The Reading Instruction Straw Man Is Burning

 

The Science of Anecdotes and Metaphors by Paul Thomas

"Zero Phonics. This view claims that direct teaching is not necessary or even helpful. I am unaware of any professional who holds this position." Stephen Krashen (2017)

Read on Substack

Can a Robot Teach Like a Robot?

For the past 50 years, at least, the Direct Instruction mafia has lobbied, twisted research findings, and created or supported a host of conservative "think” tanks (with lots of influence and much less expertise to match) to advance an antiquarian chain gang method of scripted instruction, aimed at black, brown, and poor kids in underfunded public schools. 

These marginalized schools are increasingly segregated and the families whose children attend them are increasingly the victims of economic and governmental policies that have achieved steroidal growth in income inequality over this same 50 year time period.  These two factors, segregation and income inequality, are the chief reasons for the continuing achievement chasms that persist and that, in turn, help reformers rationalize even harsher measures that further isolate and dehumanize poor kids with the lockdown no excuses approach enhanced by Direct Instruction.

If it weren't all about the conscious and unconscious bias, cruelty, control, and racism enmeshed in the Direct Instruction phenomenon, there are quite simple policy solutions to the sharp differences in achievement levels.  And if states and/or the feds would focus on these three policy initiatives—socioeconomic integration, expansion and permanent extension of the SNAP benefits and the  earned income tax credit (EITC), and high-quality universal pre-K— the achievement gaps would begin to shrink immediately and continue to shrink over time, while the feudal remonstrations by Direct Instruction advocates against humane, inclusive, inquiry-based learning could be properly told to ship out!

Back in the disturbing unreality of our current fascist milieu, however, the Skinnerian excesses of Direct Instruction continue to be the chosen schooling method by reformers (see this excellent documented critique) and the politicians they own for poor and marginalized populations. It is cheap, isolating, appropriately oppressive (designed by the privileged for marginalized students in need of the most stringent control measures), and parrot learning often produces at least temporary gains on test scores (the racist and classist proxy for learning that can be waved about as proof that robotic methods are the best for teaching poor kids). 

Most importantly, perhaps, for those that push Direct Instruction, DI is a method that requires no evidence of thinking beyond the most basic comprehension, few questions and fewer interations with others, and no creativity or thinking outside the box. In short, it is the perfect training for jobs that require workers to follow orders, keep their mouths shut, and to accept their failure (if it occurs) as faults of their own. 

But in these days robots, when tech bros have wet dreams about having their “minds” uploaded into an AI supercloud, robots have come a long way. Robots of today no longer speak in a mechanistic monotone or walk like Boris Karloff in the old Frankenstein movies. 

Witness the one below strolling with Melania, who does her best runway approach, while the robot beside her walks with only a slightly human uncertain lurch, sort of like Melania’s husband approaching a stairway.

And how about 1950s travelogue background music! This shiny plastic Figure 3, the robot with the innocent voice of a 9th grade Valley girl reading her book report, is among the latest AI product lines from Silicon Valley.  Melania, who calls Figure 3 “Plato,” would like “Plato" and its clones to replace teachers in high poverty schools in need the best robot teachers that Silicon Valley can produce.  Those would be the same schools discussed above, the most segregated and disadvantaged ones that middle class parents would never allow Nora and Ezra to even know about, much less attend.  

The leafy suburban publics and the expensive privates need talented humans, rather than robots, who actually engage the Socratic method (preferably, without any technology), which was Plato’s (the real one) method of instruction.  While the plastic and silicon Plato can dispense more facts and concepts than any million students could ever regurgitate, the nurturing of a real dialogue with children in order to spark emotion and creativity is another matter.  We may hope, at least, these regiments of plastic “Platos" have at least been debugged enough so that children aren’t instructed in various suicide techniques.

Sure, it will be expensive to replace a couple million teachers with Figure 3s, but think of all the billionaire ideological advantages and the savings that will accrue when corporate ed reformers can eliminate educators and their salaries, retirement, and other benefits. Wow, just wow!

As for the disciples of direct instruction? Would the flawless universal delivery of DI instruction to every marginalized child in every underfunded segregated school in America be the equivalent of the pedagogical Rapture?  Or would the potential obliteration of the lucrative DI empire built on vast consulting networks and textbook/software product lines turn DI worshippers into devout skeptics?

Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

Below is an open online letter from Ira Socol to the President.  I have ventured to add a few comments and a couple of video clips.  

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to discuss the things you believe are "innovative in education," just so I might assure you that in this field - in the field of America's future - your administration is doing irreparable harm.

 "Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes." Yes, the first thing KIPP teaches is Calvinist church behaviour. "They all called out at once, “Nodding!"' Yes. Stare at your master. Sit still. Nod to demonstrate your compliance. Speak in unison according to the script.

Mr. President, this is not innovation. We know this formula. It drove the colonialist education systems of Wales and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the hallmark of British Colonial Schools from Lagos to Cape Town to Delhi. It was the path followed by the U.S. government's Indian Schools.

It is the well-worn path of imperial cultures. Force those not born "like" the elite to first convert, and then run in a futile attempt to "catch up."

Mr. President, is that what you would want for your daughters?

The KIPP "SLANT" idea, shown below being introduced by a smug rich guy I cannot identify, is reductionist education which assumes that children of color are incapable of the kind of rich learning available to their wealthy, white counterparts.

[Ira, that old white guy's name is Tom Snyder, who used to develop and market some excellent collaborative learning software before such notions were made irrelevant by the present era of Test and Punish that the Oligarchs call accountability.  No, no, not for the banksters and casino capitalists, but for the fat cat teachers.  But I digress.  Now, however, instead of developing software, