Nancy Bailey reflects on the sudden upsurge in concern about reading instruction and what might be behind it.
I share her reaction to the latest “crisis in reading” because I wrote a book in 2000 (“Left Back”) that traced controversies over reading instruction back to the 19th century, to Horace Mann’s day. The big “CRISIS” was in the 1950s when Rudolph Flesch wrote “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (not enough phonics, too much Dick-and-Jane and whole-word), through the National Reading Panel, Reading First, etc.
It is a wonder that anyone can actually read anything. But Nancy says we can do more without attacking teachers and ed schools. For sure, TFA doesn’t know how to teach reading in the five weeks of preparation they get.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Most students learn to read by enjoying reading. Most students do not require endless phonic drills that bore students to tears. However, there are some students that require a different approach than others. Some poor students and a few poor ELLs are in this category, and they may meet success through a visual motor program like Orton Gillingham or Fernald, but this is small group of students. Students that require this type of instruction are generally the ones that eventually become classified. With poor students that lack a literate foundation, it is important to distinguish between those that are “hard to start” due to lack of exposure that those that truly have a neurological deficit. This is where it is important to have well trained professionals so that poor students do not end up being over classified.
Most teacher education programs do not prepare teachers to be reading specialists. While this is true, in order to better help my ELLs, I went back to school to be certified as a reading teacher. As a result, I had more tools with which to help struggling readers. I also had several ESL student teachers, and I worked with the college to at least offer one mandatory course in the teaching of reading for students that were planning to teacher ESL in public schools. I always aimed to figure out what students needed, taught them what they needed, and didn’t waste time on what students didn’t need.
Understanding how different people learn is a key element in teaching reading. Observing students provides teacher with lots of useful insights. Every lesson should include opportunities for students to read, write and gain exposure to literature, not just “barking at sounds” that is typical of lots of phonics programs. The ultimate goal is to produce independent readers that enjoy reading and know how to think.
Thank you, Diane. I fear the reading issue is being used to attack career teachers and their ed. schools. Look who’s mentioned in the Chalkbeat’s criticism of the ed. school’s reading program at U of Northern Colorado. Stand for Children!
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2019/03/14/concerned-about-reading-instruction-state-cracks-down-on-teacher-prep-programs-starting-with-colorados-largest/
exactly happening
Of course, Stand ON Children
The article is a good illustration of the issues raised in your post. Alarms are sounded by CO dept of ed: less than 1/2 the state’s children read at grade level on ave, & the % is far lower for poor and minority kids. The tone suggests things are getting worse. But when you trace back the article’s links, the “decline” is a result of upping the stds bar & tying it to PAARC tests. They admit they can’t actually compare previous results, due to the change. Then they complain that improvements over the subsequent 3 yrs are too small [no doubt the stats just reflect folks getting used to the new yardstick]. That’s used to declare failure & justify w/holding $33million in READ funds until new legislation ties teacher-prep programs to “science-based” reading methods.
As support, a teacher survey on how well their ed prepared them to teach reading. Only 70 responded. The negative feedback cited is mostly from retired & veteran teachers; surely ed-prep has evolved. Looks to me like these responses were quoted because they reflect the current push to dredge up whole-lang vs phonics.
Meanwhile the article notes in 2018, jrs took PSAT instead of PAARC – so that part of results can’t be used to support thesis. As for 3-8, whose so-called failing results cannot be compared to anything before 2015: next yr, they will switch from PAARC to new state-devpd literacy tests!
Precisely. Peruse the standards and sample test items; any sentient adult will quickly realize that CC tests (even the re-brands) do not actually test reading comprehension as joe or jane public imagine it. Bad standards = Bad tests = Misleading data.
The time has come to reject all ELA testing as it is currently constituted. Subjective, “grade level” reading and writing skills absolutely cannot be measured objectively. This fool’s (David Coleman) errand needs to end.
Exactly. Arne was on Twitter recently bashing colleges of education. States like TN continue to use Microsoft’s stacked ranking system to rate University colleges of education.The scores are based on each school’s graduates’ TVASS scores once in their classrooms and a few other factors thrown in to assure TFA receives the highest scores every year.
Privatizing higher ed is the goal & it’s going to start by shutting down colleges of education.
We need to UNDO the Damage of NCLB and Race to the Top. That should be every teacher’s slogan- UNDO THE DAMAGE.
Nancy Bailey hits the nail on the head: “since IDEA reauthorizations, parents see resource classes as unacceptable and want their children [with special needs] in general classes which are much too large for individualized instruction. They want all children to get remedial reading (intensive reading instruction) but not all children need it.”
The biggest elephant in the room, however, is mandatory, annual standardized testing at nearly every grade level with public reporting of scores “below proficient”, and the general public still believing that “proficiency” is the equivalent of ‘literacy’. Privatization investors want the public to think there exists a crisis, and the tests feed the frenzy. They also tend to point to foreign boogeymen like China to add to the Sputnik moment fears.
