One of my grandsons sent me an article about the national rush to mandate “the science of reading,” and it caused me to explain briefly (without boring him) the background of the latest panacea.
I didn’t tell him the history of the “reading wars,” which I researched and wrote about in Left Back (2000). I didn’t tell him that reading instruction has swung back and forth between the phonetic method and the “whole word” method since the introduction of public schooling in the first quarter of the 19th century. Horace Mann opposed phonics. But the popular McGuffey readers of that century were phonetic. In 1930, the Dick-and-Jane readers were introduced, and they swept the country. Unlike the McGuffey readers, they featured pictures of children (white and suburban), they used simple words that could be easily recognized, and they were bright and colorful. By the 1950s, Dick and Jane style readers were used in about 80% of American schools. They relied on the whole word method, also know as look-say.
In 1955, this national consensus was disrupted by the publication of Rudolf Flesch’s wildly popular book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, which castigated the look-say method and urged a revival of phonics. The fervor for phonics then is similar to the fervor now.
But the debate about which method was best quickly became politicized. “Bring back phonics” was the battle cry of very conservative groups, who lambasted the whole-word method as the conspiratorial work of liberal elites. Phonics thus was unfairly tarnished as a rightwing cause.
The definitive book about the teaching of reading was written in 1967 by Harvard literacy expert Jeanne Chall: Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Chall wrote about the importance of phonics as part of beginning reading instruction, followed up by wonderful children’s literature. She warned against going to extremes, a warning that has been ignored with every pendulum swing.
The 1980s began the dominance of whole language, which brought back whole-word sight reading and de-emphasized phonics. Textbook companies boasted that their programs were whole language. Literacy conferences were focused on whole language. Phonics was out. Many reading teachers held on their phonics books, even though phonics was out of style.
There is always a crisis in reading, so in the late 1990s, the pendulum began to move again. As it happened, a very influential supporter of phonics held a key position at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Reid Lyon was director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Development. His field of expertise was learning disabilities.
From Wikipedia:
From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as a research neuropsychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the NICHD at the National Institutes of Health; in this role he developed and oversaw research programs in cognitive neuroscience, learning and reading development and disorders, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive and affective development, School Readiness, and the Spanish to English Reading Research program. He designed, developed and directed the 44-site NICHD Reading Research Network.
Lyon selected the members of the National Reading Panel. Like him, most were experimental researchers in higher education. Only one—Joanne Yatvin— was experienced as an elementary school teacher and principal. She wrote a “minority view” dissenting from the report, and she worried that the report would be misused.
President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law on January 8, 2002. This law was the single largest intrusion of the federal government into education in American history. Before NCLB, education was a state responsibility. Since passage of NCLB, the federal government established mandates that schools had to obey.
One of the components of this law was the Reading First program. RF was based on the report of the National Reading Panel, which emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency.
The Reading First program allocated $6 billion over six years to encourage districts to adopt the “science of reading,” as established by the National Reading panel.
There were two reasons that the program ended.
First, there were financial scandals. Google “Reading First Program Scandals”). The New York Times reported here about conflicts of interest and steering of contracts to favored textbook publishers. “In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.”
Second, the final evaluation of the program found that it taught what it aimed to teach but there was no improvement in students’ comprehension.
Here is the summary of the final evaluation:
The findings presented in this report are generally consistent with findings presented in the study’s Interim Report, which found statistically significant impacts on instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two, and which found no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension as measured by the SAT 10. In addition to data on the instructional and student achievement outcomes reported in the Interim Report, the final report also presents findings based upon information obtained during the study’s third year of data collection: data from a measure of first grade students’ decoding skill, and data from self-reported surveys of educational personnel in study schools.
Analyses of the impact of Reading First on aspects of program implementation, as reported by teachers and reading coaches, revealed that the program had statistically significant impacts on several domains. The information obtained from the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency indicates that Reading First had a positive and statistically significant impact on first grade students’ decoding skill.
The final report also explored a number of hypotheses to explain the pattern of observed impacts. Analyses that explored the association between the length of implementation of Reading First in the study schools and reading comprehension scores, as well as between the number of years students had been exposed to Reading First instruction and reading comprehension scores were inconclusive. No statistically significant variation across sites in the pattern of impacts was found. Correlational analyses suggest that there is a positive association between time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program and reading comprehension measured by the SAT 10, but these findings appear to be sensitive to model specification and the sample used to estimate the relationship.
