27 replies to this topic

[Michele Zumwalt]

Wow, you have made some really personal comments about a volunteer parent in our community who has raised some important questions about current practice. Would you care to share your name and occupation?

[enjoylife]

My apologies to Mr. Hunter and Ms. Zumwalt. It was not my intention to trash anyone, it was my intention to inspire thought and consideration about best teaching practices.

Have a great day and enjoy life.

[tessieca]

Just my opinion on the discourse itself, not the issue: enjoylife directed comments directly to Mr. Hunter, but was entirely respectful. Mr. Hunter, on the other hand, completely halted further comment by apeman (calling debate "disgraceful"). Cathy also handily attacked apeman. This appears to be simply because of a disagreement on the issue. This community can stand to share differing opinions, and I hope that the group of proponents will not try to silence opponents on this, or any, issue.

(note by webmaster: I edited out Cathy's real name, as it is not in her personal bio, and I just wanted to help maintain anonymity in the forums)

[apeman]

"You have not changed a man because you have silenced him".

I have no problem with differing opinions. I was not offended and neither should anyone with a different opinion. That's what this forum is all about. Those of us expressing our opinions tend to be on the passionate side and sometimes get carried away. I'm OK with it.

In my little slice of Folsom and the school district I am very pleased. I place my efforts on protecting the teachers and the teaching environment so that the kids get the best product in the classroom. Bureacracy, politics and yes, sometimes parents can make it difficult for teachers. Like I said before when the teachers speak out I will support this. I know a lot of teachers in the district and they know nothing of an underground movement to lengthen the school day. Maybe they don't feel strongly enough about it to speak up.

That's just my opinion. Pursue it through the school board and see where it leads if you feel it's important. Passion is a good thing that should always be fostered in our children and their parents.

[cathy]

Funny that Tessieca knows my last name, even though it is not listed on this forum.
I did not intend to attack Apeman. I too believe that our teachers are our greatest asset in this school district. I am not criticizing our teachers by any means.
I am merely trying to inform citizens that our school district is hiding behind a loophole in the law which allows them to legally short our children of educational minutes that they should have. The school district is not doing anything that is illegal- yet there is an ETHICAL issue that needs to be considered.
Sure early/late reading programs may be fine, but the only research done on it's effectiveness shows that children's scores are no better than if they were in school all day (San Juan School District). The research only measured the student's reading ability and did not take in to account other subjects. I am concerned that the early/late program is not as effective as the district keeps telling us it is. The district has of date no data to prove it. Our growing population of kids moving from other school districts probably has more to due with our rising test scores than does our early/late reading program.

[tessieca]

Just guessed that "cathy" was the same one who has been writing Telegraph letters, etc.

[cathy]

I could guess that "Tessieca" is our own school board president, but I won't.
I wouldn't be suprised if "enjoylife" also is involved in the school board as well.
Read through the comments again. These are the people who are making decisions for our children.

[tessieca]

Cheers! You guessed right, and I have not tried to hide. You may all re-read my comments as Cathy suggests. You will note that I only commented on the discourse and not on the topic. That needs to be reserved for deliberation under the Brown Act, so there is no legal trouble.

I think you're wrong about enjoylife, though. He/she said they are a school psychologist in another district.

[cathy]

I must admit, when you mentioned the Brown Act, you peaked my curiosity.
I had to find out what the Brown Act covered.
I was interested in the code just before (54950):

"The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the
agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do
not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for
the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people
insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over
the instruments they have created."

We must remember that all this discussion is for what is best for the children. I just keep thinking that the State of California set a minimum standard of educational minutes for a reason. I don't think it is an arbitrary number. We should be providing our children with all the minutes that we are reporting. That would be the right thing to do.

[cathy]

By the way, "enjoylife" was quoting Richard's previous email. He/she did not say what he does.

[enjoylife]

Enjoylife is a concerned community member in the city of Folsom. One who highly respects the opinions of my fellow community members. I am extremely happy to see that both factions are passionate about education and the growth of our children. It is exciting to see that everyone involved believes that it "takes a whole village to raise a child." So I commend both sides for caring about our children. But, I always believe that if it isn't broken, than don't waste your time trying to fix it. In other words, let's unite as community and work together to help our students, teachers and parents to be successful. Let's band together to figure out how to solve this budget debacle as a community. There is no question that FCUSD is turning out students who are extremely competitive in the academic world. Is this truly the number one priority facing the FCUSD, "NO!" Emphatically speaking, the major problem appears to be how do you continue to deliver a quality education with little if any funding.

You talk about a district that has not given it's teachers a raise in some time. You are also talking about a district that has taken back the 1.5% raise that teachers were given in the past year. Not to mention that it's classified staff and administrators have not received a raise in some time. I have many acquaintances who are educators or work in education in one form or another. To me, there does not appear to be equity across the board district to district. You are looking at schools that are running on the basics when it comes to staffing. Groundskeepers have been eliminated. Custodians are not able to clean classrooms on a daily basis because of cutbacks and lack of help and time. Teachers are asked to do more and more each year when it comes to accountability and academic rigor, but they are not being compensated for their time and effort.