The term “reading” is often used imprecisely. It’s actually two things: decoding, on the one hand, and comprehension on the other. I have no idea if we’re teaching the former well these days, but based on observing my own 7th grade students and talking to myriad teachers at all levels I do think we’re doing a bad job at the latter. That’s because most teachers (and teacher educators) don’t understand that comprehension is mostly a function of background knowledge. The kids with the most background knowledge are invariably the best readers (unless they have some disability). So to teach comprehension, we must teach content –that’s the time-tested way of giving kids background knowledge from realms outside their immediate experience (think glaciers and legislation). But instead of this we vainly attempt to teach comprehension as if it’s a teachable skill. It’s not. We confuse ourselves with our verbiage. Not everything we label a skill is a skill. We can say there’s such a thing as “Joke Comprehension Skill” and try to teach it in Joke Comprehension class. Do you see the error here? There is no discrete skill that enables one to understand all jokes. The only way to arm oneself to understand jokes is to learn about the world that jokes are about. It’s the same with reading comprehension. Failure to understand this is why reading intervention classes produce such disappointing results. They’re a byword for futility in our district. And it’s why Common Core isn’t working. Common Core operates on the assumption that reading comprehension emerges from doing close reading on random texts, as if some muscle in the brain will enlarge through all this rigorous activity. It’s the same “reading is a skill” fallacy. To produce good readers we must enlarge kids’ funds of background knowledge. Teaching content is teaching reading.
You make some interesting points. But I think most good reading teachers understand the difference between decoding and comprehension. Perhaps the problems stem from Common Core.
Nancy,
Do you understand my point about the futility of trying to teach reading comprehension directly? Texts are about the world (just like jokes are about the world), therefore the only truly effective way to prepare kids to comprehend texts is to teach them about the world (via teacher talk in the early years and then gradually shifting to a mix of teacher talk and reading texts that are within kids’ grasp). Only by prior learning about, say, cricket, can one gain the background knowledge necessary to comprehend a newspaper article about cricket. This is E.D. Hirsch’s central, revolutionary and brilliant insight and it worries me that it hasn’t been fully digested by you and other leading intellectuals in the education community. Are Hirsch and I wrong –is there is a teachable general “reading comprehension skill” that will unlock the meaning of any text one might encounter regardless of what background knowledge resides in one’s head?
I disagree about “content knowledge”. I also can’t tell if you are talking about teaching students how to read — and by that I mean that a student can pick up a chapter book like Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (a Newbury winner) and read it and understand what is happening in the story.
I have experienced a lot of nonsense where poorly trained teachers claim a child doesn’t “comprehend” but just “decodes” because that child doesn’t understand the nuances between what is happening with the parents and their relationship with their children and with each other and perhaps their economic struggles.
That isn’t about “fact knowledge”. It is about growing up and learning about the world.
“Only by prior learning about, say, cricket, can one gain the background knowledge necessary to comprehend a newspaper article about cricket.” That sounds wrong to me.
There are newspaper articles about cricket that assume that the reader doesn’t understand cricket and articles written for people who have a lot of prior knowledge about cricket.
I assume my kid knows almost nothing about Dante. Nonetheless, my kid is a good reader who could read about Dante written for people that doesn’t assume prior knowledge.
Isn’t that how adults learn things? We read general articles about ideas and perhaps about whether or not we should expand or privatize medicare and many of them assume no prior information and others do not.
Here is a good example. I like to read Paul Krugman about economics when he assumes the reader has very little “knowledge” about pure economics. But sometimes he (on his blog) will write something for academics and try as I might, I can’t really comprehend the argument. But in the back of my mind, I feel relatively confident that if I really spent enough time and effort learning about the background economics he refers to in those posts for academics I could understand what he is saying better. But I don’t want to make that effort.
On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoy reading his “written for laymen” columns.
^^just realized you were having an interesting discussion with Nancy Bailey herself so I apologize for inserting this comment here.
NYC Parent:
You make some good points here.
If all texts were pitched to novices, there would be no reading comprehension crisis: the basic “starter kit” of world and word knowledge that every kid possesses would suffice. Young adult fiction does not assume much prior world knowledge; ergo, most kids can understand it. The problem is that most texts DO assume some prior knowledge in the reader. Krugman’s columns, even the non-wonky ones, assume a vast amount of knowledge that my seventh graders (and, frightfully, many adults) do not yet possess. Invisibly, imperceptibly, you and I, have accumulated a Mt. Everest of knowledge in our heads –from our daily reading of the New York Times alone! –that most of our fellow citizens do not possess (though many of them possess bodies of knowledge –e.g. about fishing or plumbing –that I don’t possess and that make them better readers of texts on fishing or plumbing). She who has the most general knowledge is the best reader in general. The best readers of economics, on the other hand, is she who possesses the PhD in economics. To make good readers, schools need to impart general knowledge –there is no short cut.
Ponderosa,
I didn’t get that core knowledge in elementary, middle or high school (where only American history was taught and I thought the idea of “European” history sounded so intellectual and the idea that there was a world beyond America and Europe whose history I could study was completely beyond my grasp.) I did love to read fiction and sometimes picked up some knowledge about history from that, but relatively little. I had no idea what the difference between Marxism and Socialism was until sophomore year at college.
I thought I was being taught what I needed to know in high school and in fact, I was. I learned how to learn and how to write. Those were the main skills I needed for college and life. (Along with basic math and science, I should add, although very little science!)
