I was going to put my info in yesterday’s post, but it will fit into today’s post called, You can lead a horse to water, but you make it drink, perfectly.

Yesterday, I became curious on the connections between the educrats, and the powerful influence that they play at the school level, concerning wacky teaching methods. I started to explore the York Region School Board site,by exploring the lower level educrats. To my surprise I could not locate a staff directory at the board level. My first thoughts, it is another tactic commonly employed by boards, to limit contact with parents, and public, concerning programing, curriculum, etc., and forces the public to used the prescribe methods mandated by the board, if a member of the public should have any questions, starting off with the principal. There was no search bar, and I was just left to explore every inch of the site. A very unfriendly parent site.

My next question was, to determine why it was so unfriendly to parents, and other users searching for information. The simple conclusion, is that the board has their own agenda to ensure that parents and students follow the mandates and direction, and to limit questioning from the public on their policies.

So, I was back to the low level educrats of the York Board, and research being done at the board level. I follow a thread, called Instructional Intelligence, with another high level educrat from the OISE being the author and the genius behind this profitable venture. His name is Dr. Barrie Bennett.
http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/page.cfm?id=III000001

Barrie Bennett’s bio: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ctl/Faculty_Staff/Faculty_Profiles/1324/Barrie_Bennett.html

http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/Curriculum_Vitae/Barrie_Bennett_CV.pdf

He has been a busy educrat, selling his brand of edubabble, nicely blending the science with lots of progressivism philosophy. Instructional Intelligences appears to be a work in progress, where Bennett is one of the educrats leading the charge. As a result, I could only find information through the teachers’ colleges, and other teacher sites and blogs. What I found interesting, is that when a school board decides to join the bandwagon of instructional intelligence, there is public meetings, inviting parents to explain the process. In Medicine Hat, there was such a meeting.
http://nf.sd76.ab.ca/docs/library/Parent Meeting Poster 8.5x11.pdf

Here is a sample of a course, where the main topic is instructional intelligence.
“Investigating our practices through Instructional Intelligence
This program is designed to respond to the interests and concerns of teachers who wish to become curriculum leaders in school districts. The cohort theme is to encourage and support teachers who wish to “investigate their practices” through Barrie Bennett’s notions of “Instructional Intelligence” (“II”) in order to challenge, learn, explore, and renew their understanding of how their engagement with students and curriculum plays a critical role in education.
Curriculum Studies encompass, but are not limited to, investigations of how learning is constructed. Graduate students learn about issues around curriculum planning, and development, implementation and evaluation.”
http://eplt.educ.ubc.ca/programs/cohort/med-curriculum-studies-nvc3

So back to the question why the education leaders are ignoring the mountain of research like direct instruction, practice and mastery. They are far too busy with their own theories and research putting them in practice using the schools and students as their testing grounds, and ensuring that teachers will be far too busy implementing theories such as Instructional intelligence, to asked hard questions, on end results of students. education levels and achievement.

There is no room for direct instruction, practice, and mastery when instructional intelligence is in place at a school, nor is their room to determine why students are not achieving as they should. Below is a mind map of instructional intelligence in action.
http://www.csun.edu/education/ctl/InstructIntelligence/InstructIntelgraorg.pdf

And in the last link, in the last few pages, it explains what is Instructional Intelligence from another low-level educrat.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Mx7GuIIhLsgJ:www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/pdfs/w/ii/iiMindMapPresentation.pdf+Instructional+Intelligence+site&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgJ_02smlYs-NA5uKwUgaTLF5qF_nwQRi7ZsFqj1LvNYaH_lVErJ7FKPNgCndheazE8U9Davi2DboZz3K6vp8D-zT8gEDxj94NpEFrWeFxHY33MIhGTeQfyo7be7jkRX2Eh3LY6&sig=AHIEtbTdq7t0RBJRGfvdUB3S-b4WkX_Bjg

There is a direct relationship between the publishing industry and the insiders,especially evident in Canada.

The MOE seems to choose direction for the school boards based on the large publishers`curricula versus what the research shows is effective.

There is no interest in research,as in Jump Math,even if it shows they get 3 grade improvements in 4 months,Direct Instruction is villified.Look at what happened to the NICHD research study,a half a billion dollar longitudinal study that shows how 90% of students could be learning to read and spell versus the 40-50% of students who struggle by Grade 4 and are frequently marginalized for the rest of their lives..

