Jim Cummins on NCLB?s Ideology and Practice

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

> Jim Cummins Demolishes NCLB's Ideology and Practice
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> by <http://meteor-blades.dailykos.com/>Meteor Blades
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> Thu Jul 26, 2007 at 11:49:56 AM PDT
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> Two days before Jim Cummins stood behind the 
> podium at the annual conference of the 
> organization of California Teachers of Other 
> Languages (CATESOL) in San Diego, the place 
> buzzed about his coming appearance. Four 
> standing ovations indicated that he did not disappoint.
>
> No surprise. A treasured, no-nonsense voice in 
> the world of second-language acquisition, during 
> the past three decades, Cummins, now a professor 
> at the Ontario Institute for Studies in 
> Education, has touched the life of many an 
> English as a second language teacher, inspiring 
> thousands with a thoroughly grounded 
> iconoclastic approach to the pedagogy of 
> language. He has shattered myths, developed new 
> theories and concepts, promoted innovations in 
> the classroom, affected policy, and arguably 
> done as much to shift the paradigm of language 
> instruction as Noam Chomsky 20 years earlier did 
> to shift scientific thought toward a paradigm of innate universal grammar.
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> Cummins is Canada Research Chair in Language and 
> Literacy Development in Multilingual Contexts at 
> the University of Toronto and a prolific author 
> of books on second language learning and 
> literacy development. His research has focused 
> on the nature of language proficiency and second 
> language acquisition with particular emphasis on 
> the social and educational barriers that limit 
> academic success for culturally diverse 
> students. Recent books include Literacy, 
> Technology, and Diversity: Teaching for Success 
> in Changing Times, Language, Power and Pedagogy, 
> Negotiating Identities: Education for 
> Empowerment in a Diverse Society, and Bilingual 
> Children's Mother Tongue: Why Is It Important for Education ?
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> In a simultaneously scathing and humorous talk, 
> "I'm not just a coloring person," Cummins laid 
> out a case that what is happening now in the 
> schools is not science but ideology, with 
> federal and state policies imposing a 
> pedagogical divide in which "poor kids get 
> behaviorism and rich kids get social 
> constructionism." In practice, that means skills 
> for the poor and knowledge for the rich. That 
> ideologically based approach ignores and rejects 
> research into the way students learn, 
> particularly how they learn language and how to read, he said.
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> Cummins challenged educational practices 
> resulting from federal No Child Left Behind 
> legislation, with its emphasis on standardized 
> tests and consequent teaching "to the tests," 
> saying instructional approaches now being 
> imposed are something that most in the audience 
> wouldn't want their own children to suffer. 
> These approaches have, he said, more to do with 
> teaching rats than humans. He urged his audience 
> to reclaim good instruction with attention to 
> the lessons of social constructionism instead of 
> treating students with a behaviorist approach in 
> which, as B.F. Skinner proved, even pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong.
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> "We have choices," Cummins asserted. "A lot of 
> folks at higher levels in the hierarchy don't 
> want you to know that you have choices because 
> the dominant model of school improvement that is 
> being inflicted in many states as part of the No 
> Child Left Behind reading-first approach is to 
> impose what is viewed as a scientifically 
> supported approach to instruction and to wipe 
> out teacher choice, to make it as teacher-proof as possible."
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> In spite of an array of ideological and 
> bureaucratic efforts to undermine teachers, he 
> said, "we always have choices. Even when we're 
> not conscious we have choices, even when we're 
> teaching in constrained conditions, where our 
> principals, our superintendents, our 
> administrators, our coaches, are ensuring that 
> we use choice in as limited way as possible, 
> we're always making choices." To make a positive 
> difference under these circumstances, he said, 
> "We need to make the choice to reclaim our identities as educators ..."
>
> Comparing the research into instructional 
> methods that work with what actually happens 
> today in the schools, particularly in inner 
> cities, it is "very clear," Cummins said, that 
> the current approach in too many U.S. schools is 
> 90% ideology and 10% science. Research is 
> ignored, misunderstood, misinterpreted and distorted to favor that ideology.
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> Sprinkling the findings of researchers 
> throughout his speech, Cummins repeatedly 
> pointed out that when students' identities are 
> affirmed in the classroom, they feel comfortable 
> investing their identities into the literacy 
> activities and practices, and they learn more. 
> When they are encouraged to share unique 
> personal experiences, when use of their first 
> language is not discouraged, when "decoding" 
> techniques are not the end-all and be-all of 
> instruction, when students feel they have a 
> voice in the classroom and that people want to 
> hear what they have to say, when "shared 
> inquiry," "critical literacy," "grand 
> conversations" and "social justice" are accepted 
> parts of the teaching process, students learn 
> better and become engaged with their own 
> education. "I haven't been able to find those 
> terms in No Child Left Behind," he said.
