grim depiction of reality for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds

I'm reprinting this because in spite of some traces of journalistic hyperbole I believe it does describe accurately the reality of life for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/special-features/in-depth/community-in-crisis-the-fight-to-protect-indigenous-children-from-abuse-and-neglect/news-story/bdd869155c403dd1977fa0f786aa8d83

use https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall to bypass paywall to see the pictures and video

Community in crisis: The fight to protect indigenous children from abuse and neglect
Paul Toohey, News Corp Australia Network
May 26, 2018

ON the south side of Alice Springs, a Thursday afternoon, five adults are gathered around a sedan at the entrance to the showgrounds. A man king-hits a woman and she goes down, hard. She is helped up, then carefully lined up and smashed again, in the face. She’s so drunk she has no hope of defending the punch. She goes down again.

Sitting on the window ledge of the car, watching, is a child. This is what she thinks is normal: incoherent adults enacting the brutal afternoon rituals of total alcohol dysfunction, as desensitised locals drive by with barely a glance.

Alice Springs is at Australia’s spiritual heart: the creation point in our landscape, where raw earth blends seamlessly with the cosmic, and even diehard atheists confess to sacred encounters with the almighty red rock. Now that heart is broken.

There’s deep trauma here. Some Aborigines blame white settlement and loss of culture; others see income support as the driver of destruction, because it buys alcohol and obliterates self-reliance.

The tragedy for the child is that she has already been traumatised, by her parents, for whom acts of ultra-violence carry no shame and rarely result in repercussions, other than visits to the ICU.

She has no opportunity to start life clean but is at the vanguard of another broken generation, same as the last. She doesn’t know it, but she is already caught up in a hopeless hunt for answers in which blame will always displace solutions.

Tired and self-interested politicians; overworked and numb cops; distraught and confused welfare workers; cries for more money from all directions. The spotlight never tracks on the parents causing the harm, because of a shielding instinct that says they have been injured by history.

The middle of Australia, from Tennant Creek down to Alice, is at the statistical epicentre of Australian child neglect and abuse. Each attempt to intervene becomes a forced retreat about saving culture, rather than saving kids.

LIFE IN HARM’S WAY

CALABRIA Family Wines, makers of 2017 Richland chardonnay, recommend it be served with grilled polenta and wild mushrooms. In Alice, where it sells in plastic weapon-proof bottles for $8, it’s served with brain-jarring punches and stomps to the head.

When adults hurt each other, children are hurt. The crisis in Central Australia is decades old, going back to the 1950s when the painter Albert Namatjira was prosecuted for buying alcohol for family and friends in the Morris Soak town camp, which led to the murder of a woman by her husband.

It’s been happening ever since. A month ago, a 62-year-old woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her husband at Charles Creek town camp, just near Morris Soak.

The town camps were once stopover places for out-of-towners that became squalid permanent homes; nowadays, they are crowded as people from remote areas stay longer, seeking services and alcohol — and also because life in the bush communities can be bleak, with few luxuries.

Though liquor is banned in the camps and all public places, the rules are in constant, visible breach.

John Boffa, a veteran Central Australian doctor who drives the People’s Alcohol Action Coalition, wants a total lockdown, with police stationed full-time at takeaway outlets refusing alcohol sales to all but those who can provide proof of a permanent local residential address.

He’s got stats to prove when takeaway sales are totally controlled, violence drops accordingly. But point-of-sale prohibition doesn’t address Central Australia’s estimated 4000 problem drinkers, who are chronically dependent and remain free to drink in the town’s bars.

Boffa is extremely reluctant to criticise the Aboriginal constituency, but some statistics cannot be avoided. “The Territory has the highest rate of substantiated child neglect in Australia, and the lowest rate of children in out-of-home care,” he says.

What this means is that children who live in at-risk situations often remain there, without help. Such was the case in Tennant Creek, where Territory Families, the welfare department, received 21 notifications over two years about disruptive behaviour at a notorious address on the town’s eastside.

It was decided there was no basis for intervention because — as reporters were told at the time — the notifications did not directly relate to the small children in the house.

Then, in February, it is alleged a two-year-old girl was raped at the house by a 24-year-old relative.

She would be left with gonorrhoea and require a blood transfusion due to injuries to her genital area.

It was subsequently learned there had been numerous notifications related the girl’s siblings, and the behaviour of her parents, stretching back years. The department’s inaction appears to imply a view that indigenous children have a higher threshold for living with sustained violence than non-indigenous children.

Underpinning such attitudes is the overarching welfare policy, mirrored in all states, which holds that if an indigenous child must be removed, the child should be placed (in descending order) with family and kin; with Aboriginal carers in the community; with carers in another Aboriginal community; and with non-indigenous carers as a last resort.

The ultimate aim is to reunify the child with its family. NT Children’s Commissioner, Colleen Gwynne, says it’s nice in theory, but there’s a shortage of indigenous carers who can satisfy requirements of providing a safe environment.

“Child safety is paramount, so if you’re not satisfied the child will be safe or thrive, you have to find the next best option,” she says.

Simplistic media-generated propositions, such as wholesale adopting neglected Aboriginal kids to white families, have no genuine support — anywhere. “I don’t believe there’s this push to have a whole heap of Aboriginal kids with white families, that’s rubbish,” says Gwynne.

In reality, most Aboriginal children who have been identified as neglected or abused are in white homes, anyway. For the more than 1000 kids in foster care in the Territory — 89 per cent of whom are indigenous — two-thirds are with white carers.

Yet Gwynne says Territory Families feels compelled to fast-track the reunification of the children in foster care with kin. “We have cases where a child has been fostered for six years and all of a sudden a decision is made: let’s reunify them back with family in a community, just like that,” says Gwynne.

