Would you feed someone that has high cholesterol, or heart problems KFC's Double Down (bacon, cheese, sauce, between two pieces of chicken), mashed potatoes w/gravy, and a mashed potato bowl? No.
So why is it that in chronically poverty stricken areas of NYC, where students come into kindergarten lagging so far behind, where each day it is a struggle to learn, where they don't get support at home, why is it we as real educators continually get shoved down our throats the teachings of the cult of Teacher's College reading and writing crap, led by its supreme leader Lucy Calkins? A person that has never ever taught a day in her life.
The cult of TC is leading our students down a path towards ignorance and the inability to read. As one leading educator has shared with the Crack Team, "TC is making our children in NYC dumber than wood."
But what is it about TC that is so bad, so dangerous to the minds of our students? Simply put, the basic tenants of reading and writing are ignored.
Students do not learn any grammar, there are no writing mechanics to speak of. TC relies on independent work, even for the most left behind student.
With all this testing being foisted upon students and relying solely upon test scores to evaluate teachers, with an ELA tests that emphasizes, and states, spelling and grammar are paramount, TC provides none of the basics for the students to do well on the ELA exam.
Decoding, fluency, are lacking. TC offers no practice books to develop writing skills. Zero skills books. Teaching vocabulary is frowned upon as is spelling.
Our students are becoming illiterate and no one above the rank of "teacher" seems to care. This is the damage that TC's program is doing to our students, to our schools, to our communities, to children's futures.
We can not teach, and students can not learn, without the basics the same way a pitcher can't throw a fastball with out the basics, the same way a batter can't hit without the basics. As these children get older and they are reading to learn and not learning to read anymore where will there skills sets be to learn how to decode with words they don not know? These skills are vital to learn at a young age for they last a lifetime. I should know! From the ages of 4-9 I was in speech therapy for a major articulation issue. I remember in my 20's I was reading something aloud and had difficulty pronouncing a word. A friend of mine (who happened to be a speech therapist) told me that she could tell I was in speech therapy, that I was still using the skills I learned so many years earlier. Our students today are not acquiring any lasting skills.
Teacher's College can cost up to $1,600 a day, Surely, there are better ways for a school to spend their monies. More troubling is how anyone in their right mind in a position of leadership and decision making can allow the infiltration of the TC cult into a school. Schools are abandoning TC left and right, right and left. Ask yourself Lucy, how many schools in Westchester County get suckered by you? The only reason one implement TC is to go with the flow, to conform, to follow the leader. The mindless always follow the crowd.
As long as we are damaging the students, let's just feed them White Castle cheeseburgers, fries, and milk shakes at lunch. But there would be howls of protests if we do. Where are the same howls at those wishing and contributing to the demise of students by implementing Teacher's College's Reading and Writing Project. It is time to step up.
13 comments:
Bring back SRA, McCall-Crabbs, and the Scott Foresman "Dick and Jane" series! That stuff was classic!
Actually, I entered nursery school knowing how to read.
I learned from watching TV program titles during the opening and closing billboards, and product labels and superimposed graphics during the commercials.
Lucy and her ilk promoted the abandoned or modified
"Workshop Model" which became a tool for getting rid of the most qualified and experienced senior teachers, a "gotcha" BONANZA FOR A LOT OF "ADMINISTRATORS-GONE-WILD"! The AGWs loved it for how easily they could set up teachers and put them up on incompetence charges for not following every jot and tittle of the new ordinance. It was a witch-hunt tool used in the pedagogicde being perpetrated against America and the world that replicates its diabolical aims, which is to give administrators totalitarian powers for the denial of due process and tenure. Columbia University has been stained terribly by her tenure there. And of couse, the absolute idiocy of Bloomberg, Klein, Black, Walcott and the Panel for Educational Policy benefited by her work in developing the hatchet work they greedily employed.
I am a reading teacher and everything that TC teaches about early literacy is in direct cinflict with wjat we know about how children learn to read. I made a comment in grad school about how this " reading by osmosis" idea wasn't much better than having the kids sleep with books under their pillows. I now teach 8th grade and see how 10+ years iof this has left us with a generation that can't read or write.
