Educators statewide should applaud parents, educators, and legislators in Wisconsin who are advancing AB 446. The proposed legislation will strongly improve the state mandates for assessment of reading readiness and reading proficiency for all our youngest learners. The current mandates are weak and ineffective; AB 446 is robust in its requirements. Proponents of the legislation are impassioned for these changes. As expected, there is opposition to doing what is right. Legislators claim the bill to be an unfunded mandate ignoring the current state funding given to districts for this very purpose. Political opposition for opposition’s sake.
Parallel to AB 446 we need the President of our University of Wisconsin System to acknowledge and remedy the companion problem causing children to fail as proficient readers. Educator preparation programs in Wisconsin do not teach prospective teachers to teach reading. I overuse the term “teach” on purpose. Reading is not a natural skill set; it is learned. Proficiency in reading is yet more difficult; it must be taught. Teachers must be taught to teach children to be proficient readers.
Take note: A person who can read proficiently is not prepared to teach a child to be a proficient reader. The set of reading skills we want all children to learn and use is complex and compound. There is a clear and distinct science underlying proficient reading. Many children obtain these complex and compound skills through a combination of untargeted instruction and the opportunity to read. However, more than 50% of children in Wisconsin do not. Data support this statement. A majority of children in Wisconsin are not proficient readers and are not prepared to be critical readers for the decades of their future lives.
Why is this?
For lovers of the “the game”, Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With The Curve (2012) highlighted the difficulty of finding baseball players with requisite talent for playing in the big leagues. A power hitter can feast on fastballs, but throw him a curve and he will walk slowly to the bench. The game requires talented players who can hit the irregular pitch.
Children need teachers who are prepared to teach all children to be proficient readers because they are trained to hit the curves of children who present challenges in their mastery of reading skills. Our current teacher preparation programs do not do this. Our colleges of education must strengthen teacher preparation with requirements in –
- Phonemic awareness
- Decoding skills
- Word sight recognition
combined with
- Background knowledge
- Vocabulary development
- Knowledge and use of language structures
- Skills of verbal reasoning
- ELA literacy
Check the transcript of a graduate of a WI-system college of education and look for this preparation. It is not there.
For AB 446 to be effective, it must be paired with improved teacher skills in the teaching of proficient reading. As with the legislation, this needed improvement bangs against the status quo and proponents of the status quo oppose changes in our teacher preparation programs. Such institutional thinking and behavior is arcane and archaic. This is why the action of the President of the UW-System is required. He can mandate change.
If we are to hit the curve of reading proficiency challenges and use the assessment data handed us by AB 446, we need players/teachers who are prepared and do not have trouble with the curve.