1.
Reading Recovery is an intervention for kids in grade one who are struggling to
read.
2. Reading recovery requires teachers who are specially trained to use Reading
Recovery (RR) assessments and methods. RR provides many sites around the
world for this training.
3.
Reading recovery is
one-on-one. Sessions are given daily, for about 30 minutes, and for about 20
weeks.
4.
Well over a million children have been in RR, in 49 of the
5.
RR costs anywhere from $2000 to $8000 or more per child. You read that
right! Two to eight grand!! FIRST GRADE! How tough could the
problem BE?
6.
RR can use up ALL of a school's Title I funds. I know of schools serving
poor kids ("90% free or reduced lunch") that spend over $125,000 per
year on RR. These funds could have been used to buy every graduating
fifth grader a computer or a set of the most important books in the world, or
to buy better beginning reading curricula.
7. Serious questions are raised about the validity of RR assessment instruments (and therefore data), the assignment of children to intervention groups, and about claims of effectiveness. For example, one objective (and claim to effectiveness) is that students end the RR intervention at least in the range of average for their classroom. This NORM referenced criterion is not terribly useful. What if the average for a class is low? A similar example would be claims that a drug will lower your blood pressure to the average for your community. Not a good thing if the average is 155/120!
8.
The RR website has recently been changed. RR is now presented in a way
that makes it appear to be perfectly consistent with the preponderance of
research—what reading is (the five main skills) and how best to teach it (systematically
and explicitly). I am not accusing anyone of duplicity, but it is a fact
that RR has not been considered consistent with the tenets of Reading First,
and therefore could not be used by states that wanted to receive Reading First
funds. I am not saying that the RR website was changed for political and
financial reasons. I’m just sayin,…whata coincidence!
9.
Which is the wisest hypothesis if some kids are struggling to read in grade
one?
a. These kids have something wrong with them,
and need a special intervention that costs from 2 to 8 thousand dollars per
kid.
b.
The beginning (core) reading curriculum is not adequate for some kids—just as a
standard diet does not give some kids the amount of iron they need. We
should examine the core curriculum in light of principles of sound design
and, if indicated, get a better one.
We
should also get good supplemental and intervention programs and create a
complete curriculum. We should use the supplemental and intervention
programs with kids in grade one who are struggling (much cheaper and there is
every reason to believe they would work). And we should pilot test the
new complete curriculum to see if the percentage of struggling readers decreases.
If there are still a few struggling readers, we should give diagnostic tests to see if
they have phonological processing problems (e.g., they
can't easily hear the separate sounds in words; they can’t quickly transform a
thought into a spoken word; they have poor short term memory, and therefore
forget the word they are sounding out), and, if so, give them specialized
interventions noted above.
10. RR has some features of a cult.
Its advocates identify closely with RR. They (in my experience) are true
believers in its theory and methods. They are not open to criticism or to
data from experimental research that questions the efficacy of RR or the
validity of its theory of reading.
11.
Whole
language and RR are similar in many ways—qualitative and subjective
assessments; teaching kids to use cues OTHER than the letters to identify what
words say.
Sometimes
I think RR is "remediation" for kids who were mistaught by whole language. Wouldn't THAT be an
interesting bit of research? How many kids taught to read with a solid
core curriculum qualify for RR?
12.
RR is emblematic of much that is wrong in the field of education.
**Administrators
implementing programs with no credible information on how well it works,
without a serious examination of their own curriculum to see how exactly the
new program fits, and with no idea of alternative programs.
**Teachers
in ed schools NOT being taught enough about a
knowledge system (reading, math, history) or about instructional design or
about the canons of credible research that they can judge the logical and
empirical adequacy of the programs their perfessers
preach to them.
**The
program, or method, or curriculum, or innovation is organized as a
closed system that perpetuates and at the same time hides its inadequacies.
For example, if you include memorizing words, holding a book properly, and
identifying print (e.g., signs on the wall), as examples of early reading
skills, then whole language appears to be effective—even though (given a sane
definition of reading) the kids aren't reading.
