We’re Already Paying for Universal Health Care. Why Don’t We Have It?
“Health insurance is supposed to provide financial protection against the medical costs of poor health. Yet many insured people still face the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered” care. A team of researchers estimated that as of mid-2020, collections agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills, reflecting care delivered before the Covid-19 pandemic. To put that number…
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of member’s interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is…
How Mississippi gamed its national reading test scores to produce ‘miracle’ gains
by Michael Hiltzik for the Los Angeles Times The term has been shooting around the education field and news reports lately with increasing frequency: “the Mississippi miracle.” The reference is to that benighted state’s surprising success in improving reading scores for its fourth-graders through a focused program of literacy instruction for teachers and pupils alike. It’s now 10 years old,…
Reading Kingdom’s Approach: a Comprehensive Science of Reading
Learning to read is a challenge for many students. According to the US Department of Education 1/3 of students cannot read at a “basic” level and only 1/3 achieve proficiency. And a 2020 Gallup analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found that more than half of Americans ages 16-74 read below a sixth-grade level. How come learning to read is…
A chronicle of Kappan’s coverage of the reading wars
by Teresa Preston for Kappan As Ullin Leavell wrote in these pages, in December 1943, “reading ability is a premier skill basic to an efficient participation in the American way of living” (p. 52). For our schools, teaching children to read is at the top of the list of essential tasks. And perhaps that’s why reading instruction has attracted so…
On the latest obsession with phonics
by Valerie Strauss for The Washington Post The “reading wars” have been around for longer than you might think. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the “father of public education” who was the first state education secretary in the country (in Massachusetts), advocated that children learn to read whole words and learn to read for meaning before they are taught the…
