Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

So where does the Department of Education stand on reading? Well, if your are interested in this subject and have been paying attention just slightly then you have probably heard of Reading First. Reading First is the part of No Child Left Behind that adresses reading instruction. When looking at the Dept. of Eds website on Reading First you can not see specificly where the Federal Government stands on this issue (Phonics vs. Whole language) but by digging a little deeper I was able to see that there ais a part of Reading First called Early Reading First that says that one of the goals is:

To demonstrate language and literacy activities based on scientifically based reading research that support the age-appropriate development of
- Oral language (vocabulary, expressive language, listening comprehension)
- Phonological awareness (rhyming, blending, segmenting)
- Print awareness
- Alphabetic knowledge

I think it would be fairly safe to say that the Department of Education falls on the side of Phonics. In reading the Purpose for Reading First the phrase “scientifically based research” is mentioned 4 times in less then 10 paragraphs. I am a big believer in methodology and pedagogy being based on scientifically based research that leads to a convergance of evidence. Does Reading First’s stance on scientificly based research and the published position favoring Phonics mean that the phonics based approach is where the convergence of evidence leads. Sol Stern writes in City Journal:

To see clearly what’s at stake, we need to remind ourselves of the gravity of the national problem that Reading First seeks to solve—and of how it proposes to solve it. That essential context is missing from both the inspector general’s reports and much of the media commentary.

After a century and a half of universal public education, and despite the highest per-pupil expenditure on public elementary and secondary education in the world, 40 percent of U.S. fourth-graders are reading below the minimally acceptable level, according to the gold-standard NAEP test. For minority students in inner-city schools, the reading failure rate is a shocking 65 percent. This educational failure bodes ill: children who don’t read by fourth grade almost always fall behind in all other subjects, often wind up in costly special education programs, and, as adults, have higher rates of drug addiction, incarceration, and welfare dependency.

Making the situation more tragic, nineteenth-century American children learned to read very well, thank you, in one-room schoolhouses, with nothing more than a single determined teacher wielding Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and the McGuffey readers. Even before a public school system existed in America, Alexis de Tocqueville had marveled at the country’s extraordinarily high literacy rates.

Happily, recent developments point the way to a solution to the nation’s reading woes. For the past several decades, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a wing of the National Institutes of Health, has sponsored reading research at universities across the U.S, with scientists from cognitive neuroscience, pediatrics, genetics, educational psychology, and child development publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that describe not just how children learn to read but why so many fall behind—and how schools can best keep it from happening.

The converging scientific evidence confirms what our great-grandmothers knew intuitively. The most effective reading instruction for most children—especially for those from disadvantaged homes—begins by training them to recognize the relationship between letters and the sounds they make (phonemic awareness), moves on to teaching them how to sound out whole words (phonics), and then focuses on fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Reading science has also developed effective new technologies to assess students’ progress in mastering the skills they need to decode written language. To make an analogy with medical science, reading science has discovered not only the educational equivalent of treating diabetes but also the technology that monitors how the treatment is working.

Many people reading this will have the same questions I have as I investigate this issue. The first being, Does the whole language aproach have scientific based research backing it? The fact that phonics has some convergence does not mean that whole language does not or that phonics encommpasses all children. the second question being, While it might have evidence in research what are the field results or in other words are the rates of success as high when actually practiced in the some scientificly uncontrolled environment of the classroom. Sol Stern goes on to write:

Unfortunately, the similarities between reading science and the medical kind end there. A breakthrough in medical research soon leads to new clinical practice. In education, however, the science has collided head-on with the ideologies and economic interests of the panjandrums of public education.

Reading science is a mortal threat to what E. D. Hirsch has called the “Thoughtworld” of American education—the system of “progressive” beliefs about classroom instruction promulgated by the ed schools that monopolize teacher training. The Thoughtworld has a cult-like attachment to a Romantic theory of reading instruction called “whole language,” which recently morphed into “balanced literacy” to make it sound more reasonable to dubious parents. Balanced-literacy true believers claim that to subject children to the “drill and kill” of direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse.

The balanced-literacy cultists believe that learning to read is a natural process and that most children can intuit the alphabetic principle and the meaning of printed words with a little guidance from a teacher and through pleasant cooperative classroom activities such as “shared reading” and “reading circles.” Basically, this approach says that kids can learn to read by reading—by immersing themselves in print. And for some children from literate homes, where print and articulate conversation abound, this approach can work.