I was an excellent student in high school and got high standardized test scores but I wasn’t curious or engaged. Learning more facts in high school would not have engaged me. Even in a great liberal arts college, I look back and see I only thought I was engaged and missed so many opportunities. I’d love to do my four years now (or perhaps when I was 30) when I would have gotten so much more out of the experience. I still appreciate what I learned in college, but I also see how much more I learned AFTER college, on my own, reading what I was interested in reading. Overall, the most important thing I learned in college was how to question and challenge ideas in books, something I never even considered throughout high school. And how to defend my own opinions, although the writing I learned in high school gave me that foundation. (Disclaimer: please don’t blame my high school or college if you hate my posts as that’s my fault alone).
Learning is lifelong and I think teaching kids how to think and giving them the skills to be engaged — even if they don’t use them until later -is more important than the “core knowledge” which becomes so debatable as to what that should include. My core knowledge of European, Asian, African and every other continent’s history is still awful. Maybe that means I am not as good of a world citizen as I should be. But I think the typical high school curriculum includes a lot of core knowledge and blaming that for why people believe fake facts is not really fair.
Too many people believe the lies of people like Trump and Republicans because they want to because of their values — not their knowledge. And lots of people know Trump is phony and a liar even if they would perform poorly on a test of “core knowledge”.
NYC:
You offer a lot to unpack; this is my unpolished and incomplete first go at it:
I suspect your parents gave you a robust “starter kit” of world knowledge that helped you become the good reader you were (mine did). Many kids don’t get this. And sadly many schools are no longer in the business of giving knowledge to these deprived kids (our public schools may not have been that great at it when we were kids either, but what we got at home compensated for this failure; other kids aren’t as lucky). Today’s schools are about practicing “skills”, especially ostensible reading skills. Many kids go through 12 years of this and then flunk college because they can’t understand the texts. Something’s not working.
You say a skills education is more valuable. But look carefully –what IS the “skill” of reading? What IS the “skill” of writing? What is it, really, that makes you a good writer? This is a thornier question than many realize. I would argue that the punctuation lessons and essay writing practice we got in HS were helpful, but that other factors may be equally or more important. One such factor is world knowledge. The more one knows, the easier it is to write (it’s very hard to write about what one doesn’t know). And vocabulary size is another factor. Where does advanced vocabulary come from? Exposure to wide realms of knowledge –orally and in print. Another factor is exposure to books, magazines, newspapers, poetry –one gains mental templates for writing from these. Thus knowledge, gained invisibly from sources outside writing class, gives the core capacity for writing, just as it does for reading.
In college you say you learned how to challenge an author and how to argue. It seems to me that the former is an important concept, but not one that takes four years to learn. And the latter –is it really a discrete skill? What did you make arguments about? Wasn’t learning the content well part and parcel of arguing well? And wasn’t prior learning part and parcel of your ability to acquire the new content? Are you now, as a result of your “argument education”, able to argue for a new method of training at the Ballanchine School of Ballet?
I have a hard time saying what exactly I got out of college, but I think it’s a very interesting question. My hunch is that we get lots of knowledge from college, but that it becomes invisible to us because it gets picked apart and seamlessly integrated into various knowledge schema in our brains. And it’s this knowledge that makes us better readers, writers and thinkers.
ponderosa,
I apologize because I think my post wasn’t clear (blame my education for poor communication skills!)
I don’t think a “skills education” is more valuable! That’s not what I meant at all!
I’m not a fan of buzzwords in education so I may understand “skills education” and “core knowledge” differently than you do.
I don’t think students need to know some agreed on number of facts, which I associate with “core knowledge”. I agree with you that the kind of learning you describe high school kids doing sounds terrible. Practicing reading “skills” is not education. I expect that high schoolers learn about science and history and math — not just reading skills. I do get your point because I do think students need a basic understanding about the timeline of historical events but not necessarily as something they need to memorize.
You asked an interesting question: “Are you now, as a result of your “argument education”, able to argue for a new method of training at the Balanchine School of Ballet?”
I’m not too interested in ballet and know almost nothing about it. However, if I was asked to offer my opinion on the subject, I would start learning about it. If I were a journalist writing a story, I’d first do some general reading about the Balanchine School and how they have historically trained ballet students, then I’d read about other ballet companies and see if anyone has written about new methods of training at ballet schools and/or Balanchine in particular. Once I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the issues,I’d try to talk to people who were experts in the subject to see if I was on track or if I had missed a big part of the story. Eventually I’d gain a lot of new knowledge about ballet training form an opinion and make an argument. And, if after I wrote the article, I got critical feedback about something I missed that rendered my opinion wrong, I’d want to check it out for myself and read more.
But I wouldn’t have that knowledge unless 1. there was a reason for me to have it or 2. I happened to read a good comprehensive story on ballet training that attracted my interest and then decided to to look for more to read just because the subject happened to engage me.
I think I agree with most of what you say. I don’t think that teaching kids how to learn is the same as “skills knowledge”. And I love the idea of introducing Dante to students although it could be a different poet or author, too. To me, it isn’t so much that it is Dante in particular, but that students realize that they can make connections between literature and other things. I had to read Hawthorne in high school and hated it but perhaps another student did. Does it matter whether it is Hawthorne or Chinua Achebe or someone else?
You still think you can divorce “background knowledge” from experience, when knowledge = experience. If I want you to understand something about some obscure subject you have no familiarity with or interest in, you’re just going to zone out and not learn a thing if I just start telling you about it. And you’re a full grown adult. Imagine how kids feel. There has to be some personal connection to a subject before kids are ready to learn it through direct instruction.
Dienne,
Any good teacher knows how to connect a new topic to kids’ preexisting interests. It’s not as hard as you think. What do my Latino 13 year old students care about a medieval poet named Dante? Well, he writes about teenagers sent to hell for the sin of lust (Paolo and Francesca); he writes about how slimy Don Juan seducers deserve even worse punishment than murderers; and he writes in Italian, which as I show the students, is shockingly similar to Spanish. When I show them the Italian on the big screen the Latino kids light up realizing they have a superpower that the other kids lack. Voila, kids have a new interest: medieval Italian poetry. This lesson, though it happened in a classroom, IS an experience. And in future lessons one can build upon this experience.
“When I show them the Italian on the big screen the Latino kids light up realizing they have a superpower that the other kids lack.”
Very cool.
Helping students make connections is an important element of comprehension. When you tap into that, it motivates students. Reading should always be on some level about meaning. Part of the problem with trying to teach decontextualized texts as in the Common Core is that it limits any connections students may make. I believe comprehension improves with reading whole texts accompanied sometimes by understanding history, art, politics, of the time etc. It enhances comprehension. This element is lacking if reading is presented as a test prep skill, and nothing more. Reading fiction should make students feel and think, and content is important.
If you take a book like The Outsiders, there’s no kid that doesn’t understand interactions, kindness, good and evil, conflict, poor choices. These concepts come out of experience and what the child brings to the story. It’s interactive. When teaching reading or “English” I never had to give much background knowledge for books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Comedy, or even Anne Frank. And when questions arose, like “What was going on in WWII that created Anne Frank’s situation?” Well, that’s what teachers are for. Every teacher needs to be a reading teacher. We need to teach kids how to read textbooks, as well, something I never knew how to do until my later years of teaching and that I see teachers doing all the time now. Teachers have more techniques at their disposal than ever before to teach reading. Join NCTE, ILA, NABE and search the internet.
Students do need to learn how to use textbooks. They need to know how to use the table of contents, the glossary, how to read maps, graphs, charts, picture clues diagrams and indices. These are all elements of reading non-fiction.
By the way, the IRA, the International Reading Association, currently known as the International Literacy Association, is a very useful resource for teachers.
Mary,
Being able to comprehend relatively easy contemporary fiction unfortunately does not necessarily indicate strong reading powers. To Kill a Mockingbird is popular in part because it’s intelligible to those who don’t have huge amounts of world and word knowledge. But the same reader who breezed through Mockingbird often stumbles when they encounter Dickens, Hawthorne, Origin of the Species, or college level texts. Orienting students to the features of a textbook is beneficial, but that’s fine tuning, not building the core capacity. The core capacity, that which does the heavy lifting of comprehension, is prior knowledge. Only with that can you recognize a sufficient number of words on the page to general a mental “situational model” and start inferring the meanings of the terms you don’t understand. Reseach shows that if you don’t recognize at least 90-95% of the words on the page, comprehension breaks down. To empower teens to go beyond Mockingbird, we need to build up their world knowledge.
cx: “generate” not “general”.
We’re talking about teaching students to read and Ponderosa here is talking about Dickens and Hawthorne. So I guess first graders should be well versed in obscure 18th century writing styles and obsolete words and phrases, along with the entire canon of Western history.
What could possibly go wrong?
Dienne,
Thank you for your response.
As you can see if you read carefully, I haven’t been talking about first graders. I’ve been speaking generally about improving reading comprehension in public school students. I’m sure you’d agree that our K-12 school system shouldn’t leave kids incapable of reading Hawthorn or any novelist of comparable difficulty. One of my main gripes with the current reading orthodoxy (Common Core) is that it forces first graders to do a grad school-level practice –close reading. A far better way to teach comprehension is for elementary schools to slowly and steadily build a foundation of world and word knowledge so that, when they get older, kids can comprehend complex texts with advanced vocabulary, don’t you think?
Ponderosa is sharing his success as a teacher – he’s getting middle schoolers to appreciate great works of literature – why would you twist the situation and criticize him so harshly?
Let’s support working teachers!
Retired teacher: Good luck to students “learning how to use textbooks” today, if the World Lang series in vogue are any example. They are a chaotic jumble of non-sequiturs and pop-ups. Just try to read a few pages, you’ll get a headache. My very smart tutee family was trying in vain to find info of a systemic nature from the 10th-gr French textbook. I found a used teacher’s edition on Amazon to help. Only there could you get a “map” of what a chapter covered. And complex maps they were, as each chapter raced around trying to hit listening/ speaking/ reading/ writing aspects of the snippets of grammar, syntax, vocab & idioms they’d decided to impart for now– until next chapter w/another obstacle course w/little connection to what went before.
