Borderland

Dissent Magazine kicks off a series of articles on education with this one from Susan Harman and Deborah Meier:

No matter what the question is, these alarmists have the answer. Why is the economy in bad shape? Look at the lousy math scores of U.S. students in the international competitions. Why are so many young African-Americans and Latinos in prison? They didn’t learn how to read in school. Why do poor and minority children score so much lower on tests than better-off white children (the notorious “achievement gap”)? Teachers are engaging in the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and have allowed some students to fail to meet high standards without any consequences.

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In these pages, we intend to connect the dots between the many pieces of research and demonstrate that the educational crisis is not what the public has been led to think it is, that there is virtually no research that supports ongoing corporate and federal policies, that the media has been irresponsible and complicit in hiding the truth, that the proposed solutions are unsupported and dangerous, and that the devastating consequences we are now seeing are not “unintended.” To the contrary, these radical reforms were intended by a powerful, well-funded wing of the reform agenda to dismantle our public education system and replace it with precisely the kind of marketplace reforms that are by their nature untrustworthy and unaccountable. We hope these articles will mobilize policymakers and citizens to join us in resisting this attack on our public education system and democracy.

Have a look at Stephen Krashen’s article on Reading First, in which he cites Elain Garan’s article, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, among other things, to support his contention that Reading First was flawed at its (pseudo)scientific foundations. Garan challenges the background of the panel members, the methodology, and the research base they relied on in determining “the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” Anyone interested in the roots of Reading First and NCLB should read what she had to say.

Jim Trelease provides background on Garan’s critiqe, and explains that the National Reading Panel did not actually write the Summary Report, which was produced by a public relations firm with ties to McGraw-Hill/Open Court, and differs in some respects from the full report. In her Minority View, found in the appendix of the Reports of the Subgroups, Garan explained why she sees the panel’s conclusions as being unbalanced:

Congress did not realize—and the Panel itself did not fully comprehend at the beginning of its labors—how large, uneven, and intractable the field of reading research really is. The Panel’s preliminary electronic searches of databases uncovered thousands of articles on some topics, hundreds on others, only a handful on some. Their completed reviews on several topics disclosed that the critical question of generalizability (i.e., Does a skill or strategy taught and learned carry over to new experiences?) often was not answered by researchers. The reviews show, in addition, that questions relevant to the success of an instructional technique, such as “how much” to teach and “when,” were not even examined in most studies.

The issue of generalizability is key when you launch a nation-wide campaign. And questions about “how much” and “when” to teach various skills and strategies are of paramount interest to teachers with rooms full of kids with the usual range of interests and abilities.

Krashen argues that the real issue in improving instruction isn’t teaching kids how to decode isolated words, but rather, teaching them how to read complex texts. Part of the solution is encouraging recreational self-selected reading. Compare, he urges us, the $18.5 million available in grants to libraries with the $6 billion already spent on Reading First. But then, education policy reform isn’t really about education.