“We’ve got to go back to the child. If a child is with foster carers, and the assessment is made that the child is thriving, the child is happy and loved, why would you change it? If the biological parents say we want the child returned, they should need to demonstrate that they absolutely have the capacity.”

CHAOS, NOT CULTURE

White couple Leigh Swift and Yvonne Mudford started caring for a little girl named Mikala when they lived in Tennant Creek. The girl’s Aboriginal parents were drinking and fighting, and leaving Mikala unattended, unfed, unclean and wandering.

Before she was one, Mikala was declared a “child in danger”. Her father had 48 convictions and her mother a heavy drinker who at one point stabbed her husband. Mudford and Swift looked at adoption as a way to protect Mikala.

But Swift, then the local fire chief, was legally too old to adopt. They persisted in caring for Mikala in an informal way.

Several years ago, they told the parents they planned to move to southwest WA. The parents demanded Mikala back, but Swift and Mudford were not willing to throw the child back into a damaging environment.

“They said they were taking us to court,” says Mudford. “I went to a solicitor in Alice Springs and it started from there. They said it would it be tough and expensive. But there was a whole history, not just of Mikala, but two older siblings that had been in foster care.”

Mikala’s parents failed to show up to court. In 2015 the Federal Circuit Court made the highly unusual decision to grant Swift and Mudford sole custody of Mikala. More unusually, Justice Michael Baumann’s orders made no mention of Mikala’s “culture”. It might be guessed he took the view that the only culture she had known was violence.

The judge laid out tough conditions — on the biological parents. They can see Mikala once a year during school holidays, and only during the day. The father cannot visit the child unless in the company of a responsible adult and neither parent can be under the influence of alcohol.

Even so, Swift and Mudford pay for the mother to make regular visits. They even took Mikala to visit her father in prison.

Mikala is now aged nine. She currently lives in Alice Springs. She says she loves school and reading adventure stories. Asked if she is happy, she gives a pause and a such a direct look that you know you’re going to get the truth: “Sometimes, I feel alone,” Mikala says.

To his credit, Swift makes no attempt to edit Mikala or explain what she says. She misses the family she loves, but says she is frightened of them when they drink.

What Mikala tells us is powerful: that out-of-home care is not easy for anyone. It can involve great reward but is, by definition, borne of sadness. “Nothing about this is simple,” says Swift.

THE POVERTY DELUSION

Just after 8pm, a Tuesday night. A white ute driven by a white man pulls in by the Hungry Jack’s, located close by the Charles Creek town camp, associated with hard drinking and homicide.

A young woman, possibly mid-to-late-teens, emerges from low bushes. She approaches the driver, handbag on her shoulder, has a short discussion, then gets in the passenger seat and they drive away.

It has often been claimed without evidence prostitution is coming out of the town camps. Now we have footage. But what does it tell us? No culture is immune from prostitution. Slums are slums, wherever they are, and they always provide victims to the sex trade.

Jacinta Price, a Central Australian woman who identifies as Warlpiri-Celtic, says it does matter.

At the next federal election, Price will take on Labor’s Warren Snowdon. Snowdon is Australia’s longest-serving MP — a 28-year career politician who presides over the nation’s most troubled electorate, Lingiari, but says nothing on child abuse or parental neglect because, one suspects, he does not wish to upset his crucial indigenous vote base.

“There’s Manila, but we’re not a third-world country,” says Price. “Given the rates of sexual abuse and the violence that exists, and the fact these kids are neglected and don’t have safe homes, it’s too easy to turn a blind eye to it.

“I know there’s young girls out there as young as 13, prostituting themselves. The truth is blackfellas know about it but aren’t talking about it. It’s happening and these are Australian children.”

In Alice and Tennant, you’ll hear that Aborigines in live in “abject poverty”. But this is not Manila, the black townships of South Africa or even rust-belt USA.

There’s income support and child money. The free health system is world-class and education is available to all, without cost. Everyone can eat, if they choose. There’s also work, but that requires motivation.

In Alice Springs, there are hundreds of Africans employed in security, shops and government departments. They’re working remote to build credits for their citizenship applications. Good for them, but why aren’t locals doing these jobs?

A Warlpiri man approaches outside Coles for a friendly chat. He’s waiting for his wife, who’s shopping for a trip to Lajamanu, 900kms northwest of Alice, for a royalty payment meeting from the Granites gold mine. He expects she’ll be paid $50,000, tax-free, directly into her bank account.

He says this is “the small one”. She’ll receive a bigger payment later in the year.

NO WORD FOR RAPE

Talking to youth workers around Alice, who spend time with children who roam the town, they say they would never ask them about sex abuse and, even after trust is built, never hear children volunteering stories.

Like many cultures, parents don’t discuss it; abusers are likely family; talking to authority figures is difficult; there may be different understandings of right and wrong; and kids may have poor English.

In the Warlpiri language, there is not even a word for “rape” — they use “kanyi”, which means take.

The youth workers claim most of the kids have FASDs — or foetal alcohol spectrum disorders, caused by mothers drinking during pregnancy, and which can affect learning and may produce physical symptoms.

The children have not been diagnosed: the workers are guessing. They may be right, but this in itself is a problem.

When every child is assumed to have embedded developmental issues, other real-time causes which are just as likely to hinder learning and attentiveness — lack of sleep, poor nutrition and hygiene, the shame of being dressed in dirty clothes, and repeatedly witnessing violence — take a back seat.

“We have to work with those kids, but from a public health perspective it’s more important to work on the chain of events leading up to it,” says the NT’s former children’s commissioner, Howard Bath.

He points to studies by Harvard’s Martin Teicher, who for 30 years has laid out a clinical case that children exposed to neglect, abuse and violence, such as the girl watching the adults fight outside the showgrounds, suffer brain impairment.