BA,
I will never approve your nasty, anti-teacher comments.
Stop wasting your time writing them.
Closed Reading
Common Core
Come home to roost:
Reading bore
And reading ruse
Closed reading! How interesting. I forgot about it. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it!
Nice poem by the way.
Thanks.
And nice post.
We need more real skeptics like you and Diane
“… perhaps the problems stem from Common Core.”
There it is! The obsession with labels, data, rankings, right answers on the floor, more data, testing, and more data. And, that’s about teachers and kids.
Teacher data
Is the do now and objective on the board? Anchor charts on the wall? Check.
Is the pacing guide followed and daily lesson script recited? Check.
Are the children behaved and managed? Check.
Does the teacher “model” and kids “follow?” Check.
Did you give the exit ticket and formative assessments? Check.
Are the kids learning anything? Huh? Are the kids learning anything?
Yes. I taught your kid to swim. I’m sorry s/he drowned, but I taught it.
Reading and Right Answers – Whatever happened to…
Background knowledge.
Concepts.
Necessary vocabulary and terminology.
Concentration
Observe hundreds of classes.
Kids are doing the math, but do the understand the concepts?
They can read the words but no sense of meaning.
Students will get dozens of geometry problems correct, but ask if they know the meaning of perimeter or radius. No – but they get the right answer and that’s all the non-professional teacher cares about – right answers, staying on script and pace, and test scores.
And then there is TECHNOLOGY.
Have you seen a test on a screen? Have you taken a test on a screen?
Fonts are too small.
Columns are far too wide.
Light is just bad.
On and on.
Great points!
So many problems with the Chalkbeat article and the renewed reading wars. Hopefully the corporate backers won’t continue to win this one as the Chalkbeat article is chalk full of the corporate agenda.
I believe Richard Allington stated that about 3% of students will have an extremely hard time learning to read. I can’t say I even understand the term dyslexia. . . I get that some children have issues, BUT are we also creating the problem.
Programs like ortham gillingham won’t fix it. Qualified educators who have a strong background in reading theory will be the best at fixing the issue. It’s interesting that Reading Recovery isn’t listed as part of the solution. It’s a system that isn’t a program but an intensive process of educating reading teachers. And it’s been proven to work, but because it can’t be sold or marketed, it’s not mentioned. I’d encourage people to read Richard Allington’s “What really matter in Response to Intervention”
In the age of corporate reform in education, the biggest problem we have is a very sterile learning environment and a push to force kids to read when they are not ready. The READ act in Colorado is horrible. My middle child could have been a victim to that, but I refused to have her labeled. First of all, I refused to have her take the computerized tests that determine if a child has an issue. 2nd, I refused to have her labeled when the teacher saw she wasn’t reading at a certain pseudo level. They wanted to pull her out and do an extensive phonics program with an aide with no educational experience. But I refused. She was a young first grader, and is very very meaning based.
I was lucky to have some background in reading recovery and worked under amazing teachers. Instead I continued to let her read at her own pace with easy books she chose and wanted to read. I read out loud to her and her siblings every night and now as a fourth grader she is reading for meaning and understanding.
We have destroyed the purpose of reading in our schools by making reading fractured. Had she been in a system that valued play, and learning through discovery, I expect she would have been writing a lot in 1st grade and discovering letter sounds through this. Had she been able to dive into interest areas, she would have had a desire to understand how sounds work through reading.
Had I allowed her to be labeled, I firmly believe she would be labeled as dyslexic and not be a reader today. But because I allowed her to learn at her own pace, she is right where she needs to be as a learner. Her reading is fine. Now IF they just determined reading by how fast she read out loud, we’d have an issue or by how many multiple choice questions she can answer. Fortunately, they also have her respond and she’ nails that out of the ball park. Teachers are always telling me how strong her understanding of concepts are. . hmmmm. . isn’t that was reading is all about?
I worked with Allington when I served on a committee to do curriculum work for New York State. He was an advisor to our work, and he was a reading professor at SUNY Albany at the time. He was very helpful and insightful.
Chalkbeat has interesting articles but look at their funders.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/about/supporters/
Here is something that I assume all parents who have multiple children understand (and probably those who only have one and probably most sentient people who have none).
There IS no one way to teach reading. There are multiple ways to teach reading and whether or not a child responds to one way or another way or makes the huge leap in reading at 4 years old, 5 years old, 6 years old, or 7 years old or even later has NOTHING to do with whether he is rich, poor, middle class, white, Latinx, African-American, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim or anything else.
For the love of Pete, children are unique. Some — again it doesn’t matter what their background is — will learn with ANY method and others — again it doesn’t matter what their background is — will find it easier to read using one method or find some methods are useless and others somewhat helpful.
The fact that school reformers get paid a lot of money to come up with what they claim is the new miracle approach to reading and other people get paid a lot of money to market that to the public is appalling. And the very worst of these people get a lot of money to teach ONLY the kids who respond to that miracle method of instruction while characterizing the kids who don’t respond to that miracle method as “violent” because these reprehensible adults insist that the ONLY reason that the child isn’t learning is that they aren’t trying hard enough and are just “bad kids” — which makes them feel so horrible about themselves that they finally act out after non-stop humiliation and punishment for their “crime” of not trying hard enough. Because after all, they got that reading method that is fool-proof so it MUST be that the kid is bad. That is the “no excuses” charter method except they always give a pass to affluent kids who have college educated parents because they know they can’t get away with characterizing their kids as violent they way they far too often do when the kid is poor and especially African-American. What a nasty bunch of folks.