I was looked at as a radical when in a meeting where Dr.Mighton and I were both present I said we have to get used to the fact that they don`t care about kids,the CEO of Jump Math said that`s ridiculous.
I don`t think so.

Two years later,I wonder what they think.

It is all incestuous.

Interestingly,a phone call to a school district in LA where they HAVE to increase their scores to retain their funding,landed me a sale to train many Reading Intervention teachers for Grade 1 next September.
Why,they know about the reading research and their feet are to the fire to get RESULTS.They can no longer afford to be in bed with the publishers,he told me they used to be dictated by the Governor`s office on what they could buy,whether or not it worked had no bearing.

Times they are a changing,but not here.The Feds have to put the pressure on.Frank Mackenna should be invited to help,he`s alarmed about Canada`s 42% adult literacy problem!

The trouble here in Canada, the concern with literacy rates are divided in two camps, the adult group and the children group. In adult literacy, the patchwork quilt of services with high-profile Canadians being used to what it has essentially become a charity cause to champion and high salaries for staff of the national and provincial literacy agencies. What is the number of adults having their reading levels raise?  It would be of interest, in comparing the amount of money being fund-raised and taxpayers’  money with the number of adults raising their reading levels. No such study as of yet. Just in Raise a Reader, 17 million has been raise since 2002.  ABC Life Literacy, has raise over 1 million dollars since 2000, through the use of ad selling. I would not doubt that literacy dollars donated to adult literacy could come in the range of 500 million dollars since the year 2000, yet the number of adults with raise reading levels are declining.

In the adult literacy camp, there is no concern over the role of the public education system, and the number of grade 12 graduates coming out with low-literacy and numeracy skills. There is no concern, of less access to public services such as libraries in the number of hours open, and fees to access the libraries. There is no concern of rising costs to reading material where even a newspaper is a luxury in some low-income groups. There is no concern on whys and the hows an adult lands on their door step of a literacy agency, except to provide the correct remediation. For many of the young adults under the age of 35, the number one culprit is whole language and the various mutations. One would think, that the literacy agencies would speak up in unison, since they do have the ear and influence of provincial and federal governments. But no, they are far too busy being part of the profitable side, ensuring that adult education facilities, post-secondary institutions have the remediation courses in place for literacy and numeracy. The most recent example, is money pouring in for financial literacy, divvying up taxpayers’ monies and donations to be spread throughout Canada.

How many adults do get the required remediation in literacy and numeracy?  I have no idea, but I do know how many grade 12 graduates have low literacy and numeracy skills, and it is about 33 % of the grade 12 graduates.

Perhaps Joanne, the people that need to have their feet held to the fire, is the adult literacy agencies, the provincial public education systems, and the feds who hand out grants to the adult literacy agencies without the accountability of producing positive results. As for the high-profile Canadians, are they in the literacy game to keep the status-quo or are they in it to eliminate low-literacy?  Somehow, I think it is to maintain the status-quo of the 42 % , from the angle that I am viewing in.

“The Movement for Canadian Literacy estimates that 9 million out of 33 million Canadians lack the literacy skills needed for daily living.

Low literacy rates affect all cultures and socio-economic classes and are not due to low intelligence. Rather, low literacy is a result of ineffective teaching methodologies.

Whole language and phonics are based on the premise that reading is visual. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as reading is auditory. MRI technology provides the hard evidence through scans of brain activity that whether reading silently or aloud, it is the brain’s auditory function that is engaged.

As an educational and developmental psychologist, I have built a successful practice providing remediation for students who experience low literacy and learning disabilities.”

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/295475—the-problem-is-literacy

The trouble is, our public education systems and adult literacy agencies want to maintain the status-quo because their agenda relies on high-numbers of low-literacy, to generate jobs, profit, and fund-raising dollars. It would be just silly to listen to the experts, such as the one in the above link, in their eyes. The gravy train would end, but more importantly the politicized agenda would end in literacy and numeracy.

It seems corruption ,politics,smoke and mirrors etc.are at play-don`t we know it.

I have pretty well stopped blogging,no point.
It won`t change in my lifetime-like Malkin says…20 years she`s been at it.

I still love Reid Lyon,he tells it like it is-he appears to have no agenda other than outrage and lines like Reading War and that had we seen as much research in Aids and Cancer we`d have implemented long a go-in education,the complexity of the turf is extremely egocentric,not like medicine where some thought is given to the patient.