Government, teachers and commentators continue to argue over in introducing national standards for literacy and numeracy in schools. "There's about 150,000 kids failing in our education system every year" admits Anne Tolley. The lack of adult literacy is becoming endemic throughout New Zealand, says one of our most eminent education academics, even after millions of dollars have been channelled into adult literacy initiatives.

via blueyedviking-coffeecupthoughts.blogspot.com re US system

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RHYME, rhyme and more rhyme is the key to helping children succeed in literacy,

says phonic consultant Yolanda Soryl.

............................................................................................................

John Taylor Gatto Author of Dumbing Us Down

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more than half of Maori boys are leaving school with not even a basic qualification,” Says

Massey literacy specialist Professor Tom Nicholson

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Graham Crawshaw Petition To Parliament

 

Perhaps it is a new spin on the old saying about the hand that holds the ladle ruling the world. In any case, dinner conversation is a huge and vital part of a child's development, says literacy campaigner Graham Crawshaw
 
Paul Charman talks with literacy campaigner Graham Crawshaw
 
New Zealand plumbed the depths in the recent United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) league table of how developed countries treat children, with one throwaway fact being that we are rated 24th for parents regularly eating a meal with their children. For Crawshaw that's a telling indictment, but he believes ideally children should be able to speak to an assortment of trusted adults, as well as parents and caregivers. He considers positive conversation is a medicine to heal a child's low self-esteem, a road map to fi nd a place called, "their ideal learning zone" and a toolbox to repair years of frustration and anger (mostly but not exclusively) in boys written-off by New Zealand's education system. "Positive conversations are indispensable to everyone, young or old," says Crawshaw. He wants all adults first of all to make the effort to converse with children, and secondly to do it in such a way as to draw them out, rather than bogging them down with details. Crawshaw says conversation with children takes hard work and application, but adults who learn the art can hugely increase both a child's confi dence and knowledge, and their own as well. A touch of (clean) humour always helps, however puns are frequently lost on children – but begin to work well as literacy skills increase. He admits that times have changed since his own childhood in the 40s and 50s, during which his parents arranged for him to stay with 35 different farming families during school holidays. The young Crawshaw took the train or the bus to rural far-fl ung areas of Northland and the Waikato, and became integrated into families, all of whom treated him well. 

 
"Today everyone must stop him or herself lest, even for saying hello to a child, they be thought a paedophile," he says. He says a consequence of this fearfulness is increased dumbing down, as children develop less confi dence, fewer verbal skills and possibly retreat from conversation to forms of electronic entertainment. Crawshaw intends to share his ideas in detail in a forthcoming memoir. "The common profi le of a boy at one of our camps is that he will hate school, have poor grades and probably have no dad. I therefore never ask about school, grades or dads. "It just takes practice – ask kids about their pets, congratulate them on their haircut, ask where you could get one the same, see if there are any trees at their place and ask if they climb or build tree huts in them; ask about their names and their nature. "Where there's a will, there's a conversation, provided you keep it open-ended, nonjudgemental and positive." His camps combine physical activities, such as hikes and mud slides, with white-board sessions to t each the basics of phonics, "but in my view you simply can't take conversation out of the equation – it's a vital part of learning." He remembers conversations he has with grand-children and the children of friends, such as their pets, their best or least liked insect, hobbies and ambitions. And conversations around the dinner table, as opposed to expensive outdoor pursuits, have
always been a key activity at reading camps run on his Dargaville farm.