Teicher has written that such experiences “can leave an indelible imprint on [the brain’s] structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development”.

Teicher says childhood maltreatment “is the most important preventable cause of psychopathology” yet accounts for 45 per cent of child-onset psychiatric disorders.

Says Colleen Gwynne: “So many children have violence around them and the damage caused is significant. They can’t develop because they’re under heightened alert from six months old. They stop developing and thriving.”

The money, the concern, the care is already there. There is a solution: that parents start being parents.

AFTERWORD

IN response to the recent killing of the woman at Charles Creek, Central Australian Aboriginal Congress — Central Australia’s largest indigenous health provider, and a political advocacy group — demanded the resignation of the NT Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw for not having cops permanently stationed at bottle shops.

Congress CEO, Donna Ah Chee, said Kershaw had “abdicated his responsibility to protect law and order and promote public safety, especially for our community.”

But what about responsibility from within the community? Ah Chee said nothing about Aboriginal men creating so much violence.

Myself, and another journalist, have heard off-the-record statements from senior people working in indigenous organisations that some of the recent sex attacks on children are “not that bad”.

They’re wrong — the attacks are bad. This defensiveness seems to be about protecting reputations, and diverting attention from their failures as frontline agencies in order not to draw political fire. Yet all they are doing is further marginalising kids.

the pitchfork solution to world inequality

Each year Oxfam delivers a report about how the inequality in the world is getting worse and how this needs to stop. This year, I was encouraged by a marginal note from Nick Hanauer, one of the Super Rich, who warns his fellow billionarie's that:

‘No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.’
- the pitchforks are coming ... for us Plutocrats

Now, what did that Oxfam report say?

• Since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet.
• Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world.
• Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs – a sum larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people.
• The incomes of the poorest 10% of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times as much.
• A FTSE-100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange 100) CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh.
• In the US, new research by economist Thomas Piketty shows that over the last 30 years the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1% have grown 300%.
• In Vietnam, the country’s richest man earns more in a day than the poorest person earns in 10 years.

more details here

PREVIOUS BLOGS ON THIS TOPIC
Oxfam report: AN ECONOMY FOR THE 1%
the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism
Land of the Free, Home of the Poor

the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism

A recent article by Bill and Melinda Gates (Three Myths on the World's Poor) gives the impression that capitalism is an unparalleled success story:

In our lifetimes, the global picture of poverty has been completely redrawn. Per-person incomes in Turkey and Chile are where the U.S. was in 1960. Malaysia is nearly there. So is Gabon. Since 1960, China's real income per person has gone up eightfold. India's has quadrupled, Brazil's has almost quintupled, and tiny Botswana, with shrewd management of its mineral resources, has seen a 30-fold increase. A new class of middle-income nations that barely existed 50 years ago now includes more than half the world's population.

And yes, this holds true even in Africa. Income per person in Africa has climbed by two-thirds since 1998—from just over $1,300 then to nearly $2,200 today. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa.

Here's our prediction: By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.

This reminds me of a stunning video by Hans Rosling, the Director of the Gapminder Foundation which shows how much the wealth of the world has increased in the past 200 years:
You Tube version

brown – Europe
red – Asia
green – Middle East
blue – Africa
yellow – Americas

Most of the commentaries on the web praise this video to the skies. It deserves praise for its overall assessment of the progress of capitalism but there is also a tendency to fast forward through the bad times.

In 1810 the wealthiest countries were the UK and the Netherlands. The average life expectancy of every country was below 40.

Enter the industrial revolution and the wealth and life expectancy begins to dramatically improve for the countries which do industrialise. This is true although there is no mention of the appalling working conditions, the very long working hours, the child labour in the emerging factories of Britain and elsewhere. The birth pangs of capitalism led to major upheavals in 1848, the shortening of the working day, the Factory Acts, etc.

As the wealth of countries increases then so does the gap between rich and poor countries. Rosling does mention this (at 2:35). It also needs to be emphasised that the scale he is using on the horizontal wealth axis is logarithmic, showing the per annum categories of $400 (roughly one dollar per day), $4000 ($10 per day) and $40,000 ($100 per day). If he had used a linear scale then the gap between rich and poor countries would be far more pronounced. The gap between the richest and poorest countries taken from the closing and opening screens of this video is at least 100 times today compared with less than 10 times in 1810

He does mention the catastrophe of WW1 but then fast forwards through The Great Depression and WW2. It is far easier to fast forward through the bad times than live through them or explain them.

His focus is on post 1948, the boom years of capitalism.

By 1985 even in the poorest country, Mozambique on just $366 per year, the average lifespan was three years higher than Britain in 1810.

Wealth has increased but so has inequality. Rosling visually extracts Shanghai out of China towards the end, showing that it is similar in wealth to Italy. Then he extracts the poor inland province, Guizhou, and compares it to Pakistan. Finally, he shows how the even poorer rural part of Guizhou has a wealth index similar to Ghana, Africa. Certainly in this section there is no brushing over the real world problem of inequality in China.

He finishes on an optimistic note. The gap between the rest and the west is now closing. In the future it is possible that everyone can make it to the healthy and wealthy corner with more aid, trade, green technology and peace. Rosling slips into an optimistic version of political correctness in this parting message.

Some people are optimistic about the future of capitalism because of its productivity; others are pessimistic because of its inequality, anarchy of production, environmental destruction, and alienation . We need to see both sides of this picture. In evaluating the rosy picture of Gates and Rosling, I would use three criteria: standard of living, inequality and stability.

The overall standard of living has increased dramatically. Correct, capitalism has delivered in this respect.

