The “Science of Reading” is the panacea of the moment. Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill requiring the use of SofR in the state’s classrooms.
ADEL, Iowa (Gray Television Iowa Capitol Bureau) – Governor Kim Reynolds signed a new law Tuesday meant to boost literacy rates for Iowa children. It requires schools teach a specific reading method, called the Science of Reading, and develop individual plans for students not at grade level.
Last year, more than 30% of Iowa’s third and 11th graders weren’t reading at their grade level. Travis Wilkins with the Adel DeSoto Minburn Community School District said, “As an educator and in this profession, I think it’s important we recognize and name the fact that we are not meeting our mission.”
But ADM Schools found success. Three years ago it had one in four students not meeting reading standards. Then, it implemented a literacy strategy called the science of reading. “Our third grade through 11th grade scores now show 90% of our students are proficient in reading and writing,” Wilkins said.
Now, the Science of Reading is the law in Iowa. Tuesday Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill mandating schools implement the strategy and must provide personalized instruction for students who fall behind. “And for those who continue to struggle, the bill also ensures parents are informed of their right to request that their child be retained to repeat a grade level if that’s necessary,” Reynolds said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
BTW, as soon as the next round of reading textbooks comes out, all of these programs will claim to instantiate “the science of reading” so as not to miss out on sales in places requiring this. That’s how educational publishing works, folks. The marketing people say that their product is whatever is hot on the educational midway this carnival season.
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Ever notice that every educational publisher claims that every product it publishes correlates 100% with every set of standards? ROFL. They just slap some new labels (unit and chapter heads, covers, text subtitles, exercise titles) on the same old stuff AND produce a “correlation” that purposefully weighs a ton so that no one will ever bother to read it, much less study it.
Soon all the reading programs will be claiming that they are THE science of reading. ROFL again.
These people put the CON in eCONomy.
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A grandparent complained on FB that her grandchild didn’t learn to read because his school didn’t use SOR, therefore California needed a SOR law. I looked up the school and discovered that their test scores were the highest in the district. They were of course one of the few middle class schools in LAUSD. I went on the school’s website and saw that their Benchmark reading series was fully aligned with the “Science of Reading”, so yes, the publishers are already on the SOR bandwagon.
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That’s true, of course, because marketing people would never lie to you. Never. No, not ever. They are as true as Trump.
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Iowa will be SORRY.
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I have spent a lifetime working either as a teacher or as an executive in the educational publishing industry. I have seen a thousand of these fads come and go. All with the same initial hype, followed by almost zero change in educational outcomes.
As the song goes, “When will they ever learn?”
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But he publishers always make a ton of $$$ before the bubble bursts.
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The publishers will have new labels attached to their texts when the pendulum swings again.
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They will NEVER learn. Money talks and BS walks.
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States and school districts jump on and off bandwagons based on the persistence of marketeers that work for tech companies without a shed of evidence to support such behavior. Everybody is looking for a cheap, easy magic bullet, and SOR is but one more example of a highly touted program that keeps everyone in denial about the impact of poverty has on young people. SOR is the fad du jour designed to make lots of money for tech companies.
As far as claims about proficiency on state tests, proficiency is not a statistical term. It is subjective and often influenced by state politics. If a state wants to fail lots of students, it can set the cut score high. Likewise, if a state wants to boast about its “miracle,” it can manipulate to set the cut score low. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
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I once prepared a graph of cut scores for New York ELA and Math tests over a couple decades. The cut scores jumped around like a gerbil on methamphetamines, and the geniuses at the federal Department of Education, to whom these test outcomes were reported, never groked that the scores were totally cooked for political reasons by the setting of cut scores. In some years, the cut scores in Math were so low that one could almost pass simply by guessing randomly.
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One of the many thousands of dirty little secrets of the state testing pseudoscience and scam. Your tax dollars at work making test makers and state education bureaucrats who will then go to work for them richer while screwing taxpayers, teachers, and kids, all with the blessing of our major teachers’ unions, who could end this by calling a testing strike tomorrow. I’m looking at you NEA and AFT.