Boys, aged between seven and eleven come in with monosyllabic verbal skills, too often – according to Crawshaw – stunted by indifferent or sarcastic adults, including teachers and caregivers. Their very basic vocabulary has four frequently used words:
cool, wicked, awesome … and duck, starting with an 'f.' During their week at camp they would learn to converse with peers without putdowns, and with a dult and teenage cabin leaders trained to be attentive. It may raise a red flag with some people, those unfamiliar with the Arapohue Reading Camps and Crawshaw's ideas on education primarily happening away from "school." "It's tragic that we are made to be fearful about speaking to children we meet," says Crawshaw. "Of course children must be protected from some adults but in my view it's gone too far. "It takes a whole village to raise a child, and that means every child should ideally have a network. "Today many children only ever get to converse with a handful of adults, their parents, teachers, maybe a sports coach. "Sport is great but it's surely not the be all and end all in a well rounded life." He never loses an opportunity to tell a child that they can go far… "do you like bugs? well you could become New Zealand's top entomologist – someone has to be!" Crawshaw says what is true of children is equally true of adults. "Usually when we say we enjoyed a social occasion, we are really referring to the quality of conversations they had there. "I think everyone should practice the art of listening and drawing others out. It's an art that does not have to die in the present age. "The people we meet can unlock a whole world of knowledge for us, if only we learn how to converse with them."
 
Paul Charman is an Auckland journalist, and a colleague of reading advocate Graham Crawshaw.

 

If your child is having trouble at school, going back to basics might be just what he needs. Literacy campaigner Graham Crawshaw has established a farm in Windy Ridge near Warkworth to help boys "regain their boyhood", while improving their literacy skills. The programme takes them back to basics, with no power for playstations or computers and cooking over a fire. The farm will soon host the annual Fathers and Sons camp. 

Mr Crawshaw is passionate about literacy and has dedicated the camp to improving boys' reading. He attributes their literacy problems to the
phasing out of the phonics-based teaching system commonly used up to the 1950's. His camps are based on teaching the phonics method – the different sounds letters and groups of letters make – combined with outdoor activities, positive conversations and adventures in the bush.

He started camps in Arapohue near Dargaville for boys to experience the great outdoors, but discovered the reading problem in May 1991, when he employed a teacher to test the 42 boys at the camp. He was amazed at their low reading abilities, and got the 10 worst back and introduced them to phonics, and saw their abilities rise. "It's the one skill our schools should be able to guarantee – no school can justify or excuse failing to teach every student to read and write," he says.

As well as fun reading lessons, the boys do hikes, catch sheep, make fires, build bivouacs and construct fences, he says. A boy's reading levels are tested before and after the camp using the Burt Word Reading Test and Mr Crawshaw says results show a jump in reading age of between six months and three years in a few days. "But the greatest skill they learnt is how to have a conversation –conversation is the primary forum in which learning happens." He says boys come to the camp and have so much fun being boys they forget about misbehaving. "We want to give back their boyhood in a perimeter of safety and at the same time help them with their literacy." He says he gets a bit of criticism from school principals or teachers who don't use the phonics system, one even accusing him of confusing the children with phonics. He says that teachers need to be retrained to teach phonics, which some already use to teach the alphabet or the first letter of a word.

Mr Crawshaw is trying to raise funds to complete the construction of the dormitories, ablution block and to develop more bush tracks and huts in
the adjacent bush area. He is also looking for volunteers to help with creating tracks, and working with the boys.

Anyone wanting to donate or inquire about speaking opportunities phone Graham on 09 425 8082. The camp is available for school and youth groups, and Mr Crawshaw is keen to see more local boys at the farm.

By GEMMA REDDELL - Autocar | Wednesday, 24 September 2008 

 

By Paul Charman 

Published by The Free Radical Magazine
 
Reading Warrior, Graham Crawshaw

The other kids in class get what the teacher is explaining … you don 't.
The other kids move on … you stay behind.
The other kids have prospects … you seem damned.
 
Failing at literacy affects over one-quarter* of New Zealanders. It brings that kind of quiet panic, a terror of not knowing what the teacher is talking about, a terror many of us have felt during the low points of our schooling. But what if that feeling of inferiority is sustained on a daily basis? Over many years, failing at literacy builds up and can turn to dejection, self-hatred and possibly an abyss of antisocial behaviours.

As he moves round the country, literacy campaigner Graham Crawshaw is constantly regaled with reports of young New Zealanders whose reading and comprehension is abysmal. He blames this country's largely "whole language" system of teaching literacy, which has minimal use of phonics (the sounds words make) to help children decode words as they strike them. Crawshaw is no wimp. When he mentions principals who "graduate" illiterate pupils every year, the hands-on Northland farmer derisively compares the graduation of so many illiterate pupils to a world where Fisher and Paykel could get away with delivering one-in-fi ve of their washing machines without any electric motor inside.