And
of you define success as bringing kids up to the average reading level in a
class--even if the average--in a CRITERION referenced sense—is low (the average
kids can't read worth a dang!)--then RR looks effective.
And
so, uniformed principals and ill-educated teachers cling to whatever methods that
now have a history in the system, and on which they've spent so much money and
time and effort. And the inadequacies of the method harm kids year and
year after year.
Following
is an extended examination of RR.
Review
of Research on Reading Recovery
A
number of empirical considerations render Reading Recovery a questionable
intervention for early elementary students who need instruction to ensure and
to accelerate: (1) the acquisition of essential elemental reading skills (e.g.,
phonemic awareness, sound/symbol correspondence, decoding strategies); and (2) fluent
reading with high comprehension (Adams, 1990; Blachman
et al., 1999; Brett, Rothlein, & Hurley, 1996;
Castle, Riach, & Nicholson, 1994; Cunningham,
1990; Davidson & Jenkins, 1994; Faulkner & Levy, 1999; Levy,
Nicholls, & Kohen, 1993; O'Connor, Jenkins, &
Slocum, 1995; Pressley et al., 1989; Pressley et al., 1994; Stuart, 1999; Vandervelden & Siegel, 1997). These
considerations include the following.
1.
Essential design features of Reading Recovery conflict with the preponderance
of scientific research and with the guidelines of Reading First.
2.
By emphasizing meaning and context-cue guessing over first teaching children
directly, systematically, and comprehensively to read and comprehend words by
using the code, Reading Recovery provides struggling readers with too little of
the skills they need to become proficient readers.
3.
Reading Recovery is less effective than it purports to be and does not provide
many struggling readers with the skills they need.
4.
Reading Recovery's evaluation methods and data appear to be unreliable,
overly-subjective, and invalid with respect to individual student progress and
the cost-effectiveness of Reading Recovery at school, district, and state
levels.
5.
Reading Recovery appears to violate principles of equity.
6.
Reading Recovery is very expensive.
7.
Reading Recovery does not appear to foster needed school-level reform of
reading curricula.
8.
There are more cost-effective approaches than Reading Recovery to beginning and
early remedial reading.
The Essential Design Features
of Reading Recovery Conflict With the Preponderance of
Scientific Research and With the Guidelines of Reading First.
Reading Recovery rests on the
assumption that reading is a problem solving process. Readers scan the
lines and the page for cues, make predictions about what words say and which
words come next, cross-check (using more cues), and correct errors. In
this view, a child's sense of the meaning of sentences is the child's main
guide to what words say—rather than what words say being the main guide to what
a sentence means. Therefore, in Reading Recovery, children are taught to
use many other kinds of meaning "cues" before they are taught to use
"phonics"--knowledge of sound/symbol relationships (m says /m/)--to
decode and comprehend words. These nonphonic
cues include the size and shape of words, layout of the print, pictures on the
page, analogies between known and unknown words, word order, syntax, and
special knowledge from past experience. Indeed, Reading Recovery teachers
are told that stressing sound/symbol knowledge (as in word attack, decoding, or
sounding out words) diverts from comprehension. The founder of Reading
Recovery, Marie Clay, states:
In efficient
rapid word perception, the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning
and some selected features of the forms of words (Clay, 1991, p.8).
With meaning as
both guide and goal, the reader checks what he thinks the text will say with
visual information, and by carrying out analytic manipulations (Clay, 1991, p.
235).
We have
minimized the explicit teaching of phonics. We have taught the child a
variety of procedures for analyzing words into sounds…" (Clay,
1979, p. 64).
However, in
contrast to practices in Reading Recovery, instruction is more effective when
children--especially struggling or at-risk readers--first master the
"code" (sound/symbol relationships) than when they try to figure out
words from the meaning-context (Foorman, 1995).