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Don’t forget that the new mandate will require many hours of professional development and a. Bonanza for consultants. Millions more out the door.
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Bob,
I discovered the same peculiar testing trick in New York State almost 15 years ago. The 2009 scores were phenomenal. The pass rates on high school Regents exams rose sharply. Behind the scenes, the state department of education had lowered the cut scores.
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that keeps everyone in denial about the impact of poverty has on young people
Bingo
For all children, but especially for the one for whom learning to read is going to be difficult, early learning must be a safe and joyful experience. Many of our students, in this land in which nearly a third live in dire poverty, come to school not ready, physically or emotionally or linguistically, for the experience. They have spent their short lives hungry and/or abused. They lack proper eyeglasses. They have had caretakers who didn’t take care because they were constantly teetering on one precipice or another, often as a result of our profoundly inequitable economic system. Many have almost never had an actual conversation with an adult. They are barely articulate in the spoken language and thus not ready to comprehend written language, which is merely a means for encoding a spoken one. They haven’t been read to. They haven’t put on skits for Mom and Dad and the Grandparents. They don’t have a bookcase in their room, if they have a room, brimming with Goodnight, Moon; A Snowy Day; Red Fish, Blue Fish; Thomas the Tank Engine; The Illustrated Mother Goose; and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. They haven’t learned to associate physical books with joy and closeness to people who love them. In the ambient linguistic environment in which they reached school age, they have heard millions fewer total numbers of words and tens of thousands fewer unique lexemes than have kids from more privileged homes, and they have been exposed to much less sophisticated syntax. Some, when they have been spoken to at all by adults, have been spoken to mostly in imperatives: “Stop that! I told you to stop doing that or you’ll get a spanking. Go outside and play!” (Compare the middle class, “See the leaves? Funny looking, huh? This is called a Gingo tree. Can you say, Ginko? Great. These trees come all the way from China, which is all the way on the other side of the whole wide world!”) Children from low-positive-stimulus homes desperately need compensatory environments in which spoken interactions and reading are rich, rewarding, joyful experiences. If a child is going to learn to read with comprehension, he or she must be ready to do so, physically, emotionally, and linguistically (having become reasonably articulate in a spoken language). Learning to read will be difficult for many kids, easy for others. And often the difficulty will have nothing to do with brain wiring and everything to do with the experiences that the child has had in his or her short life. In this, as well as in brain wiring, kids differ, as invariant “standards” do not. Kids who haven’t had such experiences need one-on-one conversations with adults who care about them. They need exposure to libraries and classroom libraries filled with enticing books. Kids need to be read to. They need story time. They need jump-rope rhymes and nursery rhymes and songs and jingles. They need social interaction using spoken language. They need books that are their possessions, objects of their own. They need to memorize and enact. And so on. They need fun with language generally and with reading in particular. They need the experiences that they never got. And so, the mechanics of learning to read should be only a small part of the whole of a reading “program,” and reading programs must grok that kids differ as the magic formulae of Education Deformers and Self-Proclaimed Education Pundits do not.
One size, one approach, does not fit all. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot or a con artist.
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The next phase of the scam is to shuffle all those disadvantaged students, most of whom are Black and Brown, into separate and unequal privatized schools that make lots of money for political donors. These subjective scores are then weaponized by the states. If privatizers are operating in a particularly corrupt place, they can grab the whole school including the real estate. Commodification of education complete!
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Especially the real estate. One of the charter school scammers here in Flor-uh-duh used to tell investors that he was not in the education business but in the real estate business.
Why?
Because the charter school pays off a mortgage on a building with taxpayer dollars, but the equity goes to the charter school owner.
What a grifty grift that is. Surprised that Trump hasn’t started a few. But it’s altogether possible that even something as simple as this is over his head. Stick to fleecing the rubes (Trump as Superguy NFTs, anyone? How about a Trumpified Bible to go with that?).
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Florida enables the theft of public assets. Public school buildings belong to the public, not the governor.