But the next minute Crawshaw is asking how your kids are doing at school and recommending his upcoming book, which will concentrate on how parents can best teach literacy directly to their children. Aged 73, he is widely read, a winner of the
QSM, a strategic political lobbyist with a twinkle in his eye and a lifelong passion for education — especially educating the individuals too easily branded as hopeless. Hundreds of kids have attended Crawshaw's Arapohue Reading Adventure Camps at
Warkworth, Tauranga, and at his farm at Arapohue, Dargaville. These boy-friendly camps -- with mudslides, bonfi res, bush craft and all-important literacy sessions -- can claim a dramatic turnaround in literacy age (as indicated by the Burt reading test) even after a few days at camp. 

He himself he says is now getting too old to run the camps directly, but has far from given up on the Reading Adventure Camp vision he now looks for those to whom he can pass on the baton. As he swings a hammer and wields a skilsaw building new camp facilities, Crawshaw also spends hours writing out the procedures and details needed to keep the camps accessible and effective, and on a book to keep his dynamic philosophy out in the public domain long after he is personally out of the picture himself.

Crawshaw gets a lot of opposition for his views. One school principal confronted him, saying: "how dare you confuse children with phonics "I was sharply dismissed from the man's offi ce," recounts Crawshaw, "but all I was doing was asking if he would let parents know about the Reading Adventure Camps we were running during the holidays. However, in reply to a newspaper ad. two boys from the school came to camp and returned home able to read journals for the fi rst time. They returned to another camp, with two other boys from their school, whose word decoding skills also received a boost. Crawshaw heard later that all four boys were moved to a school which taught phonics properly. "Now I say 'how dare you' to any primary chool principal over the last half-century who allowed just one pupil to leave Standard 4 (Year 6) illiterate." Yet Crawshaw says his real quarrel is not with principals and teachers, who for the most part have not been taught adequately how to teach phonic themselves. According to him the rot began in 1950 when Peter Fraser appointed as director of education Clarence Beeby, who dismantled the phonics-based education
system New Zealand had up until that point. The effects have been as cruel as they have been far-reaching, says Crawshaw, who claims it was virtually unknown pre-1950 for a New Zealand child to leave school illiterate. Recent surveys, however, have put today's rate of "functional illiteracy"* as high as onethird or more of young New Zealanders. Crawshaw says that "up to thirty percent" of the inmates of New Zealand jails are illiterate, and often says he would like to meet prisoners and apologise to them for not being taught to read. "When anyone is arrested, test their reading as well as taking their fi ngerprints." He would like to know if the person arrested can write a letter; what is the extent of their vocabulary; can they hold a sensible conversation; and could they read a book like The Power of One? "If the answer to all these questions is negative, immediate steps should be taken to trace
the primary schools attended between ages fi ve to eight — their very critical years when literacy skills should have been established, but weren't."

Crawshaw tells of sitting outside a Northland court on court day and testing reading as people came and went. A man who stuck in his mind told him that he could not read, and pointed to a nearby primary school from where he had "graduated" some years earlier. Just then a prisoner was led up the path in handcuffs and the man told Crawshaw that he was there to support him, "and he can't read either." Crawshaw says the situation is tragic and unnecessary. He intends to concentrate his future energies directly towards parents, to get them teaching their children to be fully literate. "I believe learning to read is the single most important
skill anyone acquires. But everyone learns to speak their own language without a school in sight, just from their most important teachers, their parents."

Paul Charman is an Auckland journalist and a colleague of literacy campaigner
Graham Crawshaw. He will be writing regularly for The Free Radical on Graham
Crawshaw's ongoing work with literacy for young New Zealanders. Send him
mail at paul.charman@snl.co.nz.