She actually taught for quite a few years before getting her PhD, and has spent a lot of time in hundreds (if not thousands) of classrooms.
The fact that you misspell her name also undermines your argument.
I'd also love to see your evidence that schools are abandoning the TCRWP. My understanding is that they're more popular than ever before, at least based on event attendance and the success of they Project's books.
My school had thrown TC Reading & Writing workshop out the window after a major parent revolt last year.
Luckily for us, parents saw the writing on the wall and pressured administration to bring back a REAL literacy curriculum.
All we have to do is keep in mind that it was Klein & Bloomberg who shoved Luck Calkins and TC down everyone's throats.
Need we say more??
http://nymag.com/news/features/16775/
To anonymous @ 12:56 PM. Is that the best argument you can come up with? That I put an E instead of instead of an I in her last name? Every hear of a TYPO?
As far as her teaching creds, explain where and when she has taught. In fact, prove that TC works at all.
Oh by the way, you should be one to talk.
....at least based on event attendance and the success of they Project's books.
But I am sure that is just a typo, correct?
When a school invests in Teachers College staff development, a great deal of money is spent on staff developers from TC, aka consultants.
Little if any money is left over for skills practice books which kids need.
What do kids have ???
About 10 notebooks
10 folders
1000 pkgs of Post Its
And let`s not forget their selection of their own "just right" books.
What a scam...
I know for a fact that the Teachers' College/Calkins hoax was perpetrated on high scoring schools such as MS67 in eastern Queens. I also know that the horrible principal at that school instituted a TC-only policy by hauling away (to somewhere in New Jersey) all the English anthologies, which were unfortunately full of classic, well-known literature. This was an act that was tantamount to book-burning. It broke the hearts of the (of course) veteran English teachers who'd been using those basic literature texts with success for many years. The principal replaced the literature with the TC leveled claptrap and expected positive results. The powers that be are dumbing down the next generation so they can be a desired product-an obedient uncritical corporate drone. This past decade has been a horror for true education and intellect, with scam artists like Calkins, and of course our "leaders" here in NYC at the forefront.
Go to Hamburg educational ethics and search Lucy Calkins, thanks to that blog we shut down the Lucy Calkins program and the expenses that were to follow.
Exactly as Ms Tsouris describes for Wagner (MS167) in mid-Manhattan as well. The book-burning image is really good. Also denuding the shelves. They gave away a lot of the good stuff to anyone who'd take it out of the building.
The "easy-read" replacements included stories of abuse and rape. Just the ticket in this art-starved city. The savvy 8th-graders in the school told us they had whipped through a lot of these books by the 5th grade.
By the way: check out the publishers of the replacement books. McGraw Hill? other ed-deform companies? To stock a huge city with this kind of literature must have been a huge windfall for some lucky companies.
Bronx Teacher, I may have to disagree with you on just a few points.
I am not a HUGE supporter of the TC R/W Workshop model. If I have to hear 1 more Joy Cowley story I may have to hurl.
However, I do have to point that I do not believe that this is what Lucy Caulkins originally designed TC for. It was originally supposed to tailor and fit into the classroom where the teacher can build around it using other resources. The Teacher's College program should be treated for what it is, a supplement and nothing more.
However, due to Lucy Caulkins 'selling out', her program went completely viral and is being used extremely inappropriately which was never the intention that Lucy originally had in mind for her project.
Last, many Queens schools (districts 25, 26, 28, 29) have been throwing out TC in their schools and moving to other choices. These schools jumped on the TC bandwagon before it 'became viral'. In fact, some of these schools still using the writing units to incorporate into their class curricular units because its being treated as it should be, a supplement.
If you think Lucy Calkins is a nut job, check out her sister Joan Calkins. She is an MD, but claims she is a pediatric specialist...but no records can be found. Joan Calkins the sister of Lucy is the school board president in Hamburg NY, google Hamburg school ethics for the scoop. Someone tried to get Joan Calkins removed from the BOE because she is a liar, and she was caught on tape lying, but Lucy got the commissioner to dismiss. How close are Lucy Calkins and Commissioner King...we heard very close. Anyone can comment on the Hamburg School Ethics Blog. These Calkins women are nuts.
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