The study finds, on average, that after several years of funding the Reading First program, it has a consistent positive effect on reading instruction yet no statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension. Findings based on exploratory analyses do not provide consistent or systematic insight into the pattern of observed impacts.
After the disgrace of the Reading First program, support for phonics dissipated. But in the past few years, journalists (led by Emily Hanford) have trumpeted the idea that the report of the National Reading Panel established the “science of reading.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the “Mississippi Miracle,“ claiming that the “science of reading” had lifted fourth grade reading scores, and no new spending was needed in a very poorly resourced state. Kristof did not explain why the SOR did not cause a rise in eighth grade scores in Mississippi, nor did he understand that retaining low-scoring third graders raises the percentage of fourth graders who get high test scores. State after state is now mandating the “science of reading.”
And so the cycle begins again.
thank you. how can i get a copy of the minority report on the National Reading Panel.
Maybe some day we will be able to use both phonics and whole language strengths. I never could resist the value of getting kids excited about what they were reading.
Thank you so much for this reminder of the history of these different programs. Fresh out of college, I taught elementary school in Harlem for two years in the early 1970s. I knew nothing about teaching reading, but the school used a Bank Street reader that had a fabulous teachers guide, which I followed religiously. I’m trying to remember if it was more site word-based or phonics based but I can’t remember. I just know it saved my life as a new teacher.
Hooray for the merry-go-round. How the theorists dearly love to make their money-driven theories into policy. Unfortunately for me as a practitioner, those tainted theories are being foisted on real people, real kids, and real teachers.
Yeah, we’re up to our eyeballs in Los Angeles with i-Ready, which, we are told, in based on the Science of Reading. Contracts are signed and the software implemented and everyone is being measured, teachers and students alike, by the number of minutes and “lessons” completed. Full disclaimer, I do not teach lower grades, but 11th and 12 grades. If we do not sacrifice instructional time to have the students do remediation worksheets one full day a week, then we get nasty emails informing us that our progress is being tracked. The threat to our position is implicit. Our administration has gone one step further and planted a very outspoken and moronic sycophant in our department meetings to tout the importance of compliance. And, NO, she has never carried a roll book! So, you know, totally qualified to tell me how and what to teach.
Alberto Carvahlo, our interloping supt. from Miami, loves it. The coordinators and coaches and every person who does not carry a roll book loves it. In fact, we were just informed yesterday at our PD meeting, AGAIN, that it is the ONLY reliable data and will be used exclusively to evaluate the efficacy of teaching and learning. Hooray, worksheets for everyone!
Just as I was warned 20+ years ago, the theorists who make policy are not practitioners and do not like or respect practitioners and do not understand what it actually means to be a practitioner. The theorists are winning because we are testing now year round. Yes, I said year round. In fact, Supt. Carvahlo wants students and teachers to give up days during winter and spring recesses to do even more i-Ready. Alas, lest I digress.
So, yeah, save the painted pony for me so I, too, can ride this ride merry-go-round of lunacy around and around and around.
We truly need to mount a concerted defense of legitimate teaching practices against our school board which has sadly and disappointingly allowed Supt Carvhallo to pull the wool over their eyes selling the illegitimate iReady platform and its corporate affiliated “intervention” platforms. IReady and test score based interventions are taxes on the socioeconomically oppressed, especially EL and SpEd, when it causes them — and us — to spend personal and instructional time doing test prep. It is a racist program that must be opposed.
As an LAUSD teacher, you are hopefully also a UTLA member. As such, you have rights. A great deal of struggle went into securing the Collective Bargaining Agreement that secures your rights as an education professional. You have academic freedom. Administrators cannot dictate how you teach, outside of certain basic requirements listed in the TGDC framework. At my school, many teachers have agreed to use the iReady test prep platform twice a week. That doesn’t mean I have to do it. I resist. You should get in contact with your union representatives and resist too. It’s the ethical and legally supported thing to do.
Hi Leftcoastteacher1031,
I’m not really the quiet type in meetings. I believe that Audre Lorde spoke wisely when she asked, “What good is having a voice if you’re not going to use it?” I have never heard a convincing argument for staying silent.