NB: The 1996 Adult Literacy in New Zealand
survey of adults from 16-65 ranked reading
levels from level 1 (very poor) to level 5 (very
good); level 3 is regarded as being "functionally
literate," ie., the minimum level required to
meet the "complex demands of everyday life
and work." The survey found that for prose
(the "ability to understand and use information
from text") a staggering 66.4 percent of Mäori
were below this minimum level and an equally
tragic 41.6 percent of non-Mäori.

Article In Mahurangi Matters 

As news reports all too frequently remind us, an increasing number of boys
are being referred to health professional by their parents and teachers
because of their disruptive behaviour and poor literacy rates. It's a
message that comes as no surprise to Graham Crawshaw, 76, who runs a camp
for boys at Windy Ridge, south of Warkworth. For decades, Graham and his
wife Joan have devoted themselves to giving boys back their boyhood. His
efforts were recognised in 2003 when he received a Queens Service Medal
for community service. Here he shares his passion to see literacy rates
improve in NZ and his vision for the future ….

I had a privileged childhood. I was born in Leamington, Cambridge, where
my father was the school principal. The only cup I ever won was for being
the first baby born in the school house there. We shifted to Thames in the
early 1930s and then later moved to Mt Eden, in Auckland. At that time, Mt
Eden was a boy's paradise – it was like a mini farm and we had pets, huts,
trees to climb, trolleys to race and all the other things boys love to do.
There was a real sense of community, whether you were mixing with family
or friends, neighbours or just the local butcher. People socialised a lot
more and I think we under-estimate how much we learn from this everyday
contact with one another. Contact through technology is artificial.

I'm a compulsive learner and I'm certain it is my upbringing that fostered
that. My parents, shared my upbringing with many others, who were more
than just teachers or sports coaches to me. They really listened to me and
understood my need for adventure and activity. From the age of seven or
eight, I started visiting farms owned by family friends in the Waikato and
Northland. I would catch the bus or train by myself and spend the school
holidays with them. Being able to make these farm visits had a huge effect
on my education.

At 17, I headed to university, undertaking first a medical intermediate
course in Auckland and then moving to the dental school in Dunedin. But
during my dentistry training I realised I wanted to be a farmer. I think
it was the happy memories of my childhood farm visits which convinced me
that that's where I wanted to raise my future family. At secondary school,
I'd always been criticised for changing courses but my parents were more
understanding. They said "go for it". I think we do boys a disservice when
we put them in a straitjacket so that they feel they can't change their
minds. My advice to them has always been not to be afraid to make a change
in direction, because dreams and ambitions are much more valuable than
NCEA marks.

I started working on a farm in Rangiora and then moved to my uncle's farm
in Dargaville. I then leased-to-purchase a 162 hectare sheep and dairy
farm at Arapohue, a little south of Dargaville, which I converted to sheep
and cattle. Joan and I married in 1959 and had three daughters and a son,
Richard. We encouraged all our children to be independent and when Richard
was nine, we sent him to an uncle's farm in Gisborne. It was a chance for
him to experience the farm life I'd enjoyed when I was a boy.

About this time I decided to establish the Arapohue Bush Camp concept.
Joan shared my vision, which was to provide boys with the experiences they
were missing from their home environments. We held our first camp in 1962,
with nine boys camping in our house. Two more camps were held that year,
utilising a woolshed, where a loft was constructed for the sleeping
quarters. The boys loved it. Later on, they helped us build 10 rough
cabins – it was this hands-on approach, as well as our focus on activities
designed particularly with boys in mind, that made us different from the
many other camps that were around. The boys came to us from the Auckland
Baptist Tabernacle – some were very hard cases. We could see the camps
were making some radical changes in them. You could see the delight in
their faces when they were doing things they enjoyed. Camps were held
regularly from 1962 through to 1991. We also set up an alternative school
for boys and girls from 1978 to 1982, with 87 children attending over the
four years, but this stopped due to the difficulty of staffing the school.