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Bob – simply YES. You had me at Goodnight Moon
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We teachers out here in the LAUSD have had this narrative and “solution” forced on us this year, and every year when politicians and stuffed suits — who don’t know our city let alone our kids — are making policy for practitioners. Just for once I would like to see how these people would react if we reversed this paradigm. Alas.
This year it takes the name of iReady, which is made by an educorp company called Curriculum Associates out of Massachusetts. Some folks in a room 3000 miles away from my classroom and my kids have been busy making decisions about what is “grade level” and what is expected at those grade levels in terms of linguistic (and computational) literacy.
iReady has a Beginning, Middle, and End of year (BOY, MOY, EOY) diagnostic. So, it is year round testing, which has the added benefit of demoralizing everyone for ten straight months. You sure you want to become a teacher?
Here’s how it works: Based on individual student responses to questions, the AI-powered platform creates lessons that the kids are to complete each week. Yes, it is digital worksheets. No, worksheets still do not grow dendrites. It is Flesh-Kincaid repackaged in animated form and force fed onto students and teachers who must navigate the massive time suck and morale drain every single week in order to get to, you know, teaching.
Must I spell it out?
NOTE: Guess who just received a tersely written email about my students’ reading level based on the EOY diagnostic? Yup. If I am willing to write like this for someone’s blog, imagine what my letters to my administrators, colleagues, and students sound like. May they never feel comfortable in our presence.
I recommend all teachers openly challenge these charlatans selling the science of reading as a “panacea of the moment,” and a measurement of student literacy. Come at me, bro. But you better come at me with more than felonious facts and fallacious premises. Resistance is never futile!
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Wow! That’s a shocking indictment of the willingness of state and local officials to foist mandates on teachers, mandates stuffed with someone else’s wishes and profits.
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I agree. It never fails to shock, which is a bit of a blessing. Sometimes, on darker days, I think their motive is to make us numb so we will quietly comply.
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“If I am willing to write like this for someone’s blog, imagine what my letters to my administrators, colleagues, and students sound like. May they never feel comfortable in our presence.”
As an administrator, I echo your sentiments as we, too, have our “letters to” list.
Your last sentence belongs on posters, bookmarks, and classrooms!
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Random thoughts on teaching reading…
My favorite Poster: “Top 10 to Become a Better Reader: 1. Read. 2. Read. 3. Read. 4. Read. 5. Read. 6. Read. 7. Read. 8. Read. 9. Read. 10. Read”
“Meets Common Core Standards” was the Good Housekeeping Seal to boost textbook, curriculum program (program being the key word), packaged test prep book sales. Now it’s Science of Reading stickers.
Every parent leaving a hospital with a newborn should receive at least 3 of those cloth or cardboard page picture books that infants can hold while they are being held.
Science of reading 5 pillars: They include phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Ok, so what’s new? You use what works when you need that strategy. Diagramming sentences was always fun especially for the right-brained kids who loved the visual.
Kids need to HEAR inspired reading from inspiring people, not ebook or tape.
AN IDEA for BOOKSTORE POSTERS: SCIENCE OF READING RESEARCH CLAIMS the top 5 books to teach when implementing the Science of Reading strategies: Gender Queer, The Hate U Give, Brave New World, and the Color Purple.
Hmm, a spinoff: Parents should protest and challenge “The Science of Reading” Teachers’ Guide as a BANNED BOOK.
Why do they hate the SCIENCE of anything that is actual science but love to smack the label on anything they need to sell (literally and figuratively)?
Now they like science? Ok, Executive order: Science of Reading can only be taught to children who are vaccinated and wearing masks.
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<<Kids need to HEAR inspired reading from inspiring people, not ebook or tape.>>
Amen to that! Few things hit like a live reading of Zora Neale Hurston or Chuck Palahniuk or Homer or… My master teacher brought Hamlet to life for seniors like nobody’s business. She taught me how to do the same.
