Routines across schools - When we think of routines followed in schools, what comes to our mind first? I asked this question to a couple of my friends of various age groups. I have listed a few of their responses below

v     Attendance taken by teachers

v     Lunch prayers 

v     School assembly

v     Switching classes

v     Group learning activities

v     Notebook correction

v     Examinations

v     Report card distribution

v     Parent teacher meeting

v     Homework submission

v     Diary checking

I have also followed such routines as a student and as a teacher then. Now I go to schools as a consultant or sometimes as a trainer and witness such routines. As a student I was bored or sometimes scared of such routines. As a teacher I was questioning myself on these routines, also saw my students following such routines without any understanding.

For example, the assembly time…

Students stand in line hearing to prayer, news, a few verses from religious books/poems, instructions given to the students, talk by the school Principal or the teachers. Some students just close their eyes and stand, some try to play some pranks on others, some moving uneasily under hot Sun, some just looking at their wrist watches to find out the time left out for the assembly to come to an end.  Many teachers stand there controlling students without paying attention to what’s happening in the assembly. When asked about assembly time to children, many of them were unable to say what was shared in the assembly and their responses were, “we stand in line and listen to what is told”. Nor the teachers were able to give a clear rationale as to why assembly is conducted.

I am not sure if schools are aware of the purpose of such routines. The dictionary meaning for the word ‘assembly’ is ‘a public facility to meet for open discussion’ or ‘a group of persons who are gathered together for a common purpose’.

If so, what is the common purpose for which the students gather everyday? Have Schools discovered such common purposes? What do they do to achieve them? Have they communicated it to the other stakeholders of Schools – teachers, parents and community? Do schools have some indicators to find out the value adds for children during assembly time?

Are school assemblies simply a routine to be followed or a generative force for schools to educate, empower and envision a pupil community who walk into the assembly hall with a well-defined purpose?

Intrinsic Motivation and its effects on Student Academic Achievement 

Jason Creekmore

August, 2010

Motivation 101

Schools across the nation are experiencing ever-increasing pressure to raise student test scores. In order to meet the growing demands of student achievement, educators at all levels have created and implemented strategic plans that focus on adult controlled variables such as professional development and the purchasing of computer-based learning programs. However, perhaps the most significant factor in determining student achievement is simply student motivation.  Motivation is one of the most widely-studied areas in the field of psychology and its implications in the field of education are apparent.  Psychologists have established two major concepts in regards to motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivation is described as an outside force influencing an individual’s behavior.  These types of motivators can be effective in helping students meet short-term goals, but have a tendency to make students depended on rewards. Examples of such motivators include stickers, trophies, extended break, and even money. Students who perform for the sole purpose of being rewarded by an outside variable, often times lose focus on why overall academic success is important. For extrinsically motivated students, their goal is to be rewarded for their efforts, rather than the results of their efforts, the learning itself, act as the reward.

 The other major motivational concept is intrinsic motivation. Psychologists explain intrinsic motivation as when an individual completes an activity for the basic enjoyment of the activity, or understands the underlying value of the activity. Students who are intrinsically motivated to complete tasks see the value in the activity itself and are not reliant on an outside reward for their efforts. There are many theories concerning the concept of intrinsic motivation, but one that has recently gained momentum is the Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

Implications of Intrinsic Motivation within the Classroom

The Self-Determination Theory was established by Ed Deci, professor of psychology at Rochester University. According to Deci, this theory represents a broad framework for the study of human motivation and personality (Deci, 1995).  SDT identifies three specific areas which directly influence intrinsic motivation levels. These areas include: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Deci argues that these are essential needs of all learners and as the degree to which these needs are fulfilled, the degree of intrinsic motivation will also rise. Intrinsic motivation has the ability to foster lifelong learning skills (Messali, 2010). Deci agrees with the importance of intrinsic motivation and has consequently, created an instrument to evaluate student levels of intrinsic motivation: the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-A).