And, yup, been a UTLA guy for 20 years now; I am all for unionization. I get sad and angry thinking about our colleagues in “right to work” states. I know a couple teachers in Florida. It ain’t pretty. Apologies if I came off as a victim. I am a vocal resistance on my campus to mandated testing and sign my name to that resistance. I openly invite someone, anyone, to come into my room and have an honest discussion, one that involves the kids, about why iReady should be a steady part of my curriculum. So far, no one has taken me up on the offer.
As for iReady, I will give the three assessments (BOY, MOY, EOY). But I wouldn’t think for a second that there is a correlation between those results and who the people are in front of me everyday. It’s not even close.
My 2nd period 11th graders just finished our unit on ecology. We begin with Rachel Carson. We define terms and come to understand herbicides and pesticides and how Glyphosate (Round Up) robs us of the minerals in our food. We move through bioaccumulation and our food supply. The kids research food deserts. I have them involve their families in the whole process. My kids all do research on topics of their choice under the Ecology umbrella. As you know there is a constellation of sub topics to explore. And they do research. And they make connections. They synthesize as well as empathize. I am so proud of my kids, and it gives me hope. We finish up with the kids writing a Chemical Exposure Bill of Rights.
Compare that to the animated and insulting worksheets provided by Curriculum Associates, an `education corporation based in Massachusetts. Like they have the vision or understanding of how to evaluate my kids, kids they do not know and will never meet? Its arrogance is matched only by the stupidity and lack of vision of those who believe it has merit for every kid.
I can see the merit (sort of) in building vocabulary or becoming phonetically aware. But it is so damn dry and void of personality. The text choices are dry as dirt at the secondary level. Give a kid Dr. Seuss and you are much more likely to make a reader.
Thank you, Diane. This article has been tremendously helpful to a school board member who has been trying without much success to make sense of the arguments and counterarguments. “Expertise” is being used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon us not possessed of it into compliance.
A familiar story:
Years ago at the final day of training of the OCR reading program at LAUSD we discussed discussed a well researched paper titled “The critical factors of reading success”. Two important conclusions from the research were that reading methodology and age of instruction were not critical factors. At the time there was a battle at my school between the 1st & Kinder teachers over the Kinder curriculum. (I taught Kinder). The first grade teachers were in love with a reading program called CELL and were pressuring the Kinder teachers to teach reading for long periods of time using CELL best practices. They were obsessed with the CELL program and outraged when the district mandated the OCR program. During the discussion at the OCR training I asked “if the age of instruction isn’t a critical factor, then why does this program start at earlier age?” They didn’t have an answer. At this time I was not aware of the research that showed the harmful effects of an academic push in preschool. I share your skepticism regarding “the science of reading” Diane.
Students must become adept at using phonics to read fluently. However, there are many ways for students to learn to read. After wasting $6 billion on phonics instruction in Reading First, we should have acknowledged the limitations of stand alone phonics instruction, but here we are again in another politicized debate about reading instruction.
I always got good results from using embedded phonics as I have always found that students are more motivated when instruction is connected to meaning. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension so reading for understanding is an important element of any reading program. Reading for comprehension is actually a much more complex issue than mastering phonics, which is largely a mechanical process. One of the reasons for the middle school slump in test scores is due to the fact that poor students lack the language, content and experiential base to fully master more complex reading tasks. One reason that reading programs fail to get desired results is because school districts jump on a shiny new bandwagon without adequately investing in solid training for the teachers. No program will be successful unless those that implement it fully understand it.
The whole Science of Reading campaign is likely a smokescreen to justify greater use of computer assisted instruction since phonics instruction can be easily programmed on a computer for that purpose. I would argue that there are better, more effective ways to teach phonics based on my experience, but embedded phonics does not make money for computer software companies.
“The definitive book about the teaching of reading was written in 1967 by Harvard literacy expert Jeanne Chall: Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Chall wrote about the importance of phonics as part of beginning reading instruction, followed up by wonderful children’s literature. She warned against going to extremes, a warning that has been ignored with every pendulum swing.”
What did Chall base this recommendation on? A whim? A hunch? A gut feeling? The science of reading supports Chall’s recommendations. She wasn’t a quack. She relied on research–not whims, hunches, or gut feelings about what’s best for children. What she relied on was the science of reading.
exactly
I am not a teacher, so I have little to add to this specific reading subject. But I do have an experience, suitable for 7th grade and up, that was for me invaluable. (I had Dick and Jane for learning reading in first grade.)