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> How does NCLB fit into the pedagogical picture?
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> Bilingual and English learners are now part of 
> the accountability map. "That's the good news. 
> ...That's the end of the good news."
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> On the negative side, he lamented:
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> ? standardized tests dominate curriculum and 
> instruction; first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued;
> ? going against extensive research into reading, 
> the NCLB focus is primarily on early reading (that is, "decoding");
> ? reading comprehension is neglected in the 
> junior and intermediate grades, leading to 
> fourth grade "slump." In effect, students don't know what they are reading;
> ? there is no focus on the affective sphere or 
> student identity in reading engagement, and for 
> low-income and bilingual/ELL students, 
> transmission approaches dominate to the 
> exclusion of transformative approaches.
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> One problem with the upcoming reauthorization of 
> NCLB is that many policymakers don't want to 
> change and "there is a lot of resistance to 
> listening." In other words, it doesn't seem to 
> matter what the researchers who actually know 
> something about instruction have to say.
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> Two causal factors underlie the assumptions 
> behind NCLB and Reading First, both of them 
> profoundly flawed and contradicted by researchers.
>
> Causal factor 1 is students' ineffective 
> phonological awareness and phonics instruction, 
> which Reading First advocates seek to remedy 
> with a "systematic, explicit, intensive, 
> sequential phonics instruction" and "direct 
> instruction (pre-teaching) of vocabulary to 
> promote reading comprehension." The drawback, 
> Cummins argued, is that one of things the U.S. 
> National Reading Panel "showed, which has been 
> systematically fudged and distorted by folks who 
> brought you Reading First, is that intensive 
> phonics instruction ? what they call intensive 
> instruction ? showed no positive effect on 
> reading comprehension beyond the first grade for 
> either low-achieving or normally achieving 
> readers. ... For low-achieving kids, for 
> normally achieving kids, any effects of phonics 
> instruction washed out after grade one. That has 
> not been broadly advertised by the Feds."
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> Causal factor 2 is a lack of accountability to 
> obtain quality control, for which the 
> NCLB-prescribed remedy is "tests, tests, tests."
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> Said Cummins, "Schooling has been reduced to the 
> transmission of scripted skills and facts to the 
> exclusion of inquiry, critical literacy, and 
> social awareness. In schools across the country, 
> instruction focuses relentlessly on teaching to 
> the test. This is particularly the case in 
> schools in low-income areas, which are 
> considered most at-risk of failing to 
> demonstrate 'adequate yearly progress'." He 
> cited an ESL Maryland public schools teacher who 
> calculated that in the 2004-2005 school-year, 
> English learners in a fifth-grade class took 
> five different standardized tests, some of them 
> more than once. The consequences? "During the 
> course of the year," the teacher wrote, "my 
> students missed 33 days of ESL classes, or about 
> 18% of their English instruction due to standardized testing."
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> Classroom practices undertaken to deal with 
> these causal factors are "absolutely at variance 
> with what the research is telling us."
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> Just how far off the mark the NCLB's behaviorist 
> approach has taken us is apparent when "many of 
> the reading programs being funded require that 
> all children's literature be removed from 
> classrooms." The rationale is that if students 
> are exposed to texts for which they haven't been 
> taught the phonics rules, they will figure out 
> that spending so much time on such rules is 
> useless. Phonics instruction is important, 
> Cummins agreed, but it should not be done "in a 
> mindless way" that ignores the research into its efficacy.
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> Cummins offered an alternative to the NCLB 
> approach ? under which more and more inner-city 
> schools are failing every day. That alternative 
> is school-based language planning which 
> instructs along the lines of what the research 
> has shown. Boiled down to its essentials, 
> Cummins said, literacy attainment is directly 
> related to literacy engagement. Such engagement 
> requires participation, and effective 
> participation requires that student identity is 
> affirmed, which means first language learning 
> should not be discouraged because "new 
> understandings are constructed on a foundation 
> of existing understandings and experiences."
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> His alternative focuses on a four-element 
> approach: scaffolding meaning, activating prior 
> knowledge and building background knowledge, 
> affirming student identity and extending 
> language in a way that uses the students' first language.
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> One example of a technique for developing 
> participation is the student identity text ? a 
> kind of "journal" that can be written, spoken, 
> visual, musical or multimodal combinations of 
> these, and which holds "a mirror up to the 
> student in which his or her identity is reflected back in a positive light."
>
> <http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/26/131722/394>http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/26/131722/394