constant reminders that most Europeans can express themselves in more than one language while Americans as a group remain firmly monolingual.

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A large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants in my part of the country is affecting the schools. It has had the positive effect of putting language on the front burner.

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A charter school set to open in New York City in 2009 is promising to pay teachers $125,000. Perhaps what’s even more amazing is that the principal will earn less than the classroom teachers, a mere $90,000 to their six-figure salaries. According to the news story in which I read this information,

the new school will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Is significantly higher pay for teachers the key to improving schools? 

Reading further, however, I find that the classes, grades 5-12, will all have 30 students, and the teachers will work a longer day and longer school year than teachers in public schools. Says the article,

They will also assume responsibilities that usually fall to other staff members like attendance coordinators and discipline deans.

That’s when I begin to question the chances of the project’s success.
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People are fond of holding up billionaire Bill Gates as an example of what “a college dropout” can accomplish.

Before deciding that Gates proves that attending college is a waste of time, consider some particulars of his experience.

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In going through my files of published articles on education and educational reform, I have come across several which, although written as many as 15 or 20 years ago, are unfortunately still timely. Politicians and school administrators talk a lot about improving public education, but accomplish very little in that direction.

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My town’s local school board just voted to change a decades old rule that required students to have a minimum C average in order to graduate: 2.0 on the 4.0 scale.

Not anymore. Now it’s possible to graduate with the lowest possible average that counts as a D.

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Often when critics of public education rhapsodize about the “good old days,” their memories are more nostalgic than accurate, but when it comes to English instruction, the public schools are definitely doing a worse job when it comes to equipping American students with the basics of their own language and its literature.

Defenders of the “good new days” point with pride to the fact that

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The other day I listened to Michael Feldman trying to get incarcerated persons to call in to his radio show Whad’Ya Know? It never was clear if any of the people who phoned in were genuine prisoners of the state, but what interested me was that more than one school teacher called in.

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