Borderland

Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:

…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are completely lost on me.

Stephen Downes comments on the paper that lead Tom to this site:

I don’t think that some of the solutions that seem obvious – like pooling buying power and research – are necessarily the best way to go, because such ‘big’ solutions tend to impose a uniformity on the system that is not healthy (and is endlessly subject to politics and manipulation).

To make sense here, we need to distinguish between the curriculum development process and the product, because as both Tom and Stephen point out, philosophy and politics are at the heart of the matter. Tom invited comment on the content of the site, and I’ll offer mine. I’d probably give it anyway, since the politics of this is worth discussing.

Tom’s example is, maybe, unfortunate in that it points to a decidedly non-progressive vision for reading curriculum. The “Reading Wars” are an ideological battle about whether students are best served by a word level, or a holistic approach to making meaning. It’s boiled down over the years to different camps trying to promote their own research base, and to discredit the other’s. The reason why the term, “scientifically based reading research” has entered the educational lexicon is to bolster claims of efficacy for one particular approach. Of course, we should understand what ‘scientific’ means in this context.

Ken Goodman:

…the phrase “Scientifically Based Reading Research” was put into NCLB over and over as a code phrase for a particular view of reading instruction advocated by a small group centered at the University of Oregon around Distarr, a forty year old behavioral synthetic phonics reading program originally authored by Sigfried Engelmann. Under its current publisher McGraw Hill it became Direct Instruction Reading. Douglas Carnine, a U of Oregon professor and Direct Instruction author, coined the phrase, Scientifically Based Reading Research, first in the so-called “reading wars.”

The research base that Tom pointed to represents a strongly cognitivist / behavioral philosophy toward early reading instruction, which appeals to the direct instruction advocates. Some of the researchers whose work is cited, including Carnine, have also been named as players in the Reading First controversy, which is as much about money as ideology.

Stephen’s comment about solutions that “tend to impose uniformity on the system” applies in this case, since these folks have apparently helped to narrow the definition of reading research in order to eliminate alternative opinions about whose evidence carries the most weight.

I get suspicious I hear phrases like: “The research on how students learn to read is well-established,” or “The research on which instructional techniques work is well-understood.” because claims like that are meant to silence discussion about the philosophical differences at the heart of the “Reading Wars.” My answer to the question about why they developed this company is just a guess. But I suppose it’s to make money marketing instructional materials that draw on that research base.

I’m sure Tom didn’t want a bunch of grief about his example. Putting my criticisms of the free-reading.net project aside, I agree with him that curriculum development has to happen around some agreement on first principles. I’ve done curriculum development work with the school district here, and we never start from scratch. But we also don’t usually talk about the philosophical base for the research that informs it. These days, everything points back to test scores. Ideally, we’d have several prominent examples to work from, reflecting a variety of philosophical viewpoints. A curriculum, like software, is designed for a purpose, and asking what it does is just as important as knowing whether it works.

Doing that kind of work in support of progressive principles, home-grown for public school consumption, would be a great project. But it would have to leave space for public buy-in so that it stood a chance of being implemented without fighting yet another battle in the Reading Wars. I wonder if that could even happen.