Reading words using the code--knowledge of sound/symbol relationships (m says
/m/)--is the primary strategy used by good readers, and is the most reliably
effective and safest method for teaching both beginning and struggling readers
(Adams & Bruck, 1993; Blachman
et al., 1999; Foorman et al., 1998; Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997;
Lyon, 1996; Pressley, 1998; Torgeson et al.,
1999). The following statements summarize the preponderance of research
on this issue.
Skilled reading is not sampling features of the text on the run, it is not a
psycholinguistic guessing game, and it is not incidentally visual.
Rather, research has shown that 'skilled readers process virtually all the
words they encounter in connected text, and typically, all the letters in those
words' (Vellutino, 1991, p. 82). Research
further indicates that skilled readers are sufficiently fast and accurate at recognising words in text to make reliance on contextual
information unnecessary (Perfetti, 1985). (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993, p. 167).
NICHD and
substantial non-NICHD research does not support the claim that the use of
context is a proxy for applying decoding strategies to unknown or unfamiliar
words…The strategy of choice among well-developed readers is to decode letters
to sound in an increasingly complete and accurate manner, which is dependent
upon robust development of phonemic and phonics skills (Lyon, 1999).
…the scientific
evidence is simply overwhelming that letter-sound cues are more important in
recognizing words than either semantic or syntactic cues" (Pressley, 1998,
p. 16) and that heavy reliance on semantic and syntactic cues is a
"disastrous strategy" for beginning readers (p. 32).
Reading Recovery is a 12 to 20
week, daily intervention for struggling readers in grade One.
It costs anywhere from $2000 to $8000 per student. Yet, there is strong
reason to question the claims of RR advocates that RR is effective and worth
the price. Basically, there is a lot of good research that says it doesn't work.
Why, then, is it RR popular--often
the reading intervention of choice? I will offer some reasons at the
conclusion.
Let us now continue with our
analysis.
Reading
Recovery rests on the premise that teachers should emphasize context-cue
guessing over first teaching children directly, systematically, and
comprehensively to read (recognize words and comprehend) by using the code.
However, a major reason why children struggle with reading in the first place,
and are selected for Reading Recovery and other remedial programs, is that they
(1) have not mastered phonemic awareness and sound/symbol relationships, and
therefore (2) cannot fluently (accurately and rapidly) read words, and
therefore (3) they cannot comprehend (or they quickly lose the sense of) what
they are reading (Tunmer et al., 1998).
In other words, struggling readers
use context-cue guessing, and they do this precisely because they are not skilled
at the most efficient strategy--namely, sounding out words (Nicholson, 1991; Raynor & Pollatsek, 1989).
Indeed, children who use contextual guessing and picture cues are 4.5 times
more likely to require Reading Recovery after one year of reading instruction
(Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow,
2001, p. 146). Furthermore,
The word recognition skills of
these children remain relatively weak because they do not develop as rich a
network of sublexical connections between
orthographic and phonological representations in lexical memory as normally
developing readers (Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, 2001, p. 144).
By teaching struggling readers to use context-cue guessing (which
is part of the reason they can't read to begin with!) rather than
systematically and comprehensively teaching the code, Reading Recovery appears
to decrease these children's later chances of being good readers, because (1)
in more advanced text, the most important and informative words are harder to
guess from the context; and (2) more advanced texts provide fewer and fewer
context cues from which students might try to derive meaning (Schatz &
Baldwin, 1986). Therefore, it would be expected that any benefits of Reading
Recovery in grade 1 would diminish rapidly as text difficulty increases in
higher grades, where context-cue guessing will not work. This is exactly
what does happen, as discussed in the next section.
Moreover, recent research shows
that children in Reading Recovery learn to read better when explicit phonics
instruction is added to a
For example, evaluation research
shows that:
1. "…participation in the RR programme did not
eliminate or reduce (the) phonological processing deficits" that in part
define children as struggling readers (Chapman, Tunmer,
& Prochnow, 1999, 2001).