I went to a prep school which started at seventh grade. (They counted down, not up, so 7th grade was “6th class” and senior year was “1st class”.) Our English teacher, Mr. Dilworth, required that every student have a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Why? Because Webster’s gave the source, almost always Latin or Greek, for modern English words.
This might have been the single most useful and important lesson I learned for grappling with new words. I have almost always been able to encounter a new word and immediately know what it likely means, or at least concerns, because I know the words that birthed it. To this day (I’m 71), I always have a hardbound Webster’s Collegiate on my shelf.
My apologies if this is something everyone here knows this. I am not a teacher.
Thank you, JSR! Same here. Webster’s Collegiate. My go-to, though I have a dozen dictionaries, including the OED.
Webster’s Collegiate, 9th edition. Look up “umbrella.” My claim to fame.
Dianne Ravitch, it’s in my Tenth Edition. Way cool!
Oh, good!
I will never buy a dictionary that doesn’t give the etymology of words. I don’t see how anyone can really understand a word without it.
When I took courses at TC Columbia University, I would sit in the library and read through “The Oxford English Dictionary.” The library had the complete set. The study of word origins is fascinating.
JSR and RT: Totally with you with regard to etymologies. Often, there is some amazing story behind the word.
If for example, you look up the word porcelain in a good dictionary, you will see after the entry word an entry like this:
Ital. vulva
What? How on earth is porcelain related to the Italian word for vulva? Well, thereby hands a tale. Italians have a rich and earthy language, and one if its treasures is the word porcella, which means “the little pig,” and has long been used by Italians to refer to a particular part of the feminine anatomy–the Mons Venus, which is not a mountain on Venus. Well, have you ever had a look at the bottom of a cowrie shell? The shape of the shell and of the opening at the bottom reminded Italian sailors to the Far East of porcella, little pigs, and of the opening to the vagina. So, they called these shells porcelle, too. And then, when they encountered Chinese porcelains, these seemed to them to be made of a material very like what the shells were made of, so they called these porcelle, too.
BTW, porcelains were so cheap then that the freaking European sailors would buy literally boatloads of these and use them as ballast on their ships, and sometimes, the ships would go down. And now, all over the world, tiny fragments of exquisite porcelains float up onto beaches. I had a friend who regularly combed the beaches of Rockport and Glouchester, MA, for these, and who had enromous urns full of them–tiny fragments of cups, saucers, porcelain figurines, mementos of ships that went down.
The great American poet and literary critic Randall Jarrell wrote, “A word is a world.”
Indeed.
HOW MEDIA MISINFORMATION BECAME “HOLY TEXT”: THE ANATOMY OF THE SOR MOVEMENT
On the “science of reading”, I REALLY REALLY REALLY recommend anyone with any kind of interest in the area go to Mark Seidenberg’s page and read some of the posts–a bunch of things that have come up here(in) are well-addressed there(in). The three on “the Simple View of Reading” and, before that, the one on ” ‘The Science of Reading’ ” (they are not terribly long, btw) are, I think, plausible places to start.
Seidenberg is NOT selling anything and is quite clear that he doesn’t have the answers that we’d all like–and neither does anyone else–but that where and how to look to find material out of which to construct answers is also something he’s clear about.
Full disclosure-ish stuff: While my undergraduate psycholinguistics professor was Seidenberg’s graduate advisor, I’ve never met Seidenberg, my views in theoretical (psycho)linguistics are not his, and in this area I trust him completely.
–RC
Totally agree! Great recommendation. Thank you!
Seidenberg is selling … his book and his brain science … and he has attacked many teachers (mostly women) when testifying for SOR … however, he has written: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers [emphasis added]” (RRQ 441).
“Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers [emphasis added]” (RRQ 441)
Thank you for making this extremely important point: There IS a science of reading ; there ISN’T a science of teaching reading. As a former K-2 teacher and current reading specialist, I take the science and make teaching decisions based on it. For example, I don’t teach open and closed syllables or phonics rules. But I do teach phonics because I know from the science that words cannot become mapped to memory if phonology, orthography, and meaning aren’t united.
Harriet,
I should have clarified the distinction between “the science of reading” and “the science of teaching reading.” The latter is very annoying to me. I have always supported phonics. I do not endorse the idea that there is one and only one way to teach.
I beg to disagree with your: ‘Seidenberg is NOT selling anything and is quite clear that he doesn’t have the answers that we’d all like–and neither does anyone else.’