If this was a business, than I would be worried that we would lose our quality employees to other jobs in the workforce. I would imagine the only good thing going for education is that the rest of the workforce is in a world of hurt and educators do not have the opportunity to defect.

Back to the early/late program, are there studies showing that students are not doing well on state mandated tests? All of the media releases from FCUSD show the answer to be "NO," it appears that our students are doing very well compared to the norm. Here is a basic analogy, as a parent I generally don't mind having two or three of my child's friends over the house. But, as the numbers rise I see the difficulties of containing and controlling them. I would think that this would be the same in education. The smaller the group, the easier it is to work with the students.

These are just some thoughts and I am sorry that I have gone off on different tangents!

I applaud the teachers, staff and administrators of the FCUSD for a job well done. When I speak to many of the community members, I hear that they all chose Folsom for many of the basic reasons, but one of the main reasons is the fine educational programs.

Enjoy life and step back and see how truly successful our students are. Let's focus on some other major topics.

[john]

Enjoylife, that was a very well thought out post... kudos to you for seeing the "big picture"~

[Richard Hunter]

I did not mean to suggest that debate is disgraceful. I just believe that it is disgraceful that families in Folsom and Rancho Cordova currently are denied access to the minimum instructional minute state standard, and that it has to be debated at all- this should be a given in any community. What does deserve debate is the efficacy of the early-late program. If you haven't read it already, this is a study that San Juan completed. You make your own judgement.
 
Effects of the Early Late Reading Program on Reading Achievement

 Introduction
The San Juan Unified School District has offered an Early Late Reading Program in its elementary schools for over 20 years. The Elementary Division requested an evaluation of the 1997-98 Early Late Program to supplement data obtained during three previous evaluations of the program. During the 1997-98 school year, 16 of the district’s 53 elementary schools offered an Early Late Reading Program. The amount of daily additional instruction provided to students varied from school to school and ranged from 25 to 60 minutes.

Purpose of Study
Previous evaluations of the Early Late Reading Program have provided inconsistent evidence of the program’s effectiveness. A study conducted in March 1996 found more growth over a three-year period on the CTBS/4 Reading Comprehension test for students in the Early Late Reading Program when contrasted to a comparison group. However, two other studies, one from October 1989 and another from April 1999, failed to find differences in reading achievement between students in Early Late and traditional programs. To help resolve these inconsistent findings in light of the district’s current assessment practices, the present study compares improvements in reading performance during the 1997-98 school year for students in Early Late Reading Programs and in traditional reading programs.

Description of Methodology
The study sample included all second and third grade students in the 16 Early Late schools (n=1,783) and 16 traditional schools (n=1,629) who were tested with the Stanford/9 in 1998 and had testing data available from the previous year. Comparison schools were selected to match Early Late schools on the percentage of students in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The analyses of program effects were conducted using student growth scores representing improvements in Reading Comprehension, Reading Vocabulary and Total Reading achievement from spring 1997 to spring 1998. The analyses included overall comparisons between the Early Late group and the comparison group as well as comparisons between Early Late programs offering different lengths of additional instruction—short (25-35 minutes), moderate (40-45 minutes), or long (60 minutes). These comparisons were also made within grade level, gender and ethnic group to test for subgroup differences.

Findings
Contrary to program expectations, no differences were found on any of the three Stanford/9 reading measures between students in schools offering an Early Late Program and students in the comparison schools. Nor were any differences found between Early Late Reading Programs of differing lengths.
A few differences did emerge, however, when comparisons were made within grade level and gender groupings. Each of these differences showed that participation in the short Early Late Reading Programs (25-35 minutes) had a negative impact on reading achievement growth relative to the long (60 minute) programs. Specifically,


* Female students in schools offering short programs showed less growth on the Reading Vocabulary test than did female students in schools with long programs.


* Third-grade students participating in the short programs showed less growth on the Reading Vocabulary and the Total Reading tests than did third-grade students participating in long programs.


The effect sizes for these differences are fairly strong. An additional 12-17 percent of the students in 60 minute programs can be said to have demonstrated more growth in reading performance over the course of the year in comparison to students in 25-35 minute programs. It is important to keep in mind, however, that growth scores for students in both the long and short Early Late programs were not found to be stastistically different than growth scores for students in traditional programs.

Implications
The results of this two-year longitudinal evaluation of the Early Late Reading Program, in combination with those from earlier evaluations of the program, suggest a lack of program effectiveness. Furthermore, the most recent findings suggest that the shorter 25-35 minute programs may in fact be counter productive and negatively influence the development of reading skills for certain groups of students. It is recommended that the Elementary Division carefully consider these findings in their review of effective reading intervention programs in the district.
 
For additional information contact: Paul Tuss, Research Specialist
 
If you question this research, contact Mr. Tuss. He continues to work for San Juan. As a result of his research, San Juan has been phasing out early-late programs. They used to have 16 schools on early-late, and now they only offer early-late at 6 sites.

I would love to see additional data on this issue. Like eveyone, I want what is best for children. If these programs don't even yield increased reading scores, why are we denying children access to instructional time?


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