Yogi Berra was right, It’s like deja vu all over again. Marc Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz links to a dogfight between the Fordham Institute, Robert Slavin, and the federal government over a funding cut to the Reading First program, a major mess. See Gary Stager’s summary of the report by the Inspector Generals’ office, in case you forgot what it was all about. Were specific reading programs promoted by government officials with conflicts of interest? And are those programs responsible for raising test scores?
One of the enduring accomplishments of the Bush administration’s education policy is that they’ve propagated a belief in a so-called “science of reading” which is not based in science at all. Ken Goodman counted 120 repetitions of the phrase, “scientifically based research” in the No Child Left Behind law, commenting:
…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.
Having a legally encoded “science of reading” matters to publishers because it makes some programs more attractive to consumers, as it eliminates the competition by taking many programs off the shelf entirely. And the very mention of “scientific” research is a redundancy that should make people wonder, as Goodman does, “Isn’t research by definition scientific?”
Joanne Yatvin, a member of the National Reading Panel, the people who defined the science of reading, published a revealing tale about how she came to write her minority report in response to the panel’s conclusions. In it, she described the reading panel’s decision-making process, and how they came to use a hierarchy of skills model to define reading. I’d long assumed that an investigative process led the panelists toward this definition. But Yatvin reports otherwise:
All the scientist members held the same general view of the reading process. With no powerful voices from other philosophical camps on the panel, it was easy for this majority to believe that theirs was the only legitimate view.
Without debate, the panel accepted as the basis for its investigations a model composed of a three-part hierarchy: decoding, fluency, and comprehension.
She observed, “For scientists to take such a quick and unequivocal stance was disturbing, since there are two other models of reading that currently claim legitimacy, each with numerous adherents.” She mentioned a psycholinguistic model, and a simple decoding model that were never considered. Yatvin claims that the panel’s report, the basis Reading First program selections, was hurriedly thrown together and “carelessly read and misinterpreted on a grand scale” by journalists and policy advocates who claimed that 100,000 studies were analyzed when the real number was actually 38. For a critique of the research methodology see Elaine Garan’s Beyond Smoke and Mirrors.
What brings this all forward from me at the moment is Lou Anne Sears’ Short History of United States Reading Research. It’s a paper I found on the International Reading Association’s new History of Literacy site, and it reminds me that this debate is not going away any time soon, if history is any indication. The science of reading is not a new idea. Remember Thorndike, the father of psychological testing? We’ve been at this for a century. The difference now is that one segment of the publishing industry has a regulatory edge over the competition.
People should give some thought to the idea that science is built on inquiry, not settled opinion.
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Doug,
Just yesterday, the President released the Final Report of the President’s National Math Panel. It promises to do for more math what the Reading First stuff did for reading and fraud.
The report’s recommendations are a train wreck, but I imagine that few people will object since we are a nation of mathphobes.
The President of NCTM sold his soul to the devil by being on the panel and now the NCTM’s criticism (if any) will likely to be dampened.
Despite the report’s criticism of calculators (can you imagine?) I suspect that the Halliburton of Math Education (TI) still will find a way to profit.
More fun to look forward to. I appreciate your recommendation of Thomas C. Obrien’s Parrot Math as a warm-up. Good article.
Talk about deja vu, I attended a two day reading workshop years ago by Ken Goodman and his wife. It was one of those sessions that has really stuck with me. Thanks for the links.
In Virginia, urban high-poverty Richmond adopted a “science-based” reading and math programs in 2001. The county where I taught, wealthy Fairfax, did not, and refused to participate in Reading First.
This year, on the state 5th grade reading tests, the passing rate for Richmond black children was 8% below Fairfax white children. The gap between Fairfax black children and Fairfax white children was 19% — more than double the Richmond gap.
Overall, in 5th grade reading, 88% passed the 5ht grade reading test in both Richmond and Fairfax. The urban district tied one of the wealthiest districts in the nation.
In 5th grade math, the passing rate for Richmond black children was 3% below Fairfax white children. The gap between Fairfax black children and Fairfax white children was 18% — more than six times the Richmond gap.
Richmond adopted reading programs recommended by the National Institutes of Heath, the instititution that has made the quality of American medicine the envy of the world. Is it any surprise that scientific studies can help avoid difficulties learning to read?
On this issue, what does the DATA say? And what is the impact on children, especially poor children? Isn’t that what counts?
Rick, I don’t know why poor children have any more claim to sound education practices than anyone else, but I will acknowledge that they have fewer out-of-school resources to fall back on. It is a mistake to assume that a public health model, however effective in a medical context, will also apply to educational practice. Reading programs are not “treatments” for social and economic problems, and cultural differences.
Stephen Krashen addressed the Richmond/Fairfax situation. I don’t know about the more recent test scores. It is tempting to compare the two sets of results, as if this was a scientific experiment, but the samples may not have been sufficiently equivalent, and other non-obvious variables may also be present.
For some DATA that I am more personally familiar with: My own school has not applied for Reading First grant money, though we are a Title I school. Language Arts scores for “economically disadvantaged” students improved over the last two years from 59% to 73% making AYP. African American students’ scores improved from 60% to 86% proficient. The school as a whole moved from 74% to 80% proficient for Language Arts. Despite our test score improvements, our “students with disabilities” continue to lag.
There’s no magic in any program or set of materials. Furthermore, all of these DATA are simply standardized test scores, which are highly suspect as indicators of real learning, IMO. I do believe that we have to do a better job of teaching reading, but I don’t see cookbook solutions as the best way to make that happen. Better teacher training would be my first choice. And unfortunately, packaged programs lead in exactly the opposite direction, away from broadening the professional repertoire.
And still, this doesn’t address my larger point, that there is no real science of reading. The foundation of Reading First, the “building blocks theory” of reading, is based on assumptions that were NOT the result of a scientific inquiry.
Here’s Krashen, from the same source linked to above:
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