Saying that there is no “science of reading” is rather like saying that there is no “science of human psychology.” Yes, psychology has a huge study replicability problem. Yes, there are lots of completely conflicting theories. Yes, there have been eras in which psychology was totally dominated, in the UK and the United States, by fads (Freudian analysis, Behaviorism, Cognitive Science based on analogies between computers and brains). Yes, the concept of “the homosexual,” as opposed to homosexual behavior, was invented by European doctors practicing what came to be known eventually as psychology, and this is but one example of many of how, in this field, some human proclivities and practices are pathologized by practitioners and some are then unpathologized (homosexuality used to be in the DSM; it is no longer). And certainly, things are not as clear cut in psychology as they are in, say, chemistry. But that does not mean that human psychology cannot be studied scientifically. Of course it can, and the same is true of reading. It’s just difficult to do.
And that fact is complicated by another: the term “science of reading” has now been totally co-opted by a few companies as a marketing term, and in actual, quotidian use in our K-12 schools today, that’s what it MOSTLY is taken as meaning. It’s what those few companies do.
Here’s another factor: reading isn’t simple. Yes, it can be studied scientifically. But doing so is complex because it is a complex phenomenon. There IS an actual science of reading, which is a subset of the science of language acquisition. And acquisition of the collection of language abilities that enable reading to take place is different from but built upon spoken language acquisition. And about THAT, far, far, far, far, far too many educators are PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT. Our education schools have not kept up with linguistic science. I will provide one little example of this: Our federal government assembled the nation’s experts and put together, based on their advice, that Reading First program on which it spent billions of dollars, and these so-called experts were so profoundly ignorant of their own subject that they did not even recognize that acquisition of syntax is a key component of the ability to read. It wasn’t on their list of “reading skills.” This is utterly shocking.
OK. One cannot speak clearly about so complex a topic in sound bites. But in this essay I have tried to hit the major parts of what actual science on this topic of reading looks like. Actual science, not repackaged Behaviorist computerized learning modules. Not easy fixes.
Here’s a good place to start: actually learn something about language acquisition. And please note that a lot of important detail was left out of that summary history of the development of varying approaches to reading in the US in the 20th and 21st centuries. I treat that in this essay, too:
But Harriet is right. There is a science of reading, in the sense that reading can and sometimes is studied scientifically. I think that my essay clarifies that. I tried to put in it, in one convenient place, the most important stuff that I learned about reading over a lifetime of studying and thinking about it.
What a coherent, comprehensive explanation–thank you! I wish we could just give you the last word. I read your essay several years ago and highly recommend it.
The truly shocking thing to me about all this–something I first encountered just out of college and that I have witnessed throughout my life, is that most Reading and English teachers that I know (I said most, not all), and most professional education pundits, and most district and state and federal education officials and policy makers, and many authors of textbook programs in Reading and English, and many district Reading Coordinators
ARE PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT OF THE MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, which has taken place in a separate fiefdom–that of the folks over in the Linguistics and Cognitive Psych departments.
This needs to change. Almost every Reading teacher and English teacher I’ve ever met, and certainly the authors of the puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] did not understand even the most basic stuff about the mechanisms by which people actually acquire the grammar of a language, even though we have had a robust science of this for a long, long time now–since that late 1950s.
In the course of my work in schools and in the textbook industry, over many decades, I have met thousands of Reading and English teachers, Reading Coordinators, district and state and federal education officials, and almost ALL OF THEM were utterly ignorant of the basics of the area of linguistics known as language acquisition. Of this SCIENCE. That’s a problem. It’s as though people learned to be sailors without learning navigation and chart reading but were well versed in polishing the brightwork.
Here’s a good place to start: https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/Radford2009.pdf
If our instructional approaches and materials and our standards were actually based on what linguistic scientists now know about language acquisition, they would look VERY different. The knowledge gap here, is ENORMOUS. I have tried for many years to interest publishers in actually creating scientifically based Reading instruction materials, but THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED. They are interested only in the current buzz words and in the habits of the tribe. In whatever is an easy sell to uneducated educators and their bosses.
Yup. I agree. On a related note, we’ve known for many years that foreign languages are best learned when kids are very very young yet we start teaching foreign languages in middle school (for the most part). It’s too late and much more difficult to attain fluency. It’s been very interesting to me (in over 30 years of teaching) to observe how students learn to read in a foreign language. For most of my career, I’ve been the only French teacher so I’ve had the same kids for many years – sometimes 4 or 5 years in a row. That’s given me quite a long time to observe students progress, and I find it fascinating.