2. The progress of Reading Recovery
students remained "persistently well below that of the ND ("Normally
Developing") children" (Chapman, Tunmer,
& Prochnow, J.E., 1999).
3. "The RR group obtained
significantly lower scores than the ND group on all reading performance
measures on each of the three post-RR testing occasions… (Chapman,
Tunmer, & Prochnow,
2001, p. 165).
4. Following Reading Recovery,
"…RR children performed relatively poorly in terms of word identification,
reading comprehension, classroom book reading level, and reading accuracy"
(Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow,
1999, 2001, p. 165).
5. In a large study of Ohio's
Reading Recovery, only 53% of the children eligible for Reading Recovery scored
at the classroom average on book level measures by the end of grade 1 (Battelle, 1995).
6. "RR failed to significantly
improve the literacy development of children considered to have succeeded in
the program: RR children showed no signs of accelerated reading
performance, and one year after completion of the programme,
they were performing at around one year below age-appropriate levels"
(Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow,
1999).
7. Twelve months after they were
"discontinued" (i.e., finished with Reading Recovery), about 35% of children
continued to benefit, about 35% were no longer "recovered," and
"The remaining 30% probably would have improved without such intensive
intervention, since a similar percentage of control and comparison students had
reached average reading levels by this stage" (Center et al., 1995, p.
241).
8. Children who received Reading
Recovery gained 4.6 book levels at time of discontinuation over children who
needed remediation but did not receive Reading Recovery. However, at
follow-up, the RR advantage dropped to 2.4 book levels. For the neediest
of struggling readers, the advantage of Reading Recovery was only 1 book level
at follow-up (Glynn & Crooks, 1992).
9. "…by third grade, the
Reading Recovery instructed groups may not be significantly different from the
comparison groups as indicated by measures of text reading" (Shanahan
& Barr, 1995).
10. Regarding comprehension, former Reading Recovery students perform about the
same as comparison groups of struggling readers who did not receive Reading
Recovery. Specifically, "proficient oral reading
performance at Grade 1 has not resulted in self-extending strategies to other
literacy tasks in subsequent grades" (Hiebert,
1994, p. 20).
11. Maintenance of skills taught in
Reading Recovery is low.
For example, even when the primary criterion is a task that is common in RR
tutoring—oral reading of text—levels of maintenance at Grade 4 are low.
In Grade 4, approximately 4 students or 5.5% of the cohort will be able to
orally read text at the average school level and will score at the average
school level on the WRMT-R (Hiebert, 1994, p. 23).
12. For children who completed
Reading Recovery, the average score for Oral Accuracy was the only score which
"met or exceeded grade-level standards," and "The lowest average
score was for Oral Comprehension" (San Diego Unified School District,
1999, p. 4).
13. "Literacy Assessment test
scores indicate first grade students who successfully completed the English
version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower than the control group of
non-participating students on all three sub-tests" (San Diego Unified
School District, 1999, p. 5).
14. "SAT 9 test scores indicate first grade students who successfully
completed the English version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower
than the control group of non-participating students using the internal studies
conducted by the District's RR/DL Program" (San Diego Unified School
District, 1999, p. 5).
15. "…RR children showed
declines in reading self-concept following RR, and they held more negative
perceptions of ability in reading and spelling, and in general academic
self-concept six and twelve months following RR" (Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E.
(1999).
16. Reading Recovery does not
appear to decrease the need for other services, such as special education and
Title I (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 987; Pollack, 1994).
And all this for only 2 to 8 grand per kid!
Reading Recovery Evaluation Appears to
be of Questionable Reliability and/or Validity.
The validity of Reading Recovery
claims to effectiveness is weak in several ways.
1. The validity of findings and
interpretations is threatened by the composition of the treatment group.
In many analyses, only students who are discontinued (i.e., judged successful)
are examined. Some students are omitted because of absences and other learning
problems. Other students begin Reading Recovery but are eliminated at the
teacher's discretion for low potential (Hiebert,
1994). This makes "the program appear more
effective than it really is" (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 991).