If I sound mad, it is because I am. The fact that common sense has been thrown out the window because rich people and lazy politicians — some of them even progressive ones — prefer to see no evil has been a crime against so many children. And just because you don’t happen to have one of those children who struggle does not mean that the one way that worked for your child that happens to be in fashion works for everyone. Same with math.
The answer is not to argue which method is better. The answer is to have very small class sizes and experienced teachers who have internalized that just because the student didn’t learn it the one way you were told to teach it does not mean he isn’t trying. Experienced teachers who know how to reach a child based on the kind of child he or she is and what works for that kid.
Best teacher my kid ever had told me — when I was an inexperienced parent at my very first parent teacher conference ever — that my kid had no idea how to read, but not to worry, because she knew exactly what to try and she was sure my kid would eventually get there. She was absolutely right.
NYCpsp: Yes. To everything you said.
Long.
A recent commentary in EdWeek (January 3,2019) had the headline “We have a national reading crisis.”
I am not a reading specialist, but I noticed the whole commentary was intended to approve of keypoints in the 2000 National Reading Panel report (written before the Common Core State Standards) and also to endorse recent ELA curricula approved by the Gates-funded project EdReports. EdReports is marketed as if it should be a consumer’s report for educators. EdReports ratings are designed to promote investments in curriculum materials aligned with the Gates-funded Common Core State Standards. Here is the praise for EdReports in the EdWeek Commentary.
“Districts today have many choices among research-aligned, excellent curricula, which was not the case even two years ago. These new curriculum options may be the catalyst we need to improve reading instruction. In each of our districts, we have implemented one of the newly available curricula that earned the highest possible rating by EdReports, a curriculum review nonprofit. District wide reading improvement followed.” All three authors have district-level leadership roles.
I folloed the authors’ suggestion and looked up the EdReports materials that received the highest ELA ratings in the last two years.
For grades K-2 these were:
1. ARC Core. Publisher American Reading Company.
2. Core Knowledge Language Arts, Publisher Amplify.
3. EL Education K-5 Language Arts, Publisher Open Up Resources.
For grades 3-8, or some portion of that grade span, the highest ELA ratings in the last two years were:
1. ARC Core, Publisher American Reading Company (grades 3-8)
2. Core Knowledge Language Arts, Publisher Amplify (grades 3-5) only
3. EL Education K-5 Language Arts, Publisher Open Up Resources (grades 3-5 only)
4. ReadyGEN, Publisher Pearson (grades 4-6 only)
5. Developing Core Literacy Proficiencies, Publisher Odell Education (grades 6-8 only)
6. MyPerspectives, Publisher Pearson (grades 6-8 only).
7. StudySync, Publisher McGraw-Hill Education (grades 6-8 only)
8. Wit & Wisdom. Publisher Great Minds (grades 6-8 only)
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/03/07/we-have-a-national-reading-crisis.html
EdReports is said to be the result of a Gates-funded meeting of minds in 2012. Most of the invited participants focused on math. EdReports was envisioned as a way to put teeth into the 2012 “Publishers Criteria” for the Common Core. https://sunnylands.org/article/sunnylands-math-strategy-group-to-tackle-potential-of-technology-enabled-math-education-programs/meeting
By 2013, the initial process for reviewing curriculum materials for compliance with the Common Core had begun. The process called for the use of “drop dead criteria” for a proper series of steps to complete a triage. Otherwise reviewers were wasting time on non-compliant materials. A year later this language was softened. Reviewers were to use “gateway” criteria, but the meaning was the same: Don’t waste time looking at materials that did not meet the gateway criteria.
In 2014 professionals in branding and communications were hired to launch and promote EdReports. You can see the strategy and their pride in getting coverage in national news here
http://www.widmeyer.com/work/edreports-org.html
Reviewers for EdReports receive 25 hours of virtual and face-to-face training on the Common Core standards, the grade level shifts in the Standards, and the EdReports “gateways,” rubrics, and indicators for rating textbooks, digitial materials, and open education resources.
Gateways 1 and 2 focus on questions of alignment to the Common Core standards. Rubrics and detailed indicators are intended to ensure the materials meet all grade level standards (e.g., no review of standards from prior grades). Gateway 1 leads to ratings of “Text Quality and Complexity.” Gateway 2 leads to ratings of “Building Knowledge, Vocabulary, and Tasks.” The ratings scheme for Gateway 3, “Usability,” requires that the materials have passed muster on the first two Gateways. Usability ratings treat matters such as aiding “differentiated instruction, assessment, and effective use of technology.”
