THESE TWO interviews capture the unspoken and  dichotomous issues that new (read recently trained in all of the newest strategies, methodologies, theories, practices) teachers are faced with!

Thank you for these TWO very important interviews.

I will be obtaining the transcripts in order to share them with other k-12 teachers and teacher librarians such that I am.

Teacher librarians want to teach and coordinate critical thinking with classroom teachers' instruction units but at every turn we are repulsed with the needs of the teachers to teach to the "test" in order to prepare our innner city kids to perform well on these high stakes tests.

I am in a multiple award winning district, Long Beach, CA

www.lbschools.net

All k-12's nationwide are criticized regularly by the press, parents, and corporations for not preparing the kids to be critical thinkers for the work requirements of today, but at the same time the focus is on these standardized tes

Teacher Opposed to Standardized Tests Reconsiders

May 4, 2008 from Weekend Edition Sunday

LIANE HANSEN, host: No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002. The law was just a few years old when Youth Radio's Chela Delgado took a job teaching humanities at a Philadelphia high school. She thought she knew exactly where she stood on the all the testing she had to administer until she started listening to some of her students' parents.<

Lesley Farmer recently posted a summary of PIRLS
(Progress in International Literacy Study). My
colleagues and I have been examining the data from
PIRLS using multivariate statistical techniques, and
here are our preliminary conclusions. Once again,
libraries look good: 


Do libraries matter?
Syying Lee, Stephen Krashen and Jeff McQuillan
Submitted as poster session, American Library
Association, 2008 Summer Meeting

McQuillan (The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real
Solutions, 1998), reported that an “access to books”
factor (school libraries, public libraries, books in
the home) was a strong predictor of performance on the
1992 fourth grade NAEP reading examination, even when
poverty was controlled.  The two predictors accounted
for 72% of the variance in scores: Knowing the level
of poverty and access to books is 72% of the
information needed to predict the NAEP score.

We

Are we reading less? Are we reading worse?
Sent to the Washington Post, Feb. 18, 2008

Both Susan Jacoby (“Dumbing of America,” Feb. 17)
and Howard Gardner (“What will happen to reading and
writing in our time,” Feb. 17) assume that the
National Endowment of the Arts’ (NEA) finding that
we are reading less and reading worse is correct. It
is not clear that this is the case. 

For example, the NEA cites a 2006 Pew study showing
that only 38% of adults said they read something
yesterday. Not cited by th

School libraries short on money, books
Austin school librarians making do with old and moldy
books, aging collections.

By Laura Heinauer
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 17, 2008

When deciding what books will be part of Govalle
Elementary School's library collection, librarian
Laura Genet has to keep the bar low.

The average publication date of the East Austin
school's computer science collection is 1989. The
newest set of encyclopedias was published in 2001 —
before some of her kindergartners were born. Although
books with moldy pages, like a recently returned copy
of "Clifford's First Christmas," get tossed, most of
the mildewed tomes, like the big central dictionary on
its pedestal, get wiped off and returned to their
shelves.

"I can't get rid of them," Genet said, "only because I
don't have anything to replace them with."

Times might be tough at Govalle