2. The major forms of evaluative
data are subjective and may be biased. In Reading Recovery, running
records (a major outcome measure) are used to determine where a child places in
the 20 levels of book difficulty (Clay, 1993). These records are provided by
the Reading Recovery teachers (who have an obvious stake in the outcomes),
rather than by impartial evaluators. Moreover, running records involve
qualitative analysis with a high level of inference. For example, Clay
says, "…you need to look at every error the child makes and ask yourself
'Now what led the child to do (or say) that?'" (Clay,
1993, p. 31).
The possibility of unreliability
and invalidity are underscored by research showing that, although Reading
Recovery teachers rate "discontinued" (i.e., successful) students who
can read books at a level of 16., the same children's classroom teachers rate
the children's reading book level as only 9 (Chapman, Tunmer,
& Prochnow, 1999).
3. The design of many Recovery
evaluations does not rule out the effects of maturation and other learning
experiences (e.g., reading in class and at home) that can account for changes
(Shanahan & Barr, 1995). Again, claims to effectiveness are likely to
be inflated.
Reading Recovery may violate
principles of equity in three ways.
1. A major objective of Reading
Recovery is to bring struggling readers to the average level of first grade
classroom achievement. However, this average level differs markedly from
school to school and community to community. The average school
performance in low income areas is generally at the 20th percentile, while the
average performance in more affluent areas is at the 80th percentile. Therefore,
to bring low-income struggling readers to the 20th percentile sustains their
educationally disadvantaged status (Grossen,
Coulter, & Ruggles, 1996).
Moreover, children who read at the
20th percentile level are not likely to be academically successful later.
Such child need school-wide effective beginning reading programs that aim for
mastery before the end of grade 1.
2. Reading Recovery is designed to
serve the lowest 20 percent of a school population. This may be equitable
in a school with few struggling readers. However, in a school where a majority
of children are struggling readers, serving the lowest performing children will
leave a large percentage of struggling children untreated. In
other words, Reading Recovery is not designed to solve illiteracy problems in
schools with a high proportion of at-risk children.
3. Reading Recovery purports to
work with the lowest achieving readers in a school. However, the most needy
children may be excluded--sometimes because they are judged too difficult to
work with or not likely to benefit. For example, Glynn & Crooks
(1992) report that "Reading Recovery teachers and/or STJCs
in three schools said they would not take particular mainstreamed special needs
children into Reading Recovery as they were 'too slow to go into Reading
Recovery'."
4. In contrast to the explicit
objective of Reading First and the No Child Left Behind legislation--which seek
to produce high reading achievement in all children--Reading Recovery
"never envisioned to recover 50% or more of the children reading below
grade level…It was designed to recover 10 to 20% of struggling readers after
one year of reading instruction using the New Zealand Balanced Reading Programme" (Reutzle, 1999,
p. 323).
Reading Recovery is Very Expensive.
Several studies report the high
costs of Reading Recovery when teacher training, salaries, and materials are
considered.
1. Heibert (1994) calculated that the cost per
successful student was $8,333.
2. Shanahan & Barr (1995)
calculated that Reading Recovery cost between $4600 and $8333 per successful
child.
3. A longitudinal study (1991-98)
by the
In some districts, a child's
one-to-one Reading Recovery (60 lessons) costs more than the entire year's
schooling. Grossen et al., (1996) state that
"the data indicate that the cost for Reading Recovery (30 hours of
instruction for one child) exceeds the national average per pupil expenditure
for one full year of schooling."
Reading Recovery is a one-to-one
pull-out tutoring program for children in grade 1. It is designed to
serve a small number of individual children. It is not the proper solution for
schools and districts serving disadvantaged children--children who come
to school ill-prepared for reading instruction. These schools cannot wait
for children to become struggling readers because of inadequate beginning reading
instruction and/or phonological processing weaknesses (Liberman,
Shankweiler, & Liberman,
1998). Rather, these schools must focus upstream--on prevention of
reading difficulties--rather than wait for problems to emerge in grade 1.