Most other countries that are committed to truly learning a second language start much younger than we do in the US. The US treats the study of a foreign language like a frill. Most of the EU starts a second language study at age six, seven or eight.
Nailed it, Mamie!!! We have it so backward.
I agree about the new buzz word or new education guru we get every year. I’ve learned to tune it all out because it gets dumped on us one year, and there’s something else the next year. I remember when curriculum maps were the new big thing. Thankfully I didn’t put in too much time on them because they soon went the way of the dodo bird. The first thing that comes to mind with any new shiny education gimmick is, “This too shall pass.”
I was always puzzled that school districts, at least the two where I worked, insisted on one size fits all curricula. I do understand that this is typically due to contract obligations and such, but Diane’s essay reveals that what is purchased has to do as much with trends and fads rather than actual results. As you have often written, if we focused on teachers preparation, substantive resource allocation, and teacher autonomy to determine what is required for every student, we might actually see some results.
Clear and succinct . . . but there are reasons on the Right
to diminish Public Schools through attacks on reading programs
and money to back campaigns to, as Chris Rufo said recently,
to ‘destroy trust’ in public education in order to promote
voucher programs mascarading as ‘school choice’
I agree that we need to be careful about the swinging pendulum of education silver bullets. But I do believe that US schools have not taught reading (or anything else) intentionally or effectively. I support the science of reading, but I don’t think fixing the lack of phonics is enough. We need knowledge building curriculum as well-both are necessary (we also need other things too, such as better discipline, more recess, more arts, better standardized testing, a whole new approach to special Ed, etc.).
There is evidence that this combo works. Beginning around 2011, England reformed its National Curriculum to emphasize phonics, grammar, and knowledge building. In the 2021 PIRLS test, English 10 year-olds had the 4th best reading scores in the world. Louisiana is doing some great work pulling these two pieces together and I’m interested in seeing the results.
We also need to do a better job on the teacher training front. A lot of the elementary teachers I know have commented that they weren’t actually trained in how to teach children to read. That’s crazy to me.
NYC jumped on the Science of Reading, the flavor of the day. I blogged about the Reading Wars many times, always high clicks. Over the current and next year every NYC elementary school will switch to a phonics curriculum chosen by the local superintendent, the Mayor can check his “to do” list and move on.
My reading experts tell me the key is matching the instruction to the needs of the child, what a surprise!!
In the near future, nearer than you think the kid’s personal Chatbot will both chose and teach the kid through the chips stapled in their earlobe. They haven’t don’t you yet?
Yes, Billy Gates, master of the universe and purveyor of failed next big things in education assures us all, in his Clippy the Paperclip way, that chatbots are going to be the next big thing in Reading instruction. Let’s do away with those silly teachers who have to be paid so much. Computers running Microsoft software are so much more “personal.”
Peter, Take any school you like where they are going to teach phonics. I will bet with that that at the end of 1st grade there will still remain at least 20% of kids who are unable to read at grade level.
I teach dyslexic kids on a one on one basis and I know why they had shut down/ disengaged from learning to read.
Until the cause of kids disengaging from learning to read are eradicated the reading proficiency will remain status quo.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the articles on the “Science of Reading” written by Diane Ravitch and Freddy Hiebert. I agree with most of what they said about the teaching of reading. They are addressing the issue with research findings and common sense. The problem is that when the “bad guys” (the ill-informed) were taking over the field of beginning reading over the last 20 years, there was no effective pushback from leaders in “reading education” who knew something about practice. I believe that is because the clinical tradition in reading has all but disappeared (think Barr, Henderson, Clay, and others). It’s probably happened in other helping fields too, such as medicine and clinical psychology, where scientific findings and measurement have driven out the need for clinical knowledge and expertise. BTW, whole-class phonics instruction and decodable books fit more easily into the culture (and the budget) of the elementary school than does careful training of reading teachers.