Inequality has increased too. This is totally ignored by Bill and Melinda. It is mentioned by Rosling in places but the logarithmic wealth scale distorts the huge and growing gap here

Stability: Apart from the post war boom period (relatively stable and prosperous) capitalism has been an unstable system which can’t seem to avoid periodic economic crises. Over the next few years we will see how acute this problem will become. I'm really uncertain. I don't think anyone fully understands the inner dynamics of capitalism and its tendency to crisis. That elephant is still in the room.

Is Diane Ravitch missing something?

Diane Ravitch is a highly respected education commentator and historian in the USA. She initially supported "No Child Left Behind" but later reversed her position.

High-stakes testing, "utopian" goals, "draconian" penalties, school closings, privatization, and charter schools didn't work, she concluded. "The best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers." (Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform)

I noticed a couple of books she has written which are very relevant to my research (research update here). I have just ordered her most recent book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. It contains chapters on test scores (both local to the USA and international comparisons such as PISA), the achievement gap, poverty, merit pay, teacher tenure, Teach for America and Michelle Rhee. The gloves are off, it's education war in the USA.

This made me curious about her attitude to Direct Instruction, so I did an advanced search of her blog using that phrase, "Direct Instruction" site:http://dianeravitch.net/. It appears that Diane doesn't write much about Direct Instruction but she does publish opponents of DI, such as Stephen Krashen, on her blog.

But what I found most interesting was that a supporter of DI, with the moniker Eded, challenged Stephen Krashen and IMO Prof Krashen did not provide an adequate response. Here is the exchange, including the original Stephen Krashen material initially posted by Diane Ravitch, A Literacy Expert Opposes the Common Core Standards

Stephen Krashen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, where he taught linguistics.

He comments here in response to an earlier post about the Common Core standards:

What this excessive detail also does is
(1) dictate the order of presentation of aspects of literacy
(2) encourage a direct teaching, skill-building approach to teaching.

Both of these consequences run counter to a massive amount of research and experience.

There is very good evidence from both first and second language acquisition that aspects of language and literacy are naturally acquired in a specific order that cannot be altered by instruction (C. Chomsky, 1969, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10. Cambridge: MIT Press; Krashen, S. 1981, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, Pergamon Press, available at http://www.sdkrashen.com).

There is also very good evidence that we acquire language and literacy best not through direct instruction but via “comprehensible input” – for literacy, this means reading, especially reading that the reader finds truly interesting, or “compelling.” (Krashen, S. 2010.The Goodman/Smith Hypothesis, the Input Hypothesis, the Comprehension Hypothesis, and the (Even Stronger) Case for Free Voluntary Reading. In: Defying Convention, Inventing the Future in Literacy Research and Practice: Essays in Tribute to Ken and Yetta Goodman. P. Anders (Ed.) New York: Routledge. 2010. pp. 46-60. Available at http://www.sdkrashen.com)

Now here is the exchange between Eded and Prof. Krashen in the comments:

Eded
December 27, 2012 at 12:24 am
Regarding the second point, I’m not aware of any research to suggest that direct instruction is counter to research.

skrashen
Please have a look at papers at http://www.sdkrashen.com, my books, as well as the work of Frank Smith, Kenneth Goodman and others.

EdEd
Dr. Krashen – thanks very much for posting the link to your website in response to my comment earlier. I have reviewed a few of your articles, and unfortunately I’m not seeing any research demonstrating that direct instruction is ineffective. I do see arguments presented, with some research, that motivation is important when learning to read, along with opportunities to meaningfully engage with reading. However, I haven’t seen any studies which contradict the massive body of evidence supporting direct instruction in the “Big 5″ areas of reading (see http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/ for a good list of research).

Could you perhaps provide a reference to a research article which specifically examines direct instruction vs. non-direct instruction instructional methods, and shows a greater impact of non-direct instruction methods on general reading outcomes (e.g., measures of reading fluency, comprehension)? It may be more helpful to evaluate your claims more specifically, rather than talk in broad generalities.

To the general public reading, I would highly encourage you to view the research link above and draw your own conclusions regarding direct instruction, as Dr. Krashen (and apparently Dr. Ravitch) are in the extreme minority when it comes to perceptions regarding the literature base of direct instruction.

skrashen
Please keep looking. Many of us have published research showing the extreme limitations of direct instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, grammar, in direct response to the claims of the big 5 and National Reading Panel, and supporting the hypothesis that PA,phonics, vocabulary, grammar and competence in text structure are the result of reading (especially self-selected reading). Much of it is summarized in one place: Please see Comments on the LEARN Act, http://www.sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=4. (A lot of it has been published in major journals, eg Phi Delta Kappan, Reading Research Quarterly, Garan’s papers in Language Arts, Kappan.)

EdEd
Thanks for your response Dr. Krashen. Certainly one of the difficult aspects of this discussion is that it’s so broad. It’s not very easy to making sweeping generalizations about broad categories of interventions, as any particular side can start pointing at particular niches in the research, or studies within those niches, to prove points.

As such, I’ll respond to your comments on the LEARN Act specifically related to Phonemic Awareness (PA). Your main citation is a review of studies cited by the NRP about phonemic awareness, where you cite an insignificant effect of PA training on reading comprehension. In response, I’d direct you to this meta-analysis which shows a moderate effect size for PA on reading skills, and a large effect size for PA training on phonemic awareness skills:

http://nichcy.org/research/summaries/abstract53

I’d also point out a limitation of the parameters of your meta-analysis:

You only examine the effect of PA training on reading comprehension, as opposed to more component skills such as decoding, word reading, and reading fluency. It is entirely possible that PA training would have little or no direct impact on reading comprehension in later years of a child’s educational career, but have a more significant impact on more basic, foundational skills such as decoding. As such, it may be that phonemic awareness training is not sufficient in producing effects related to reading comprehension, and perhaps not even necessary with some (or many) kids, but it may nevertheless be a necessary component for some struggling readers in terms of acquiring beginning reading skills. As such, citing evidence that PA instruction fails to single-handedly produce long-term reading gains is not evidence that PA training is unnecessary.