Such prevention requires
school-level or district-level focus on effective reading curricula in pre-k to
grade 1 that will teach children essential skills--such as language, phonemic
awareness, vocabulary, sound/symbol relationships, decoding strategies, and
comprehension strategies (as shown by the preponderance of scientific
research)—so that these children by the end of first grade are becoming
proficient readers who do not need remedial reading (Chall
et al., 1990; Shanahan & Barr, 1995; Torgeson,
1998). Arguably, only a small percentage of first graders
(children with true processing difficulties) would need remediation if they
were properly taught the first time.
There
Are More Cost-effective Approaches Than Reading Recovery to Beginning and Early
Remedial
These cost-effective
alternatives include the following.
1. In light of research cited above
that questions the efficacy of Reading Recovery, it would be wiser for a
district to implement school-wide and district-wide beginning reading
instruction in kindergarten, and even in pre-k for at-risk children, using
field-test curricula that provide direct, systematic, and comprehensive
instruction on language, phonemic awareness, sound/symbol relationships,
decoding (sounding out) strategies, fluency, and comprehension—-rather than
wait for reading problems to emerge and then spend anywhere from $4000 to
$11,000 on Reading Recovery per first grade child.
2. Systematic, explicit classroom
instruction on phonemic awareness and phonics using decodable text was more effective
with Title I children than a Reading Recovery support program. Indeed, it
was found that "It was the classroom curriculum effect, not the tutorial
method effect that was significant (Foorman, Francis,
Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher, 1997, p.16).
3. Reading Recovery students read
better when explicit phonics instruction is added to a Reading Recovery
program; e.g., "rime analogy training" (Greaney,
Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997), segmenting, blending
and riming (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993), and word
study to develop phonological awareness and decoding skill (Santa & Hoein, 1999).
4. Fincher (1991) found that
"…teacher Assistants with almost no training and minimal teaching
materials with which to teach and working in less than desirable conditions,
outperformed the Reading Recovery teachers when their students' overall
achievement was compared" (Fincher (1991).
5. For at-risk or struggling
children, it is reasonable to use standardized, objective instruments for
identifying children's reading difficulties and then providing timely use of
explicit, focused instruction (Lovett & Steinbach, 1997; Torgeson et al., 1999). For example,
a. Lovett et al. (1994) developed a 35 lesson word identification program for
dyslexic students for one hour four times per week. This program achieved
highly significant results with the "core deficit"; namely,
phonological processing and nonword reading skills
(p. 818).
b. O'Conner et al., (1995) provided
a program for at-risk readers. The program lasted five hours (15 minutes
twice weekly for 10 weeks), and taught letter-sounds, segmenting, and
blending. A second experimental group had a wider range of phonemic
awareness activities. The authors conclude that students in both groups
generalized the skills they were taught and used them in the reading process.
c. Hempenstall
(2002) developed and evaluated a 50-hour program for early elementary students
with many of the same reading difficulties of students selected for Reading
Recovery; e.g., below average scores on phonemic awareness, pseudo-word
decoding, picture naming, digit span, and spelling--in other words, precisely
the children whose core phonological deficits are present in most struggling
readers.
Hempenstall used an inexpensive (about $20) program, Teach
Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983). The design features of
this program are consistent with the preponderance of empirical research.
In contrast to one-to-one Reading Recovery, students were taught in a more
efficient group setting. Comparing the remedial reading group and the
wait-list group, Hempenstall found that the remedial
reading group made statistically significant gains in word attack, phonemic
awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, phonological recoding in
working memory, and spelling.
In summary, in view of Reading
Recovery's high cost, its ability to affect only a small number of children in
a school, equivocal evidence of immediate and long-term effectiveness, and
generally subjective measures, and in view of readily-available, effective,
less costly, and pro-active alternatives, a district would be advised seriously
to rethink a plan to use Reading Recovery.
