A NYT article, In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash inspired dozens of blog posts. Many of them challenge the article’s bias and the author’s uncritical acceptance of the school administration’s claims of efficacy for their program.

Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, defended the Madison schools, saying that the National Reading Panel report shows only minor benefits from phonics for K-1, that it lends no strong support for one style of instruction, and that an early phonics instructional emphasis has not been shown to improve comprehension for older students.

“This revisionist history of what the research says is wildly popular,” Dr. Allington said. “But it’s the main reason why so much of the reading community has largely rejected the National Reading Panel report and this large-scale vision of what an effective reading program looks like.”

The article also spawned a series of responses in EducationNews.org from Reid Lyon, Bob Sweet, Linnea Ehri, Timothy Shanahan, Mark Seidenberg, and Louisa Moats, who all try to “set the record straight.”

Lyon and Sweet make it clear that by law, eligible programs must include “explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension strategies.”

The comment by Louisa Moats took aim directly at Allington, insisting that,

Like the issue of global warming, there is no scientific debate about whether children benefit from direct instruction in how the alphabetic code of English represents speech. There is, in contrast, plenty of evidence that teaching children to guess at words through context and pictures is, indeed, malpractice, and that most poor readers fall by the wayside early because no one is teaching them how to read. Richard Allington, who was quoted in opposition to Reading First, has no credentials as a researcher or scientist. He and the “reading community” to which he refers have perpetuated myths and ineffective practices associated with Whole Language for decades.

No scientific debate? No credentials as a researcher? Malpractice?

Why does Moats so casually dismiss Richard Allington’s qualifications to offer criticism? Could it be that he published a critical rebuttal to her recent Whole Language High Jinks attack on “non-scientifically” based research programs? (The use of scare quotes around these phrases seems impossible to avoid in this discussion.)

Allington accused Moats of exaggerating the link between systematic phonics instruction and reading achievement reported by the National Reading Panel, ignoring research that contradicts her point of view, and recommending commercial reading packages developed by her employer. Schools Matter also took a jab at her report.

The NYT article and ensuing discussions serve as an example of the rhetoric around the reading wars, which has escalated now with the development of an allegedly scientific, and subsequently legal, standard for reading programs. Though it originated as a device for reviewing grant applications, this standard appears tempting for school critics to use as a litmus test for teacher professionalism.

Timothy Shanahan understood this in 1999, when the National Reading Panel was formed:

The fundamental idea behind the federal government’s establishment of a review panel is something along these lines: A major controversy is compromising the commonweal (in this case, children are not being taught to read as well as they should be) and undermining public confidence (i.e., trust in schools is declining). To ensure a reasonable standard of quality and to protect respect for public institutions and professions, an authoritative group is appointed to carry out an objective review of the research and to decide upon a standard of practice. The federal government then endorses this standard and benefits are provided to those whose professional practice is consonant with it.

Shanahan went on to make a comparison with Medicare, which will only pay for standard treatments, pointing out that review panels such as this are unprecedented in education. He also said that he didn’t know, at the time, how the NRP findings would be used, or even what those findings would be. As it turns out, though, we are hearing the adjectives evidence-based and scientifically-based, being linked to curricula, and educational decision-making, and when they are coupled with medical metaphors and accusations of malpractice, I feel a bit queasy because it sounds like a prescription for an end to inquiry, as Moats would apparently have it. The medical metaphor is a dangerous one to apply to education, I believe.

In 1998, Ken Goodman rhetorically asked, Why Reading?

Why is so much effort, heat, anger, and venom poured into arcane issues of how kids learn to read?…
1. Reading has always been a hot-button issue. It has a proven track record of scaring parents into electing board members who support back-to-basics campaigns….
2. Political campaigns need to paint everything in black and white as good versus bad….
3. A successful reading campaign could be a vehicle for developing a blueprint for a campaign to control education at all levels through national law, an objective heretofore seemingly impossible under the constitution.

He goes on to say that “reforming” won’t stop at reading, and that math would be next. He was right. See the National Mathematics Advisory Panel site.

This blog post could be so much longer. Over the past week I’ve dug back into the NRP findings and dozens of journal articles to learn what the report did and did not say. It’s important, I think, because public schools not only serve a public but they also create a public. The politics of education seems distant, though it speaks to us and though us constantly.

Just what did the National Reading Panel say? What is evidence-based reading research? What effect do metaphors have on teaching? I’ll try to deal with those questions each in turn in my next few entries. But, right now, report cards demand my attention.