Consider this analogy: a beginning swimmer receives instruction on how to breathe properly, but receives no additional swimming instruction. Is breathing instruction sufficient to producing good swimmers? No. Do all good swimmers breathe well? Mostly. Did all good swimmers learn, through explicit instruction, to breathe properly? No. Is any of this evidence that explicit instruction related to breathing properly is unnecessary or unhelpful to beginning swimmers, particularly those who struggle with breathing? Absolutely not. In fact, instruction on breathing may be absolutely critical to swimming, but may show little if any effect on a swimmer’s ability to swim a 500 meter butterfly stroke fluently, as beginning breathing is not sufficient to produce those gains.

As I mentioned before, it’s very difficult to discuss in blog comments a topic so wide as “direct instruction.” As such, my main point here is not to debunk your entire statement that there is no support for direct instruction as such a discussion would have to be much larger. Rather, my point is to highlight to other readers that your assertions (and Diane’s assertions) about direct instruction are not “givens” in research, that most folks do support the use of direct instruction, and that your research links/comments are not without challenge.

I’d also like to add a note of thanks for your willingness to engage in discussion on this blog – too often there is a gap between research and practice, and your willingness to engage in discussion with the “average reader” is a testament to your desire for research to be actually used rather than simply created. I’d also welcome follow-up comments and challenges, as I think those reading this blog post would be most informed by a more specific discussion of the research, as opposed to general statements about broad categories of interventions.

skrashen
The failure to find a clear relationship between PA training and reading (reading comprehension) is consistent with the meta-analysis you cited. Also, there are other arguments, eg: some people learn to read quite well with very little PA, PA develops without instruction, adult illiterates have low PA, then their PA improves after they learn to read. Also we have to ask how millions of people learned to read before experts “discovered” PA. (We have made similar arguments for PA in second language development,Krashen, S. and Hastings, A. 2011. Is Phonemic Awareness Training Necessary in Second Language Literacy Development? Is it Even Useful? International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 7(1). Available at ijflt.com)

EdEd
Again, PA training may not have a significant, direct impact on the general outcome of reading comprehension, but may have an impact on component, foundation skills such as word reading. Simply because an intervention is not sufficient in producing a general outcome does not mean that it isn’t a helpful component. There has been a causal link established between PA training and development of word reading skills, between word reading skills and reading fluency, and between reading fluency and reading comprehension. As such, it appears that PA training is mediated by variables such as word reading and reading fluency, and thus does have an impact on reading comprehension, if only indirectly.

With your “other route” concept – that some people learn to read quite well without PA training, consider mapping directions from your house to the mall. There are likely multiple routes, and the existence of one route does not imply the lack of existence of all others. You might take the highway, or the back roads. Those supporting PA training are not claiming that PA training is the only way to become a proficient reader, but that it is one route, particularly for struggling readers. In fact, it’s a common assertion that MANY readers do not require direct, explicit instruction in PA, phonics, etc., and that other, informal processes are at play.

In terms of PA developing without instruction, consider the case of a diabetic not producing insulin. The fact that many healthy people produce sufficient insulin is not evidence that diabetics do not. Similarly, that some children develop PA in a healthy manner is not evidence that other children do not.

In terms of PA developing as a result of other reading processes developing, I agree that there is not necessarily a unidirectional influence of PA (or many reading variables). For example, phonics instruction contributes to PA. However, that phonics instruction contributes to PA is not evidence that PA training does NOT contribute to phonics skills.

Again, bringing this discussion back to a point of relevance to this blog post, my hope is that those reading this discussion will not take for granted Diane’s comment that direct instruction “run[s] counter to a massive amount of research and experience.”

skrashen
Credit/blame where credit/blame is due: the comment that direct instruction “run[s] counter to a massive amount of research and experience” comes from me, not Diane Ravitch.

Eded
Ah, I apologize – I was reading what I thought was her interpretation. Again, I’ve enjoyed the discussion. Looking forward to more exchanged in the future hopefully…

skrashen
RE: PA, may have an impact on component, foundation skills such as word reading. Maybe word reading is not foundation skill but also a result of reading experience. (The comprehension hypothesis).

Eded
I think I understand you theoretically, but how do you make sense of evidence that phonics instruction improves word reading, that better word reading results in better fluency with connected text, and that fluency with connected text is what (in part) enables comprehension?

skrashen
Complex phonics, word reading, fluency are all the RESULT of real reading for comprehension.

EdEd
Dr. Krashen, in response to your last comment in our discussion above about phonics, word reading, and fluency being the result of comprehension as opposed to building toward comprehension, I’d again return to my “multiple pathways” comment: Some if not many children do not require explicit phonics (or other) instruction to read fluently and comprehend – they may independently acquire those skills, facilitated in part by being provided motivational and engaging reading contexts. However, with struggling readers (and others as well), research has suggested that explicit instruction in foundational reading skill areas (e.g., phonics) can lead to acquisition of more advanced skills such as reading fluency.

In other words, we both seem to be right, in that kids seem to be able to learn to read with both direct instruction and non-direct instruction. The question then becomes which modality to use in different situations, which would be directly answerable by research investigating the differential effects of DI vs. non-DI approaches in different instructional contexts. I am familiar with a variety of studies which support DI in across contexts, and am not familiar with any studies which examine DI and non-DI approaches side-by-side, and find greater effects for non-DI approaches. Could you provide any links to studies that would suggest favorable results for non-DI approaches over DI approaches?

Stephen Krashen
December 27, 2012 at 9:09 pm EdEd to avoid clogging up Diane’s blog, please write me off line and I will send you some sources and papers. My email: skrashen@yahoo.com.