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So, why do so many states,
districts, and schools use Reading Recovery? Here are some reasons.
First, no one who buys RR knows much about
what reading is, how it is best taught, and how it is most-usefully assessed
(for purposes of rational decision making).
Surely, anyone with a bit of
commonsense knows that learning to read takes some effort; its skills must be
taught by a skilled teacher or by a person using a well-designed and scripted
program (just as new surgeons follow a written routine), because even small
error patterns can accumulate into big errors (e.g., reading “d” as “duh”);
that the obviously best way to read words is to use knowledge of what the
letters usually say (phonics) and that guessing using any other cues is NOT
reading and only MAKES you dyslexic (“can’t read”).
Most ed schools have been under the
sway of whole language and its bizarre theory of reading--as a psycholinguistic
guessing game, in which teaching phonics is not only seen as unnecessary but
positively harmful—when in fact NOT teaching phonics makes kids use guessing as
a last resort—and guessing is what illiterate people do. Therefore, most
teachers, reading specialists, and administrators who come out of ed schools are not only ignorant but have a head full of
nonsense. They have NO idea how to teach reading properly. They
have NO idea what a sound curriculum looks like. They have NO idea how to
measure progress in all five of the main reading skills in a reliable and valid
way.
BUT THEY ARE CERTIFIED! In a
few years they have tenure. You think they will be open to criticism?
And, in ed
schools they were indoctrinated by their whole language and RR professors.
Approval and grades were contingent upon chanting and writing the mantras of
whole language and RR. I know of final projects that consist of students
making a poster of their “Literacy philosophy.”
Debbie
and Jenn’s Reading Philosophy
All children have a right to read. [So?]
All children should have access to authentic literature. [Fine, but how
do you teach it?]
Students should be life-long learners. [Whatever that
means. As illiterate adults, they won’t be getting much learning
from books.]
[Debbie and Jenn
are my advisees. They began as bright kids. Now, they are as dumb
as a sack of hammers. So I give them a course in how to teach reading
whenever they come for advising. I won’t let them register until they
perform the teaching routines.]
So, these new teachers get jobs in
schools where what they have learned is EXACTLY how they are supposed to teach.
The circle is now closed.
Some of these teachers become reading coordinators and supervise other
teachers—making sure that they keep teaching kids to guess. “No, don’t
have her sound it out! Ask her, ‘What word do you THINK goes there?’”
Second, the way out of
this maze of ignorance and bad curricular choices is blocked in several
ways. If a school realizes that the percentage of kids who can’t read is
now so high it is obscene (50%?), then they have to do
SOMEthing. Well, who can a school or district call? They call the local ed school. And what does the ed school offer? Reading Recovery.
On the advice of ed schools, administrators will spend all
their Title I funds and spare change on RR. They will have nothing left to buy good
materials, even if they thought that they ought to.
Third, if schools and districts fail to collect quantitative data
on each of the five reading skills, there is no way really to tell why kids
can’t read.
So, schools are left with the default assumption that kids who can't
read must have some kind of disability. Therefore, instead of
critically examining the
reading curriculum or how teachers teach, to see if there is any skill
they are
not teaching, they merely install Reading Recovery. Therefore,
there will be little change in curricula or in teacher behavior.
This means that a steady stream of mistaught children will be available
for remediation each year.
In time, schools get used to having a
certain percentage of kids, and a certain “kind of
kids” not reading. Illiteracy is now normal.
Finally, whole language and RR
reading coordinators, administrators, and ed professors take positions at the state education
agencies. RR is no longer a district choice. It is mandated by the state.
That’s why you have to demand and
support state efforts to make districts and schools accountable.
Why you have to demand
well-designed reading programs and professional development for teachers that
is consistent with the preponderance of research.
Why you have to demand that schools
of education teach reading according to the preponderance of research or lose
accreditation.
This alone may not produce needed
changes but doing nothing surely won't.
The tragedy here is that the needed
change is so small and the benefits are so large.