"[W]hen things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read."

"And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened. What they do is never enough. This isn’t the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it’s the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they’ve personally caused. Black people live and die every day under the burdens of a racism more insidious than the current virus that’s also disproportionately killing us. And yet white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress. Theirs is still a world of signs and signaling, where actions like joining book clubs — often based in some 'meaningfully curated' readings that are probably easy to name: 'White Fragility,' 'How to Be an Anti-Racist,' 'Between the World and Me,' maybe even 'All About Love' — take precedence.... [In social media] people write long posts about the need to examine white privilege, to 'name white supremacy,' and to either proudly denounce family members or call them in to conversations.... ... I know what happens next. In a handful of Sundays, my social media feeds will no longer have my white allies 'This'-ing, or unpacking their whiteness or privilege, or nudging their kids to put down their tablets and march. Their book clubs will do what all book clubs do: devolve into routine reschedulings and cancellations; turn into collective apologies for not doing the reading or meta-conversations about what everyone should pretend to read next; finally become occasional opportunities to catch up over wine...."

From "When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs/I’m caught in a time loop where my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties over and over again" by Tre Johnson (WaPo). If you're wondering what, in Johnson's view, is the right response, I can pick out the 2 words where he says it, and when you see them, you may think it's no wonder white people don't just snap to it and do what needs to be done: "dismantle systems."

ADDED: I read the top few highest-rated comments at the link, and they were all taking issue with Johnson's stereotyping of white people. What percentage of white people react to racial strife by cuddling up in book clubs murmuring about "White Fragility" and "Between the World and Me"?

The Scottish Attainment Challenge

"The Attinment Scotland Fund is a targeted initiative focused on supporting pupils in the local authorities of Scotland with the highest concentrations of deprivation. The Challenge Authorities are currently Glasgow, Dundee, Inverclyde, West Dunbartonshire, North Ayrshire, Clackmannanshire and North Lanarkshire."

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Education/Schools/Raisingeducationalattainment/Whatarewedoingaboutit/AttainmentScotlandFund

If what we are seeing is an example of a targeted initiative to improve literacy in deprived areas, then there is cause for concern: plenty of whole words, flash cards and parental involvement but no indication that children are directly instructed in the correspondence between letters and sounds. Children who come to school with limited vocabularies are not always able to grasp these connections intuitively.

To think that Clackmannanshire had sorted the problem out ten years ago ! What happened ?

"The dispute between advocates of whole language learning and the proponents of phonics instruction has plagued schools and education policy makers around the world for at least the last fifty years. The whole language approach has today been officially abandoned. Nonetheless, I suspect that the issue is still alive in many a teacher’s mind because whole language advocates are still firmly entrenched in their position. They are convinced that their approach is best suited to children’s needs."

"In France as well as in the United States, efforts to reconcile the two camps have led to the adoption of an unhealthy compromise called ‘mixed’ or ‘balanced reading’ instruction. The punch line is quite simple: We know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key state in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme."

http://www.iferi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IFERI-INFORM-No.4-June-2015-Settled-Science.pdf

I think teacher training has a lot to do with this as well.

Education Scotland: the puzzle about the attainment gap

Now I have my own ideas about what would narrow the educational attainment gap between those at the top and the bottom of society, and like many other people, standardised testing is not one of them. So, given the recent pronouncements of John Swinney,  I went in pursuit of teachers` opinions which seemed a bit mixed and all over the place.

Then I came across a most extraordinary post from the Learning Zoo: This is a blog by Anne Glennie who says of herself on Twitter, with 2,130 followers, that she is a Primary Teacher, Literacy Consultant & Trainer, who resides in the Isle of Lewis. Her tweets have obtained 2,988 likes. 

What she noted was that the Education Scotland website had presented two contradictory versions of why disadvantaged children have difficulty with reading. One presented the answer to that as a failure of children to learn the letter-sound relationships. (Phonetics) and this was the original version: 

 

Children need to develop a number of inter-connected skills to learn to read successfully. An important first step is for children to develop decoding skills, through the teaching of phonics (how letters are linked to sounds) and phonological awareness. A balanced reading programme should also develop children`s fluency, vocabulary and comprehension skills.

Evidence from Scotland shows that children from disadvantaged background are more likely to have difficulties with their reading. One of the key factors which drives this appears to be the quality of  of the home learning environment, which can influence children`s phonological awareness, vocabulary development and oral language.

As a result, phonics-based approaches are more likely to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds master the basics of reading.

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Anne Glennie celebrated the fact that Education Scotland had finally `got it` as I would have too.

However, that was short lived when she realised that Education Scotland had surreptitiously changed the text a few weeks later:

Learning to read is complex. Children must develop a range of inter-connected skills and knowledge. Some skills and knowledge develop as a result of direct instruction and practice. Others develop more slowly, through children having many repeated experiences with books.

Evidence shows that children from disadvantaged backrounds in Scotland are less likely to attain well in their reading. Key factors which drive this appear to be the quantity of reading experiences that young children have at home and the quality of those experiences. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have less access to high-quality picture books, their home reading experiences tend to be less frequent and their conversations with adults about books tend to be shorter, less playful and narrower in scope. Home learning environments influence children`s views of what reading is for, their knowledge of books and stories, their phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary and oral language development.

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The puzzle was that both posts were dated February 2016 and no acknowledgement of any edit was given.

http://www.thelearningzoo.co.uk/2016/04/24/education-scotland-and-the-mystery-of-the-shifty-document-swap/

She asked many questions about that and then this one.

"Did Education Scotland knowingly deceive practitioners by quietly removing the old document and publishing a look-a-likey replacement, hoping that no-one would notice the complete u-turn in advice?"

Well, yes I would say so.

How else are the authorities going to promote early interventions and interfering in the lives of women (families) from the first trimester  (12 weeks of pregnancy) and the Named Person, (chief gardener) fantasy?

Reading must not be about a tried and trusted teaching method for which the evidence is overwhelming, if the GIRFEC named person theory is to survive. It`s got to be about families and the early years.