Reading wars morph into research wars and it's hard to keep track of it all. But I thought that Eded had the better of this exchange, with Stephen copping out at the end. From my reading of the evidence it does favour Direct Instruction over the Whole Language views of Stephen Krashen. For instance see Kerry Hempenstall's essay, Literacy assessment based upon the National Reading Panel’s Big Five components (long, 46pp), for a very thorough review of the evidence.

Diane Ravitch's position is that poverty trumps teaching methodology. That is a powerful argument but we can't put on hold better education until the poverty question is solved. The education establishment and teacher unions have a duty to study the evidence and deliver the best possible education to poor students in the here and now.

three choices for indigenous people

The three choices for indigenous people in welfare state countries such as Australia are:

• passive welfare, which leads to destruction 
• go back to the past, which is impossible 
• go forward to a bicultural and multicultural future 

The correct choice seems obvious but some people just don't get it. See this article: Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress

I found a Noel Pearson article (2004) which is directly relevant to the themes in the above linked article by David Bedford. It’s an essay from his Selected Writings, Up From the Mission. I did find a version (pdf) of this article on line, although it’s not exactly the same as the one in his book.

Economic context is important. Pearson makes some preliminary remarks that aboriginals in countries like Canada and Australia (he calls these First World) do receive significant welfare, unlike aboriginals in poorer countries like PNG (such as Papua New Guinea, which he calls Third World).

This changes everything because the connection between traditional economy and culture is ruptured in these “First World” countries, which have welfare states. He goes onto say:

In my view this distinction, between the indigenous peoples living in a First World welfare state context and those who do not – is decisive, and is not properly comprehended when people think about “the survival of indigenous cultures and societies in a globalised world”. It may not be properly comprehended by Indigenous leaders contemplating the prospects of their people being able to retain their cultures in a changed and changing world.

He then makes some remarks the “cultural vibrancy” he has observed in Third World countries such as PNG and contrasts this with the cultural disintegration he has observed in Australia. This latter aspect is not stressed in this essay but is a very strong theme in many of Pearson’s other essays, eg. Dr Charles Perkins Memorial Oration, ON THE HUMAN RIGHT TO MISERY, MASS INCARCERATION AND EARLY DEATH Delivered By NOEL PEARSON, October 2001

Pearson then outlines three choices for aboriginal people in welfare states. I would argue these choices are very relevant to the theme of the above "marxist" (not true marxism IMO) essay of which I am critical. I’ll quote this section from Pearson's essay in full (from the online version):

One choice is “to remain where we are”: attempting to retain our traditions and cultures whilst dependent upon passive welfare for our predominant livelihood. For the reasons advanced earlier, I would say this is not a choice at all. If we do, the social and cultural pauperisation of Indigenous society in Australia will continue unabated, and we will not establish the foundations necessary for cultural vitality and transmission to future generations. We therefore need to confront and demolish the mistaken policy that passive welfare can subsidise the pursuit of traditional lifestyles in remote communities.

The second choice is to “go back”: to maintain our cultural and linguistic diversity in the same way as the peoples of PNG are able to, or other such indigenous peoples throughout the Third World. But this is hardly possible. Indigenous Australians are now engulfed by the Australian economy and society, and it is impossible to see how territories could be established where the welfare state no longer reached, and traditional economies could be revived (this is not to say we cannot reform the welfare state within Indigenous regions). For one thing, my people would simply refuse this course in practice.

The third choice is to “go forward” and find solutions to a bicultural and bi- and multilingual future. That is Indigenous Australians must face the challenge that comes with culture and traditions no longer being linked with our economy in a relationship of coincidental necessity, but rather one of conscious choice. This is what I have in mind when I suggest a First World Indigenous people, rather than a Fourth World (1) people. Some of the elements and requirements are as follows. Firstly, it is about being able to retain distinct cultures, traditions and identity, whilst engaging in the wider world. Secondly, Indigenous Australians will need to ensure that the economic structure underpinning my people’s society is “real”. This will require fundamental reform to the welfare system affecting my people so that we are rid of passive welfare. It will also mean that our people gain their livelihood through a combination of all available forms of “real” economic activities – traditional, subsistence, modern – and this will include the need to be mobile through “orbits” into the wider world and perhaps back to home base again. Thirdly, education will be key to enable bicultural and multilingual facility and maintenance – as well as to enable economic mobility. Fourthly, we will need to deliberately and decisively shift our cultural knowledge from its oral foundations to written and digitised foundations. We will need fundamental traditionalists to be learned in our languages and cultures to fight for cultural scholarship and maintenance that can withstand whatever social and economic changes we will confront.

This is a bare sketch of the kinds of policies we will need if we are to survive as an indigenous people within a First World nation.

The programme I outlined is obviously not a separatist programme. I advocate restoration of social order and a real economy, education and proficiency in English that make my people socially and economically completely integrated, national unity and geographic mobility. There should be much common ground for Indigenous people who agree with me and conservative and economically liberal people.

(1) I wasn't clear about Pearson's "Fourth World" terminology. However I found an article by Nicolas Rothwell which clarified the meaning:

But crafting a future for Aboriginal remote communities requires above all else a clear sight of what they are now. The communities are a welfare state and, thanks to Cape York activist Noel Pearson, the rotting effects of passive welfare provision in the Aboriginal realm are plain, and the virtues of work-for-welfare programs are accepted across the board. But the communities form a welfare zone with unusual, complicating characteristics. They have Third World living conditions but they are not in the Third World.

Rather, they are in a much stranger place: a place quite hard to see and understand. We might call it the Fourth World: a deeply deprived space contained within the borders of a modern, prosperous First World state. Absolute poverty is not the limiting economic problem: a controlled, regular, yet inadequate supply of transferred money is, along with its inevitable outcome, relative poverty - a fate both grinding and comforting for those locked out of the productive economy. Capital formation is impossible under such circumstances, unless land use can be traded.