Being a school administrator myself, student motivational levels, and more importantly student achievement levels are a priority.  The study of intrinsic motivation and its effects on academic achievement, naturally posed the question:  Is there a positive correlation between student’s level of intrinsic motivation and their academic performance?

Study

In the spring of 2010 a study was completed that dealt with academic achievement and intrinsic motivation.  Sixty  7^th and 8^th grade students from a rural middle school in Kentucky completed the SRQ-A evaluation tool.  Students were randomly selected from two distinct groups: students with a 2.5 grade point average or below, and students with a 3.5 grade point average (GPA) or above. The purpose of the study was to determine if a positive correlation exists between the intrinsic motivational levels as determined by the SRQ-A tool and student academic achievement as evidenced by GPA.

Results

The average GPA of the 60 students was 2.72 and the average SRQ-A score was 13.9. The numbers changed dramatically when examining the two distinct subgroups. The top 30 students had an average GPA of 3.67 and a SRQ-A score of 17.8. The bottom 30 students had an average GPA of 1.76 and a SRQ-A score of 10.1. A correlation test was applied to the two variables to measure the relationship between intrinsic motivation and academic achievement.  The results indicated a positive correlation of .891, meaning that there was an 89 percent chance that the variables of GPA and SRQ-A data were related. The data suggests a close relationship exists between academic achievement and intrinsic motivation.

In a field which values data-driven decisions, this study assuredly indicates that schools would benefit from focusing more time and energy on increasing student intrinsic motivation. In some respects, intrinsic motivation can be thought of as a precursor to increasing academic performance. Schools should make every effort to implement teaching strategies and create an atmosphere which fosters intrinsic motivation.  As test score requirements rise with each passing year, educators must seek every advantage possible to raise student performance levels and according to this study, intrinsic motivation plays a significant role in our future success.

Reference

Deci, Ed. (1995). Why we do what we do: understanding of self-motivation.

Messali, Janice. (2010). The effect of motivation on academic achievement.                    

           http://www.ehow.com/facts_5804273_effect-motivation-academic-

           achievement.html#ixzz0w2aZMmCQ.

The moment you start looking deeply into this mystery, you’re going to come up against a gang of ideologues led by John Dewey, the Father of American Education. He and his buddies were socialists. They believed in transforming the country, one way or another. 

So look where we are. We are now staring into the teeth of a conspiracy.

A lot of people are upset by this word, but I don’t see any way to avoid it. Starting by 1910, every time Dewey and another professor at Teachers College had a meeting, they were plotting to insinuate their ideas into every public school in America. No Congress voted; no president approved. Dewey, who was probably a Fabian socialist, believed in working quietly from the inside; and that’s what he did.

I’m fascinated by the conspiracy question because I don’t think we can fix the public schools unless we first confront what actually happened to them. Here’s my short take: a lot of socialist educators said the heck with knowledge, facts and all that academic stuff; the big job is to turn children into future socialists. End of story.

However, if you do start talking about conspiracy, one common response is, no, no, we don’t need any crazy theories like that. The problems in the schools are clearly due to lazy parents, difficult kids, the Internet, drugs, sex, television, rock ‘n roll, etc., etc. Why go poking around in the past? Dewey’s been dead forever.

My sense is that many people are content to stay on the surface and to blame the victims. They don’t want to rock the status quo or blame any of their nominal allies. They don’t want to look at root causes. 

Well, in this case, the political beliefs of our Education Establishment a century ago are the root causes. These people were basically what we would today call European socialists. Traditional, academic education was not their main priority. Once they committed to a secret agenda that the public did not ask for or approve of, then you are witnessing a conspiracy. What else can it be called?

(For more on this topic, see “Education: America’s Biggest Conspiracy,” which is a fairly short article; and people have left some interesting comments ( http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Education-Americas-Biggest-Conspiracy.aspx )

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Called RFID and GPS based tracking system; the state-of-the-art monitoring system will already been adopted by many renowned schools and the process of adoption is still going on.

