MI House to Focus on Solutions
Michigan House to focus on solutions
On Thursday, the Michigan House of Representatives released their priorities for this session. In education, their focus will include a statewide system of educator evaluation and support, greater school accountability and a focus on improving early literacy.
In addition to the House, the State Senate and Governor have also outlined their policy priorities in recent weeks.
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From the Capitol
STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION MEETS TODAY. The Board meeting begins at 9:30am on the 4th floor of the Hannah building in Lansing. The meeting will include presentations on testing and ESEA flexibility renewal from the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to regular business. The full agenda is available here.
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION MEETING ON THURSDAY in room 521 of the House Office Building. The meeting will include a presentation by the Department of Education and the President of the State Board of Education, John Austin.
Reading Instruction and the Achievement Gap
By Karin Chenoweth
The following excerpt is from “Reading Instruction and the Achievement Gap,” by Karin Chenoweth. Click here to read the full article.
…reading instruction is one of the most complex tasks our schools undertake. You can get a sense of its difficulty from the fact that 52 percent of eighth-graders whose parents graduated from college can’t read at the proficient level as measured by the Nation’s Report Card. Fourteen percent can’t read at a basic level. Although this is a problem that hits every demographic group you can name, the numbers are much worse for kids whose parents didn’t finish high school, for kids who live in poverty, and for kids of color. Those numbers constitute a huge part of what we know of as the achievement gap.
Achievement gaps are often blamed on the personal attributes that kids bring with them to school — whether they live in poverty, whether they come from single-family homes, and so forth.
But anyone who has looked at this issue also has to say that a contributing factor has been that, too often, reading instruction has been hit-or-miss or, sometimes, completely wrong-headed.
Read the full article at The Huffington Post.
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