The year 1991 was a key time. We had 42 boys at a camp and I decided to
test their reading ability. We were appalled at some of the results. The
problem cut right across wealth and ethnic boundaries. Although I knew
nothing about teaching reading, except my memories of the good primers we
had had at school which taught phonics, I decided to try to do something
to help the boys who had such low reading ability. It was a case of trial
and error. We started with the 10 poorest readers. Then, in 1995, we held
our first reading adventure camp in Titirangi, which was attended by about
30 boys. Girls didn't seem to need the camps as much as boys - they seem
to have been better at surviving the whole language (look and guess)
methods used by schools. I realised that conversation is an integral part
of literacy learning and there is a marked absence of conversation in many
boys' lives. We hear of boys disrupting the school, but I sometimes wonder
if it is the school system disrupting the boys' learning style. Since then
we have held 70 reading camps, now called Farmstays. I still believe the
level of illiteracy in our nation is a national scandal. No boy should
pass his seventh birthday without being able to read. If there is a
problem, such as dyslexia, Irhlen or Asperger syndrome, then they need to
be diagnosed early so teaching can be adjusted accordingly.

We bought the Windy Ridge Bush Camp, now called Windy Ridge Boy's Farm,
south of Warkworth, 12 years ago. It's a 14 hectare bush property and we
have added 'boy friendly' buildings with no electricity, long drops and
bunkrooms with minimal furnishings. It's a 1900s zone. The boys we see
come with a lot of 'baggage'. They are often very angry so we spend time
with them trying to work through their issues. We give them alternatives
to angry behaviour, offering them activities involving the three key
elements boys love – mud, fire, and water. After awhile, they forget to be
angry. Fairness and justice are also an integral part of what we teach.

We've held five programmes at Windy Ridge, one of which was filmed by
Maori TV, but there are still many challenges ahead. We hope to eventually
have available a manual for tutors to help standardise our programmes. We
are looking for new tutors, people with a real heart for boys. Funding is
also needed to help run the camps and other services we plan in the
future, such as free reading tests, an 0800 literacy hotline, training
courses for parents, tutors and teachers, special programmes for those who
have dyslexia and other syndromes and adult literacy programmes. The
environment we raise boys in is crucial in determining the young men they
will become. Camps like ours are helping to give at least some boys the
chance to get back on track so that they can lead happy and useful lives.

 

A NZ Herald obituary to Marie Clay (I refuse to recognise her grand title of "Dame") concluded that "her influence on literacy in New Zealand is unparalleled." With that judgement I wholeheartedly agree - except perhaps for the equally disastrous influence of her mentor, Clarence Beeby.

Marie Clay [her first name is pronounced MAH-ree, but hey, just go right ahead and guess; it's what she used to encourage] has certainly earned for herself a place in literacy history that is unchallenged. She is credited with changing the face of primary school literacy in New Zealand, and she did: largely by discarding the teaching of phonics as the very foundation of learning to read, leaving several generations of New Zealanders adrift in a world of words, and. without any means by which to decode them.

The results can be seen in literacy surveys such as the 1996 world survey on adult literacy, which demonstrated all too clearly -­and it's worth reminding ourselves of this fact frequently - that too many New Zealanders emerge from school without two of the basic skills that were once (pre-Clay) taught there: they can neither read nor write at a skill sufficient to function in the modern world.

The survey found that a staggering 66.4 percent of Maori are below the minimum level of "ability to understand and use information from text," and an equally tragic 41.6 percent of non-Maori. 40 percent of employed New Zealanders and 75 percent of the unemployed are below the minimum level of literacy competence for everyday life and work. Universities organising remedial reading and writing courses for first-year students report that "University students can't read, write or spell," and that "Students fail basic skills," and the Labour Department estimates that up to 530,000 New Zealand adults have inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.

530,000 New Zealand adults! You'd have to think that levels of functional illiteracy that dire did not happen by accident, and you'd be right. They happened after Marie Clay's "look and guess" method of reading was substituted for the teaching of phonics. 

Phonics teaches children to match the sounds of letters and groups of letters that make up words, a skill that once mastered allows the student to match letters to sounds and vice versa - in short, to learn to read. Eighty-seven per cent of the English language can be easily learned using phonics, and the remaining thirteen per cent by rote and memory -- not a difficult task once the groundwork has been laid. It is a tried and true method by which the mystery is removed from those mysterious marks that appear on the page.