The inhabitants of this zone are welfare pensioners, who have subsisted for decades without strong incentives to acquire skills or seek jobs. In this Fourth World of the communities, there is a strong awareness of positional disadvantage: the men, women and children there know they are at the bottom of the social pyramid of Australian life, but they have no idea of how to change their status. The younger generation's members are encouraged to share the expectations of the wider society but geography and the lack of educational pathways prevent them from taking part in the outside world on even terms.
- Our fourth world

Do Pearson’s three choices represent the real options available? I think they do. Which of the three choices do you support? Argue your case. Obviously I’m with Pearson – choice three.

I would add that Noel Pearson’s practice has gone far beyond outlining these choices. He has influenced governments in Australia to implement his option 3 in Cape York Peninsula. This I regard as a remarkable achievement of truly progressive practical politics starting from a reality so grim that people can’t imagine and seem to continually want to forget about once they have heard.

Land of the Free, Home of the Poor

The extent of economic inequality is astonishing and underestimated by nearly everyone. PBS NewsHour’s Land of the Free, Home of the Poor with Paul Solman is brilliant and a must watch.

Over 90% of people interviewed underestimated the extent of wealth disparity picking the Swedish wealth profile as the one they thought represented America. Differences b/w Democrat and Republican voters were insignificant.

Reality:

• Top 20% possess 84% of the wealth 
• Second 20% possess 11% of the wealth 
• Third 20% possess 4% of the wealth 
• Fourth 20% possess 0.2% of the wealth 
• Fifth 20% possess 0.1% of the wealth 

In the last 10 years most of the change has been a dramatic increase in the wealth proportion of the top 0.1%

Warren Buffet:

Yes, there has been a class war in the United States and my class, the super rich, have won

Towards the end Richard Freeman points out that the extent of inequality in the USA matches that of China, still a mainly peasant society, and African countries.

Another reference which makes some similar points and also emphasises that across the political spectrum Americans desire a more equal society than the one they currently live in: Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

Is there an education crisis in your country?

Some thoughts on reading
SCHOOLWORK by Nicholas Lemann
and
How there can be and NOT be an educational crisis in the US by Mark Guzdial

Three reasons why you might say there is an education crisis in your country:

1) We aren't as good as Finland. Your country is falling behind other countries on the international PISA test scores (link)

Finland envy is relatively new because PISA tests, the technical ability to compare educational achievement in different countries is relatively new. What does it mean? My guess is that Finland as a society values education and social equality higher than other OECD countries. For example, to become a teacher in Finland you need a Masters Degree and they are more generous in their treatment of Disadvantaged students and cater better for their needs at a younger age.

So, if your country is not like Finland there are grounds for saying there is an education crisis. If you are near the top of the PISA list then you might claim there is not an education crisis.

2) The gap b/w the knowledge rich and the knowledge poor is increasing, there is a long tail of educational under achievement for the Disadvantaged. For example, Australia does alright on the average PISA scores but we do have a long tail of disadvantage.

This one is driven by social class and a sense of social justice or fairness. Australian education is quite unfair because the children of poor people who live in low socio economic areas end up being grouped together in school classrooms. It doesn't matter how good the teachers are, these classrooms can't compete - other things being equal - with the children of wealthy parents who end up being grouped together in Private schools which have a completely different classroom environment.

So, if you can access the wealthy Private schools or the few elite government schools (the way it works in Australia) there is no education crisis but if you can't then there quite possibly there is a crisis in your classroom.

3) There is a perception that desired education goals (however they are defined) are not being matched with desired educational attainment. eg. declining enrollments in maths and science courses, with maths and science being seen as desirable by observers and not particularly desirable by many students. Or you might think computer programming skills or some other computing skills are really important in today's world and be frustrated at how poorly these skills are lagging in education systems.

(update 27th September: This section could be much expanded especially in a qualitative sense.
eg 1. Alan Kay has argued there is not a real computer science.
eg 2. The current economic crisis reveals that the real science of political economy has been suppressed in higher education for many years - a great evasion of past findings has been occurring
eg 3. the global warming issue has revealed that there is a crisis within the culture of science and how it connects to the politics of policy formation)

So, if you can complete any old course and get a job there isn't a crisis. But if you are worried about the education system delivering a good education to all citizens based on your view of high quality education then there is.

Conclusion: Education crisis doesn't really exist on a country by country basis. update 27th SeptemberRather the education crisis is a barometer of an underlying crisis in social class and depth of awareness of knowledge development issues in your country. Finland is on top because there is less class division and a more caring attitude to the disadvantaged.

Education crisis exists on the basis of social class and your attitude towards knowledge. The education crisis is a class crisis and an epistemological crisis. It really depends on your point of view of the sort of society you see as desirable, so it cannot be measured "objectively".

Lemann downplays the crisis because his outlook is middle class, the crisis does not directly touch him the way it touches the disadvantaged. Guzdial, from his perspective in computer science and epistemology, acknowledges a crisis of sorts but there is no reference to the importance social class in his article.

related:
maths education crisis in Australia - the long tail of underachievement
curriculum reform will not improve education without quality teachers

roots of oppression

roots of oppression

in case you haven't seen this, it's an amazing and very comprehensive photo gallery with commentary by a Dane, Jacob Holdt, hitchhiking around USA, some years ago.

Extract from Chapter 1:

Traveling in such a deeply divided society inevitably was a violent experience:

4 times I was attacked by robbers with pistols,
2 times I managed to avoid cuts from men with knives,
2 times frightened police drew guns on me,
1 time I was surrounded by 10-15 blacks in a dark alley and almost killed.
1 time I was ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan,
several times I had bullets flying around me in shootouts,
2 times I was arrested by the FBI, and 4 times by the Secret Service.
I lived with 3 murderers and countless criminals.....
...but I have never met a bad American!