"We have been working on this system for quite sometime so children can be monitored to ensure their security and safety," said the manager, Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

A Noida (India) -based IT solutions provider, Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd. will implement this automated Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and GPS-based student tracking system in the school's buses. Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd. uses a combination of RFID, GPS (Global Positioning System) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) technologies.

RFID is a type of automatic identification system whose purpose is to enable data to be transmitted by a portable device, called tag, which is read by an RFID reader and processed according to the needs of a particular application.

All the buses of schools will be equipped with RFID readers and each student will be given an RFID card (pictured) which incorporates GPS and GPRS technologies, with all the student's particulars printed on it.

Using the technology, the parents will get a text message every time the student gets into the bus and alights while going to the school from home and when returning. Alert messages will also be sent to the school authorities.

"This technology will give peace of mind not only to the parents but also to us," said School principal, adding parents had been consulted with regard to the scheme and they had given positive feedback.

"Parents were favorable with the system because ultimately it means security and safety for the students," he said, adding he could see that other schools could adopt it in the future.

 Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd. manager said the application software displays not only a real-time view of the location of the bus but also the student inside the bus at any point in time.

"The system can be configured and could be converted into a smart card in the future to have other functions," Manager explained, adding RFID readers could be installed in other locations in the school as needed to further ensure the safety of students.

He also said the text messages would be very specific. For instance, if a child is still inside the bus five minutes after the vehicle's engine is turned off, a text message will be sent to the school authorities.

It means that this system from Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Will answer the question more prominently that “Its already 10 PM do you know where your child is???????????

But now every parent and school administration knows.

By Sachin Singh

Agnicient Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Kim Hughes and Dominic from Young Children magazine wrote about assessment:

Assessment is a continuous process. Ideally, assessment describes the progress of a child’s learning not just after a single test but over time. There is no beginning, middle, or end to learning, so it follows that assessment of children’s learning should not be limited to measurement only at the end of an instructional unit (Hughes & Gullo, 2010, p. 57-8).

At The Adventurous Child, we understand that assessment isn’t only happening at the end of the semester or year. Teachers are constantly assessing their students’ progress. Assessment can also take many forms: it can be the teacher and his state-mandated report card, or it could be the day care center instructor monitoring her children’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical milestones.

Equipment in an outdoor classroom can be built with state early standards in mind, which is useful for assessing children. For example, a balance beam will help develop balance and coordination through outdoor play. Moreover, the ability to step from narrow beam to narrow beam requires a greater skill level than just walking on a standard preschool balance beam. Watch your children’s understanding in gravity and enjoyment of motor and sensory experiences increase as they move from one beam to the next! Stepping pods are another great way to monitor children’s physical developmental milestones. While crossing the Playground Stepping Pods, a child’s brain, eyes and feet all have to work in accordance with one another to move from lower pods to higher pods and back, and to step from a small object to another small object. Aside from assessing development, this is fun, too!

Be on the lookout for the second part to our Assessment Series, Assessment is Comprehensive.

Race To Nowhere is an excellent description of the standardized testing movement. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, increased the role of the federal government in public education and also expanded the role of standardized testing. This morning, I had a conversation with another educator who was ending a California State Testing week. The dedication of this teacher is commendable; although exhausted and stressed, this educator was hopeful that her students did well. She wanted them to have a chance at the best education possible. When I mentioned to her the best education possible is not based on state testing, she went through the myriad of reasons why testing is a benefit. These alleged benefits of standardized testing permeate the public educational system causing harm to students, teachers and the future of public education as a whole.

According to the California Department of Education, the purpose of standardized testing is “to measure how well students are learning the knowledge and skills identified in California’s content standards.” In addition, standardized testing results will assist with focusing curricular instruction and organizing teaching methods. The goals of standardized testing seem to be falling short; instead of measuring student knowledge and focusing instruction and methods, the rigor of testing seems to be a silent erosion of our school system. A recent documentary, Race To Nowhere, chronicles the culture of today’s youth in public school. According to the documentary, the epidemic of standardized testing has produced a culture for cheating, disengaging students, stress-related illness, depression, burnout, and of compromised young adults seemingly unprepared and uninspired for the future.