Marie Clay rejected this thinking altogether. In her book Becoming Literate (given me by a training college student for whom it was required reading), she writes,

Teachers may feel that the critical thing for the child to learn is his sounds, and they may provide an elaborate scheme for teaching that overrated aspect of reading known as phonics ... Current thinking suggests that we may have to revise our thinking about the value of phonics ...

Given the tragic results of lost generations before us, perhaps instead we might find more value if we "revise our thinking" about the work of this woman, who threw out the baby of phonics without even leaving any bathwater behind. I suggest a more appropriate name for her book is Remaining Illiterate, which sums up the situation for several generations of functionally illiterate New Zealanders who have her own overrated system to thank for their minds having been turned to mush.

Although some schools and even some of Clay's own protégées claim to teach phonics as part of a "mixture of methods," in reality this teaching is mostly confined in the early stages to teaching the 'names' of the letters (rather than their sounds) so that children may identify the first letter in words, at which point children are encouraged to guess what words say by using "the context of the story," or "picture clues," and then to commit them' to memory by "shape." Other approaches bizarrely introduce children to whole words first, only then getting them to sound out letter combinations within words. Where more structured phonics is taught it is usually later on, and then chiefly for spelling purposes.

However research evidence shows that pupils do not learn to distinguish between the different sounds of words simply by guessing, or by being exposed to books by a process of osmosis. They need to be taught the connection between letters and sounds, rather than an over-reliance on guessing.

Supporters of Clay will point to her much vaunted Reading Recovery programme, initiated by Clay to pick up the casualties caused largely by her own implementation in NZ schools of the wholesale rejection of phonics, and which earned for her a Damehood. It was adopted by NZ schools in 1983, and for a time even bought overseas in the UK, the US and in Australia.

However, research in the US and by James Chapman and Bill Tunmer at Massey University in NZ show that the true results for this programme have been grossly overrated. Reading Recovery programmes often resulted in lower self-esteem, they found,and no long-term improvement in reading ability. US education writer Martha C. Brown summarises the reasons that made California and Texas drop Reading Recovery and Whole Language and begin again to embrace phonics. Reading Recovery's stated goal, notes Brown, is to bring "the bottom 20 percent of readers up to the average reading level in their classroom."

The Reading Recovery programme claims an 83 percent success rate, promising to cut other remedial costs. However, Timothy Shanahan, professor and Literacy Center director at the University of Illinois, and Rebecca Barr, professor of reading at the National-Louis University in Evanston, Ill., found Reading Recovery rejects some eligible children and drops others who progress slowly. Reading Recovery omits these children in figuring its success. With this data included, the researchers found the short-term success rate was 51 percent, not the 84 percent Reading Recovery claimed with one group of children ...

A New Zealand Ministry of Education study blames Reading Recovery's failure on lack of "systematic instruction in word-level strategies" (phonics). Reading Recovery uses "principles and practices very similar to those of whole language," says Patrick Groff, emeritus professor at San Diego State University. Reading Recovery books, like Whole Language books, contain repetitive sentences and pictures to help children guess.

"The Whole Language approach to reading simply does not work for children with reading disabilities. A structured, phonics -based approach is more likely to help them," concludes a 13-year study by 100 researchers in medicine, education and psychology.

Despite flawed methods and high cost, Reading Recovery's average annual enrollment increase between 1986 and 1998 was 47 percent, based on figures from Reading Recovery Council of North America. Nearly 11,000 U.S. schools use Reading Recovery, and 560,000 children have participated.

A Battelle Institute study shows the average annual cost of a Reading Recovery tutor is 30 percent more than the cost of a teacher for other remedial programs ...

The scandalous problem of rampant illiteracy has for too long been denied, disguised and explained away by insiders in the training colleges and the elite clique of educationalists who have followed along behind Clarence Beeby and Marie Clay. Their confusing 'look and guess' system of illiteracy is increasingly discredited, and continues to consign the young people who can't cope with it to the scrap heap. Her influence on New Zealand literacy has indeed been unparalleled - and I do not intend that as a compliment.

                                                                                               July - August 2007-The Free Radical- 19