That I survived I owe to my stubborn belief in these words by Jose Marti:

You must have faith in the best in people and distrust the worst.
If not, the worst will prevail.

universal communications

I've started a new wiki, universal communication. Tony Forster, who understands the engineering side better than me is helping too.

It is for documenting research about bringing communications technology and electricity to the developing world. At this stage it is mainly for notes about understanding concepts / terminology, resources and thinking aloud

It might be useful for:

• those thinking about how OLPC fits into a bigger picture of third world development
• more generally the connection between poverty, electricity generation and communications technology
• understanding the situation on the ground for those planning to visit and / or work in developing world (eg. Oceania, Nepal, Afghanistan, many African countries, etc.)
• understanding successful models about how it has been done, eg. PFNet in the Pacific
  

poverty and OLPC affordability

Apart from Australia and DR Congo (included as benchmarks) the following are most of countries to which the OLPC has already been deployed in significant numbers or to which there are reported plans for significant deployments in the near future. The figures are in Purchasing Power Parity PPP$ (adjusted income per person) of selected countries. The data is from the Gapminder site [1]

COUNTRY	PPP$
USA	31,133
Australia	24,219
Uruguay	8,653
Mexico	7,762
Columbia	5,877
Peru	4,670
Papua New Guinea	1869
Ghana	1515
Mongolia	1285
Mali	1084
Nepal	1052
Rwanda	983
Ethiopia	824
Afghanistan	740
Haiti	709
DR Congo (poorest)	230

Here are some figures of the numbers of XOs deployed to some of these countries [2] [3]:

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF XOs
Uruguay	130,000
Peru	70,000
Mexico	50,000
Birmingham, USA	10,000

Colombia is reported to be about to buy 20,000 and Ghana is reported to be about to buy 10,000.

In addition, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia, Afghanistan have approx 5,000 XOs each provided by the Give1-Get1 program.

So far, the governments which have purchased large quantities (not just pilots and not recipients of the G1G1 – Give one, Get one - scheme) of XO’s are Uruguay, Peru and Mexico.

These Latin American countries are not the poorest in the world. Many African countries are the poorest along with some Asian countries. These countries are roughly 5-10x poorer than those which have actually purchased the OLPC

Each OLPC or XO costs about $180 per person. The Total Cost of Ownership is higher and has been estimated at about $450 over a five year period (disputed figure)

Apart from OLPC, other possible information technologies come to mind for poor countries, which are being used for education:

OMPT (one media player per teacher) - One portable media player with speakers and power source costs as little as $50. This small cost can change a classroom of 40 or 50 individual lives

Mobile phones - for example, see the MobileED project

Telecenters - "I found computers in all the centers, but bicycles, books, cell phones, community radio stations, and video tapes were also used to obtain and share information" (olpc-news article by Robert Kozma)

Internet Kiosks - A day in the life of a village kiosk operator in India

I am not suggesting that the OLPC is not a great technology for the poor children of the world. They need personal computers for maximum benefit. But due to the economic bottom line for some countries at the moment it is too much to expect that they will get there without assistance. Also we need to consider transition technologies like the above to bridge the gap.

Another related issue is the best method(s) of electricity generation for poor countries. This is held over for another article.

Reference / Footnotes:

[1] Gapminder provides some great visual representations of dry statistic

[2] OLPC Community News attachment, July 6, 2008 shows a graph of deployments at that time

[3] OLPC:News provides regular information about deployments

stop the band-aid

Why some forms of aid are bad for poor African countries:
(Spiegel interview with Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati)

• welfare bureaucracies are financed
• corruption develops
  
• creates a dependence, beggar mentality
• weakens local markets
• dampens spirit of entrepreneurship
• food grants undermine local farmers
• inhibits trade between African countries

Might be better to support the OLPC give one, get one initiative

the india hole in the wall experiment

What can we learn from the india hole in the wall experiment, conducted by Sugata Mitra?

That children, aged 6 to 12, including poor children with little education, can quickly teach themselves the basics of computer literacy, without any adult help whatsoever

What basic computer literacy did they learn?

• Ability to use the mouse, to point, to drag to drop
• How to draw, eg. with MS Paint
• How to browse the Internet, to find things of interest to them

The key thing for this to work is that teachers and other adults get out of the way. "Minimally invasive education". Curious kids can train themselves to operate a computer at a basic level


Therefore if we can provide computer access to these kids then to teach them these basic skills is a waste of teacher time and money. They can do it themselves!

Then teacher time can be freed up for more important things, such as Alan Kay's list of non universals:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony (?)
• similarities over differences (?)
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

Children will learn the computer basics in this way. But not adults.

Doesn't this show that Negroponte's OLPC idea of levering the children to speed things up in developing countries is a good idea, that up to a point it will speed things up:

It's about levering the children themselves. Children are extraordinary - we don't give children enough credit for what they can do. I mean, we all know when your cell phone breaks you give it to a 12 year old, when you don't know how to use your laptop you ask your kid. We all know that! And yet we sort of think that they have to, after the age of 6, stop learning by doing and learn by being told.

And, in the best of situations, a child in the developing world is in a classroom 2 1/2 hours a day, five days a week, which averages a lot less than 2 hours a day over the week. So, even if you make that experience better, you're only dealing with a small part of the problem. So what we did, we said to ourselves: "How can we actually leverage the child for a lot bigger part of the day, and do something particularly for the poor children in remote parts of the developing world?" And we set to do what we call the "$100 Laptop"
- Negroponte: "levering the children"