“Only a handful of scholars and practitioners have argued in defense of standardized tests,” wrote Lishing Wang and fellow researchers Gulbahar H. Beckette and Lionel Brown. The Educational Research Newsletter analyzed the pros and cons of standard-based assessments. According to the website one of the pros of these assessments are a common core of knowledge. These common standards assist in comparing grades across teachers and schools. Students should be expected to meet common standards that are challenging and are more than just minimum requirements regardless of socioeconomic status, race or disability. The other side argues that by imposing standards on students’ minds they are constricting intellectual freedom. These standardized tests oversimplify the core knowledge and do not test higher-order thinking. Cookie cutter standards either dumb down instruction or condemn low-ability students to frequent failure. Students can become disengaged and burned out.

Regardless of the side of the argument, all students, teachers and schools are not created equal and this fact is not taken into account when examining the practice of standardization. The practice of standardized test are to meant to level the playing field when in fact the playing field with struggling learners in school is never level. In other words the interventions that are being utilized to assist struggling students are not individualized or unsuccessful. According to the California Department of Education website’s data for July of 2008, 13, 237 students took the Math portion of the California Exit Exam and 13, 373 students took the English portion of the exam. 29% of the students passed the Math and 30% passed the English portions of the test for the state. When we superimpose the same standards on every student, teacher and school, we receive results that are disappointing—a race to nowhere.

These disappointing results are rooted in non-profit school communities maintaining for-profit activities, i.e., test scores. Data has become the catch phrase and teacher’s names are associated directly with their student’s scores. Improvement has been demanded on the back of a shocked system, and therefore an increase of assessments and pacing guides has followed. This increase of standardized testing is big business for the private sector. There are four companies that dominate the testing market: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson- three test publishers and one scoring firm. Press reports value the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million. There is a top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and instruction. Policymakers dictate the content, textbook companies convert the content into materials and schools purchase these materials for consumption by teachers and students. According to a blog entitled, When Pedagogy and Policy Collide written by Brigitte Knudson, what America is experiencing is called “commodification” of education. In others words, education has became a commodity or moneymaker. Knudson goes on to state, “Education – the process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis in the country that places blame on a system of its own creation that is intentionally underfunded to perpetuate the cycle.” This marriage of big business, government and non-profit school communities continues to lead to disappointment and a move toward privatization of public education. It’s a lose-lose situation as reformers concentrate on splintered areas of need while big business and government erode the core, destroying the public education system right under our noses.

“Race to Nowhere is a call to challenge these current assumptions and mobilize families, educators, and policy makers for how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens,” Race to Nowhere website. Check the website to find a screening, go see it. Spread the news to educators, parents, students and your community. Join the Race to Nowhere Facebook Page in your area. This link is the  Los Angeles page. If a page or community group is not available for your area, start one. Let’s continue to examine the facts regarding our educational system and make it our own again.

Curriculum and instruction go hand in hand when it comes to meeting standards. Without a strong curriculum, instruction becomes lost and weak. Curriculum guides instruction and without curriculum there is no instruction. My theory is based on research and classroom experience as a teacher. The foundation for building a curriculum comes from having a strong, detailed and well thought out standard. Standards that lack organization provide a weak foundation to build the curriculum. Since curriculum and instruction are so closely related, it takes constant communication with the curriculum committees and teachers. Once the standard is set, the curriculum is put into place as a means of meeting those standards. The instruction that is taught is the how the curriculum and the standards will be achieved and fulfilled. Curriculum and instruction share a very close relationship. One cannot work without the other and both the curriculum must be strong in order for students to succeed. 

On the state of California Department of Education’s website it states that curriculum is, “information for improving student academic achievement of content standards by communicating policy and expectations and supporting districts by providing instructional guidance” (CA Dept of Education). Additionally, Partnership for 21^st Century skills also states that “curriculum is essentially a design or roadmap for learning, and as such focuses on knowledge and skills that are judged important to learn.” Instruction is the means by which that learning will be achieved. This further supports the theory that curriculum and instruction go hand in hand; there can be no one without the other.