The reading field had another problem when this “science of reading” stuff was being sold to the schools. University-based reading educators, in the 2000s, were turning away from the “nuts and bolts” of teaching reading, which was much more complicated than phonics instruction, and turning toward critical theory and identity politics. Check out the program of an NRC or IRA national convention today. There are very few university-based reading educators left who have hands-on experience with struggling beginning readers or older remedial readers. (Note. Maybe there never were many.) And such practical experience, backed by sound theoretical knowledge of the reading process, is necessary for effective teacher training. Thus, there was no organized pushback from knowledgeable leaders to the “science of reading,” a shallow and misleading answer to a very complicated problem; i.e, helping the bottom 30% (bottom 50% of poor children) achieve a decent level of literacy by the end of third grade (word recognition, fluency, and comprehension). (Note. “Decent level” doesn’t necessarily mean “grade level,” another dangerous falsehood (i.e., every child must be at least average) that dominates discussion in the reading field.
Nuff said.
Diane, once again your historical background is very informative, but your summary of recent events disappoints.
Actually, some really interesting science on reading using various types of brain scan technologies is providing new and important insight that most Ed schools still seem to be avoiding.
Medically-aligned brain scan research in reading like Positron Emission Tomography and fMRI technology probably don’t get covered in most Ed school programs, but it’s time that they should be. I would think responsible Ed school researchers would want to be all over this information, but that just isn’t happening enough.
Instead, I recently saw a noted Ed school reading person co-author a paper saying that such research is just “esoteric,” dismissing it as of no value. And, this is far from a unique attitude.
Reid Lyon’s efforts in this area deserve more attention in your post. His efforts date back to at least the early 1990’s. Lyon was sponsoring radio-isotope based positron emission activities well before fMRI work began.
Brain scan research now extending back more than three decades indicates that there are clinically detectable differences in how the brains of weak and strong readers function. There is also evidence that the right type of remedial reading instruction can change brain activity from using areas of the brain that weak readers use to using other parts of the brain associated with what strong readers use.
To be sure, I think more needs to be learned, but it doesn’t seem like Ed schools are much interested. That is a real problem that needs to be fixed.
Also, there now is some evidence from the NAEP that Mississippi’s reading work is starting to impact the 8th grade, too. Thanks to COVID it isn’t showing as a notable increase in performance, but rather as a notable maintenance of performance while most other states experience declines. You have to break the NAEP data out by race to see this (something a lot of science of reading deniers just don’t do), but there is some evidence there. See more on that here: https://bipps.org/blog/the-story-about-improvement-in-reading-in-mississippi-continues-to-get-better
Richard,
Thanks for your comment. I’ll keep watching the 8th grade scores in Mississippi. Florida has strong 4th grade scores (and 3rd grade retention) but unimpressive scores in 8th grade.
Watchful waiting.
Howard Bloom of the Los Angeles Times is questioning teachers about SOR in LAUSD on the FB group Parents Supporting Teachers. I shared your articles.
“Hi, I’d love to read some ASAP (as in today preferably) discussion about reading instruction efforts related to the “Science of Reading,” LAUSD was among the districts that received funding for a science of reading initiative and appears to have had some good results at the group of schools that took part.
It’s challenging to evaluate such efforts because a school or a teacher is usually doing many things to help students. It’s difficult to isolate the effect of one factor or one program. Moreover, theoretically, all LAUSD schools already are aligned with science-of-reading methods and research, so why did this version at a few schools have progress beyond the norm? Was it extra funding and support? Was it the benefit of staffwide PD, whether as a helpful refresher or an elevating of skills? (It’s worth noting perhaps that Primary Promise teachers — a different program — received special training in science of reading practices.)
Every time LAUSD gets a new reading program, we are told it’s state-of-the-art and better than the previous one, which, it turns out, always had some shortcomings that were never mentioned until it was replaced.
LAUSD has been telling me since at least 1999 that it is pro-phonics and on the cutting edge of this issue, until something or someone new comes along and says the district was “not up to date, but it is now.”
One thing that I did notice in the 1990s was that the leaders of the bilingual ed division were anti-phonics at the time (following the scholarship and leadership of folks such as Stephen Krashen and and Norm Gold) — and huge proponets of whole language. Not sure how that argument evolved within LAUSD and the needs of English-learners beyond that point. (Some of you will recall that an early advocate of returning phonics to schools was former longtime school board member Julie Korenstein.)
But I don’t want to get too deep into history. Want to hear your thoughts and experience. Everything will be on the record for a possible article unless you specify otherwise, which is fine to do, of course. If you are a teacher, it is helpful for you to include in your post your name and where and what you teach and perhaps your years of experience.
— Howard Blume
LA Times
howard.blume@latimes.com
213 265-2985″
Don’t forget the Hawthorne Effect.