EdReports.org is currently funded by: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (wealth from Microsoft), Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation (wealth from oil/natural gas), Helmsley Charitable Trust (wealth from real estate), William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (wealth from computers), Overdeck Family Foundation (wealth from managing investments, former VP Amazon), Broadcom Corporation (wireless and broadband communication), Samueli Foundation (wealth from Broadcom), Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation (wealth from managing investments, banking) and Stuart Foundation (wealth from Carnation milk/Nestlé). As an indicator of some of the larger levels of support since 2015, the B&M Gates Foundation has sent over $15 million to support EdReports; the Helmsley Charitable Trust gave $2.3 million and the Hewlett Foundation granted $2 million for this project.
A brief search of the Internet provided information about the three authors of the EdWeek Commentary. All have other press reports with praise for EdReports or specific reading programson EdReport ratings. The Internet also has several job positing for EdReports raters in math, ELA, and science.
It is worth noting that formal reviews of curriculum materials have long been a responsibility of teachers who have job-alike positions in a large school or a school district. Some states would add a layer to this process. Supervisors or state directors of a content area would often arrange for these reviews. Publishers provided samples of the materials for discussion and rating, along with aids to help raters–“correlations” to any state standards, checklists of technical requirements met such as bindings, plug and play roster uploads to the Internet.
EdReports is designed to preempt these local and stae decisions and to shape the national market for curriculum materials. The ratings give publicity to instructional materials that are strictly aligned with the Gates-funded Common Core standards as if those standards and “aligned curricula” are unimpeachable, along with two aligned tests known as PARCC or Smarter Balanced.
Not so.
This year, Florida dumped the Common Core, joining four states that never adopted them and eleven that rewrote or replaced them. According to an EdWeek survey, only fifteen states and the District of Columbia will administer PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests this Spring.
I look forward to seeing the Common Core vanish from sight along with all related efforts by mega-millionaires to take over what is taught in our nation’s schools.
I look forward to seeing the Common Core vanish from sight along with all related efforts by mega-millionaires to take over what is taught in our nation’s schools.
Amen to that. Unfortunately, some of those states that nominally replaced David Coleman’s puerile, vague bullet list of skills really just renamed them and tinkered with them a tiny bit. And the skills lists that replaced them in some states are no better. The people who take these lists seriously tend to be profoundly ignorant of the subjects that the lists are supposed to cover and so don’t see the obvious problems with them. A discussion of the problems with one so-called “standard” (though one could give similar treatment to almost any “skill” from the CC$$): https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
I’ve come to think of whether someone takes the CCSS in ELA, or most any of the competing state ELA “standards” seriously as a rough but pretty accurate measurement of whether he or she knows anything at all, really, about the English language arts.
From what I’m hearing from my peers in Florida, Common Core has just been rebranded. It’s still there. They are now moving towards the corporate personalized learning pushed by Gates.
Yup. Here’s what happened. The oh-so-Reverend Mike Huckabee (whose spawn is Miss Communications, Sarah Hucksterbee) went to CPAC a couple years ago and gave a speech. He said that the Common Core brand had been tainted and told the assembled ghouls that they should go back to their states and rename them. In other words, lie to the people of their states. New name. Same stench. Putting a smart new label on vinegar doesn’t make it into fine wine.
So, they followed their minister’s advice. Florida just tossed out the Common Core completely, but under the new extremist governor, what will replace it is likely to be as bad or worse.
Correction: That would be Sarah “Miss Communications” Hucksterbee
As CEO for College Board (a position created just for David Coleman), Coleman is cashing in big time on Common Core, since Coleman aligned the SAT with Common Core.
He and others at College Board are cashing in at the expense of millions of American families from whom they get nearly a billion dollars a year.
College Board is one of the biggest rackets now operating in the US. It should be shut down by the IRS, along with ETS because it is most certainly not a non-profit as it represents itself.
I remember fondly the ELA stds in the parent handbooks when my kids were in NJ midsch & hisch in the ’90’s- early 2000’s. They may have been the NJ Core Curriculum, or our district’s version; such things weren’t on the internet then. They were about 4 typewritten pages each. They expressed only what they wanted students to be able to do upon completion. Nothing about how to get there– that was up to the ELA Dept & the teachers. The whole business of breaking the discipline into skills to be obtained by end of each grade is just about testing, & nothing else.
Hmmm. ELA STDs. I’m going to have to remember that one. Useful for talking about the CC$$. LOL.
tutucker: I’m not sure whether NJ claims not to be using CCSS-ELA anymore, but they’ve revised & re-named them [2016]. Go to the “NJ Student Learning Standards” introduction, & you find a mostly-admirable set of bullet-pointed “strong beliefs.” But the “K12 ELA Revisions “Crosswalk” is revealing: left column is straight CCSS-ELA, right column shows tweaks in red. These are modest attempts to clarify, make more grade-appropriate, add importance of context, content, comprehension. I can’t imagine why they bothered, since we still use PAARC to assess!
It’s amazing to me how the Gates Foundation & Co. are behind so much. There’s a lot of money to be made in reading especially with phonics and Common Core.
Suggested title for the current hysteria about reading:
Hooked on Phonies
Hooked on Phonies
Hooked on crooks
Hooked on monies
Not on books
Hooked on software
Hooked on hard-
Hooked on shaftware
Gates and guard
A wonderful piece, Ms. Bailey. Thank you! And thanks to Dr. Ravitch for sharing your perceptive, insightful, beautifully written article. Standardization and regimentation is, indeed, a great evil. It’s child abuse. Your call for a renaissance in our approach to Learning Disabilities is much needed.