In the state of California, not only do curriculum and instruction work hand in hand, but so does the department of education and the district for the betterment of the students. Teaching students does not fall only on the teacher’s shoulders. With communication of policies and making the expectations clear, they are able to work toward the goal of improving student’s education and helping students meet the academic standards. The education of our youth is a community responsibility, not the primary or sole responsibility of one stakeholder or another (Lederman, 2001)

Constant communication between the curriculum committee and instructors is necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Without this communication, the curriculum becomes lost and so does the instruction. “Curriculum is the content of what is taught along with an overall process of how that content is to be taught, and instruction being the more detailed plans and the way those plans are implemented in order to teach the curriculum content, it becomes easy to understand that the two must be compatible in order to maximize student learning” (Yates 2000).

To effectively teach students, teachers and staff must keep in mind that all students including special needs students learn in different ways. When creating a curriculum based on the standards, we must keep in mind how we will reach students with learning disabilities to ensure that they too strive to meet standards.

Curriculum and instruction take constant communication within the educational system for the benefit of the student. Curriculums are created from standards which are constantly changing and demanding more of students every year. As a result, the curriculum must also change and so should the instruction the helps to meet those standards. Students with learning disabilities and those without must get instruction that helps them retain the information being taught. The curriculum must take into account the different types of learners in the schools system and cater the curriculum to them. The instruction that is given is a more specific roadmap that will reach all learners. All in all both the curriculum and instruction are an essential part of education and meeting standards. Without either one, there is no way to effectively meet set standards.

References

21^st Century Partnership (2007). Retrieved June 10, 2008 from,

http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/21st_century_skills_curriculum_and_instruction.pdf

Curriculum and Instruction. California Department of Education. Retrieved June 10 from, 2008

         http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/

Lederman, N. G. (March 2001). Curriculum and instruction: Whose life is this anyway? School

         and Science Mathematics. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from,

         http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3667/is_200103/ai_n8928991/print

Yates, Russell (2000). Curriculum Overview. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from,

http://www.multiage-education.com/russportfolio/curriculumtopics/curoverview.htm

Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on auto-pilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders. 

The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed.

I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are running on an unintended auto-pilot and no longer serve the purposes for which they were constructed. Neither can be reasoned with or even approached.

Was this tragedy inevitable? Or an unlikely concatenation of events that should never have happened? In any event, we can look back a century and observe our doomsday machine in creation.

History circa 1900 was as turbulent as our own. Intellectual debates raged. Communist and Socialist movements boiled in almost every country. Revolutionaries were trying to transform the governments of Russia, Austria, Germany, etc. Wealth was growing at an extraordinary pace, as were technology and inventions. 

The most brilliant people became Doctors of Medicine, Law, and Philosophy. What did the also-rans do? Cynics have suggested that they invented new fields where they could be stars and empire-builders. Education, Psychology and Sociology did not exist much before this time. Once these also-rans had Ph.D. attached to their names, they could build departments at colleges across the country and lay down the law to the next generation. They bestrode new frontiers of knowledge; it was heady stuff. Unfortunately, most of these young stars first studied in Germany where their brains were steeped in a mishmash of Hegelian, Prussian, Marxist, Freudian, and other exotic influences. They returned to America almost as alien invaders. 

John Dewey spelled out a new approach to education, where academic pursuits would be devalued and social activity would become the primary purpose. He went further, laying out a scheme whereby his disciples would commandeer Teachers College, and use it to indoctrinate generations of young teachers. These eager propagandists would be sent to the small towns of America to spread Socialism. All this was in full force by 1910.

More and more, I tend to think of Dewey as America’s Favorite Quack. He said a lot of extreme things and he had a messianic belief that he was supposed to push all of them to fruition. Regretfully.

Then history got even weirder. By 1920 the Russians had finished their Revolution and already gone off the deep end. Lenin concluded that Communism must occur in all other countries in order to save the Communist Party in his country. I.e., to save what quickly became Stalin’s lurid dictatorship. 