This week it was Tim Obrien’s The Things They Carried. Kids were mesmerized. You know it’s good when a 16 year old stops the reading to Google what a Bouncing Betty is and then gives me permission to continue. The magic and joy of that moment.
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I need some details before I can gibe an educated reply to the program.
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I was curious about this ADM district in the article, so I crawled around looking for enrollment/demographics information. A tiny, nearly all white, wealthy district, around 2000 total enrollment. Few SPED, no ELL. So ADM is being lifted up as a shining example of SOR. Here’s the best part. For the last several years, Iowa has changed the weights of their inputs that they use to calculate the overall score for a school (I examined the high school in this example). So in 2021 (3 years ago, terrible reading scores!), post-Covid the scores were lower. Not by much, but some, like nearly every school in the country. Then, Iowa did this:”New school index scores and school rating categories have been calculated with data from the 2020-2021 school year and are displayed on the ISPP for the 2021 reporting year. Some one-year changes to how index scores are calculated to accommodate pandemic-related impacts to the data were made, such as reducing the weight of the Growth measure and increasing the weight of the Proficiency measure to compensate. ” So, now you’ve got some new methodology, coupled with changing weighting of the overall index scoring over time. And, somehow, SOR is responsible for ADM’s “improvement”. Are they kidding? What a statistical joke they are playing on all of us. Except we are smart enough to already know what the punch line is.
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I’m saddened at this because a top-down policy dictate is so not Iowa. The state I knew was proud that each district chose its own curriculum.
SteveA
Get Outlook for Androidhttps://aka.ms/AAb9ysg ________________________________
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We have fallen prey to the hubris of the district and state and federal micromanagers. Each works assiduously to defend and expand his or her turf. I don’t know how we go back from this, but it has been disastrous. People do not work well in conditions of low autonomy.
Prepare teachers well. Then leave them TF alone to do their jobs, with assistance, of course, from their colleagues.
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This is an interesting article and comments for those of us in Oregon, especially for me as someone who founded and led a national non-profit that focused on helping teachers use research and best practice to improve their classroom practice. Oregon is currently in the early implementation of a major early literacy initiative driven by the lousy scores here, as in most states. Oregon is a solidly local control state with 197 districts ranging in student populations from 15-44000, each with their own autonomous boards. Virtually none of the teachers who came through the prep programs over the past twenty years had ANY preparation in how to teach reading, none. Do they need Professional Development? You bet! Do the teacher prep programs need revision? Yup. Our governor made early literacy a top priority and, no surprise, urged districts to employ “research-based practices” aka the science of reading in order to get grant money. Let’s be clear: the science of reading phrase refers to a body of research, not a specific program. So, folks are being incentivized to use research to improve practice. Is there anything wrong with that? Will vendors make money? Of course. But who decides what to purchase? Local adminstrators in a state like Oregon. Our situation is nothing like what was carried out in Mississippi, where a system of support was funded and sustained. Will most of our districts improve the performance of their students based on the all mighty 3rd grade reading test coupled to the Common Core? Sadly, I predict no. And the failure won’t be because they pursued the science of reading. Securing significant change in instructional practice is tough and not quick and we’d do well to not simply pick a scapegoat to target when we’re dealing with complicated humans in a complex and fraught enterprise like public education today.
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I quickly reviewed the linked materials on the Science of Reading and find much to recommend them. They acknowledge the complexity inherent in the act of reading and provide for addressing individual needs, responding in unique ways to each student rather than adopting a single method for everyone. HOWEVER, once again, nothing in the approach recognizes the importance of emotional engagement in motivating and improving readers. The captivating story, the intriguing idea or fact, the recognition of experiences both like and unlike our own are the very reasons we read at all. The brain is not merely a cognitive apparatus but an emotional one, with strong feelings linked to memory incorporated into virtually every cognitive decision we make. For all their oversights, this is what “Whole Language” approaches got right. The reasons I, an adult, read have absolutely nothing to do with the goal of passing a test that scores me “proficient” in decoding and comprehension, and I believe there are psychological (emotional) reasons that setting that as the obsessive focus actually discourages children from reading.
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