And thanks be to all the gods for reading teachers and English teachers, especially those who buck the many abominations of our current one-size-fits-all standardization of PreK-12 education. Here, my take on a few of the issues in current approaches to reading instruction: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
Thank you, Bob!
Bob,
I don’t agree with your blog on comprehension. I would encourage you to read Paul Thomas, Richard Allington, and Nancy Atwell.
My lord! There is someone who does not agree with me somewhere on the Internet! It’s a National Emergency!
My essay is meant to undermine some of the common superstitions of the tribe.
I strongly approve of Atwell’s use of individualized reading lists and of giving struggling students choices in their reading materials.
Bob, this is such a great essay. I just read it for the third time. Among other things, it explains very well the role/ interplay/ meshing of background [content knowledge] with reading comprehension. As a for-lang teacher, I also appreciate the distinction between what is “wired-in” & what needs to be taught expressly, & the consequent uselessness of rote-learned random vocabulary as well as trying to enlist memorized lists of grammatical-function definitions to the task of comprehending syntax.
Thank you. Much appreciated!!!
We are fortunate to have individual Reading and English teachers who understand that kids differ, that some have different kinds of minds need classes with people specially trained to meet their needs. Courageous of you, Dr. Bailey, to be clear about this.
Oops. left out an “and” there. LOL.
Teachers aren’t at fault, but we are having a reading crisis.
NY Teacher, I’m no longer in the classroom. Could you list a couple reasons why you believe this? I have my own ideas why it might be. Some listed here.
In The Educated Imagination, the critic Northrup Frye pointed out that one of the earliest written texts in existence that isn’t just a record of the contents of a granary–is an ancient Sumerian one that says that children no longer honor their parents or obey the Gods. LOL.
These kids!
Reading is not declining. It’s changing. Change happens.
I think reading instruction is declining because we no longer respect the professional educator to use their professional know how to actually teach.
I will blame Gates and everyone else that has forced teaching and learning to be standard.
I’m sorry to go off topic, but American Beauty – best film ever…? Really, Bob?
Thank you, Diane. And thanks for so many interesting comments about reading.
Chicago Public Schools for example has been loading extra paper work onto Special Ed teachers making it harder for them to give resource classes (and also using them as subs). At the same time removing librarians and thereby closing libraries that all the children used. It’s a perfect storm.
Sara, when I started teaching special ed. in the ’70s IEPs were 3-4 pages long. I also think they were clearer and more meaningful. When I left teaching they were like a book with objectives you checked off and information that had nothing to do with teaching.
Amen to that.
Yes, & same even at Chicago suburban schools, Sara.
Also, a common idea was that teaching L.D. Resource was easy…anybody could do it. Lots of untrained/inexperienced people tried to do it & wound up going back to general ed. teaching (maybe it had something to do w/the fact that those teachers weren’t qualified to teach L.D. students). &, often, when L.D. teachers have retired, they’ve not been replaced; sp.ed. coordinators/principals used the self-contained class aides (who were in to help their inclusion students) to ALSO cover the L.D. resource kids. Although I’ve always found Sp.Ed. Aides to be well-trained & generally excellent, there were just too many kids to be properly serviced.
(&, BTW, violation of the I.E.P. & I.D.E.A. {but what does that mean anymore, in the Age of DeLoss?})
Parent groups & parents–keep fighting, & go to your local Learning Disabilities Assn. for help & legal aid (there’s one in every state, even
though some of the groups have gotten small; there are local chapters, as well).
Teaching someone to read is not rocket science, it is not even high-school calc. Protestant immigrants who knew how to read — a clear cultural benefit of protestantism over catholicism — used to teach their children reading and basic arithmetic before community schools came along. And when these schools did appear, it was assumed that the enrolling children already can read, write and count. What a difference with our times, when a store clerk cannot figure out 15% discount out of $15 purchase without using a special discount button on a cash register.
“Reading is not declining. It’s changing. Change happens.”
Yes, indeed, change happens – and so does decline. Two things changed Western culture:one was the introduction of the Phonetic alphabet (from Asiatic Phoenicia) which created a strong tendency toward linearity and abstraction. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message” (although he was partially wrong about that – content matters too). The Gutenberg press accelerated the emphasis on linearity and abstraction until the discovery of electricity and the Industrial Revolution. With the introduction of electronic media we are rapidly re-entering pre-literate, visual modes of consciousness.Ask any teacher who has been teaching more than 20 years about the ability of his/her students to focus, concentrate and/or discriminate! We are at a major turning point in history, where it will lead us…who can say?
A 40 year veteran teacher here. The ability of the average (8th grade) student to “focus, concentrate, or discriminate” has deteriorated to the point of non-existence. The lack of interest and curiosity that we are seeing is not only alarming but is draining the rewards of student enthusiasm out of our day to day efforts. The cause? The combination of a test-centric school experience with the social distraction of instant everything and smart phone addiction are the only possible explanations for this tectonic shift teachers have observed over the past 5+ years. I may be off base; any other thoughts? Thanks for asking.