Hundreds of front groups were formed in the US to promote Communism. They meddled big-time, certainly in education. This was bad enough but things got worse in the 1930’s due to the Great Depression. This tragedy pushed our educators entirely over the edge. In their judgment, it had to be clear to everyone that Karl Marx was right, capitalism was finished, and the New World being created by Moscow was clearly the future. 

George Counts, perhaps the leading educator in 1932, expressed the mood: "That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction." Conquest! Willard Givens, boss of the National Education Association in 1934, stated: “[M]any drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control." Destroy and control! The NEA Journal expressed in 1936 the ultimate goal of all the gimmicks pushed by our Education Establishment from then to now: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing.” No facts or skills! 

In 1946 the NEA Journal proclaimed: "At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession." World government! Stalin, who would live until 1953, was that year contemplating whether he could conquer Europe. In that context, “world government’ is code for “do what Uncle Joe wants.” Practical translation: a vastly expanded gulag. 

In short, there may have been some big brains in education in the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were some restless empire-builders. But by 1950 the field had shifted far to the left and become fossilized at that point. My impression is that the young people admitted to the field had to be yes-men who would support without questioning all the Received Wisdom. They were on auto-pilot. 

At this point American education had become a machine that could not evolve or rethink its goals. In dumbing down the country, the Education Establishment had dumbed itself down!

American education pursued mediocrity with cunning and tenacity. As fast as one idea didn’t work and was ridiculed by the public, the Education Establishment devised 10 more. The “marketing department” at Teachers College et al has to be one of the great success stories of American history. These people invented Cooperative Learning, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, Reform Math, Open Classroom, Multiculturalism, Authentic Assessment, 21st Century Skills, and fifty others. All these things, I’d argue, were dumb and dangerous; but they sounded good enough that the public would pay more taxes to implement them. 

No question, this doomsday machine was fixated on acquiring money, union jobs and power. Huge doses of all three. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of thought left over for the humble tasks of making sure kids can read, write and count. (Significantly, all the good minds appeared outside of the Education Establishment, most especially Rudolf Flesch, Samuel Blumenfeld and Siegfried Engelmann.)

But education was no longer the goal, and no longer the result. Education was the pretend product from a vast machinery whose real goals were ideological in nature. This doomsday machine manufactured education’s demise.

How do we stop the machine? For one thing, refuse to recognize its legitimacy. It’s no more legitimate than the auto-rockets and killer robots up there on my imaginary space station. 

[See related article “49: How Do We Learn? How Should We Teach? Why Do The Experts Get Everything Wrong?” on Improve-Education.org. For more on the history of American education, see "21: A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch," especially Parts 2 and 3.]

My piece was titled “Our Schools Are Skilled At Making Sure Boys Don’t Read." It’s longer, more aggressive, with more suggestions on how to deal with this very huge problem, namely, that boys don’t read well or they don’t read at all. (Also, my article drew helpful comments from readers in several countries.)

Now I want to mention the big difference between my article and the one in the Times. Kristof earnestly discusses theories about why boys can’t seem to keep up with girls. It’s helpful to discuss these theories, and as much as I like mocking the New York Times, Kristof deserves credit for that.

But Kristof doesn’t mention the essential problem, which is that reading methods used in public schools are often ineffective. Specifically, the Education Establishment still pushes sight-words and Dolch words. All the phonics people say that the very process of memorizing these words will prevent the child from becoming a good reader. 

Let’s say a boy is 10 or 12 years old and he doesn’t like to read. You don’t actually know whether he is avoiding books as a matter of  preference, or he is unable to use books as a matter of never having been properly taught. This is a HUGE distinction. If the Times had thrown its authority behind investigating this distinction, we might make some progress. In any event, my piece on CanadaFreePress ends with some quick diagnostics you can use on this hypothetical boy so you know what his problem really is.

NOTE: the CFP article is now included in a new section called "50: Leading Boys To Reading" on Improve-Education.org. Also includes list of books that boys like. 

www.improve-education.org/id76.html