Progressive educators don’t cite scientific research to support their approach, however, because none exists—not one study based on randomized field trials. In 2002, the whole-language-dominated National Council of Teachers of English passed a resolution attacking Reading First for favoring only “one model” of science and called instead for “implementation of diverse kinds of scientific research, including teacher research.” Translation: teachers can evaluate instructional methods by observing their own classrooms, science be damned.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, recently surveyed ed schools and found that 85 percent of their elementary education classes don’t teach the principles of phonics and scientific reading instruction. “The resistance from many educators to [teaching phonics] has been palpable,” the report concluded. Of course, interests other than pedagogical are at stake. If a major shift occurred in teaching methodologies, tenured jobs and professional development contracts from the $500 billion-plus education industry would suddenly be up for grabs.

Such was the state of affairs when NICHD’s chief reading scientist, Reid Lyon, and House education committee staffer Robert Sweet drafted the Reading First legislation, early in 2001. Lyon had just become President Bush’s informal advisor on reading instruction, while Sweet was a former teacher and longtime advocate for science-based reading programs. With the president’s encouragement, Lyon and Sweet consciously designed Reading First to do an end run around the deeply entrenched whole-language movement.

“We knew we were battling a culture of intellectual corruption and hostility to science in the education industry, and we had limited weapons to use effectively against it,” recalls Sweet. “Reading First was created to be a catalyst, to provide a financial incentive for schools finally to start doing the right thing for the millions of kids left behind in reading.” You could say that Reading First was a $6 billion federal bribe to get districts to do what they really should have been doing already.

Getting the program enacted required walking a political tightrope between Republicans wary of federal interference in local decisions and Democrats who liked spending more federal education dollars, but with no questions asked. Compromising, the Reading First legislation abandoned the idea of requiring participating districts to use only scientifically tested reading programs. Instead, districts could also use untested ones, as long as they adhered to the principles of scientific reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

It wasn’t everything Lyon and Sweet wanted, but it was enough—or so they hoped. The two reformers bet that a critical mass of schools would sign on and implement the general principles of reading science, which would then produce evidence that this instructional method was lifting achievement in previously struggling schools. Such a real-life demonstration, they believed, would ignite a countercultural education movement of teachers, parents, administrators, and education activists who would spread the Reading First gospel.

Four years later, the evidence is starting to come in. More than 5,600 schools in 1,700 school districts nationwide have received Reading First grants. The participation level is impressive in itself. It means that state education agencies and a large number of districts have pledged (in writing) to use Reading First grants exclusively to teach according to the principles of Scientifically Based Reading Research—a phrase that appears so often in the legislation that it has become an acronym, SBRR. So unless officials are lying and just grabbing the money, we now have a critical mass of educators willing to try the pro-science side of the reading wars.

We also know that 100,000 K–3 teachers are receiving training and continuous professional development in reading science. That represents a critical mass, too—one that takes on even greater significance if the Reading First teachers appear to be improving the academic performance of their low-income, at-risk students. Reading First has pulled off something of a coup just in removing all these early-childhood teachers from the ed schools’ ideological orbit.

A comprehensive study by an outside evaluator will appear in 2007, measuring Reading First’s influence on student achievement nationally. But some states and districts are already seeing significant improvement. When the relevant congressional committees hold hearings on NCLB reauthorization, they might start by looking to neighboring Virginia, where they’ll discover a dramatic example of Reading First’s power. With apologies to Dickens, we might call it a tale of two school districts—one welcoming Reading First, the other disdaining it.

The first, Richmond, offers a classic profile of an inner-city school district. Of its 25,000 students, 95 percent are black, more than 70 percent are poor enough to be in the free-lunch program, and 44 percent change schools during the year. Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.

But 2001 is also when Richmond school officials embarked on an ambitious reform, whose centerpiece was a standardized reading program based on evidence from the NICHD studies. By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.

Since then, Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.

While this is just one person writing from a standpoint of support for the Dept. of Ed.’s program we have to admit he sites bases for his support. Many will say that Reading First’s recent political scandal taints anything it supports the facts are that the methodology of phonics is supported by a convergence of evidence despite any flaws it might have. With out making any judgements on whole language i think I can at least answer some questions I had at this point. A phonics based approach does work and that if applied correctly can improve results for many children in most situations.

This Bush Education Reform Really Works
By Sol Stern
City Journal
Winter 2007

Reading First Web Site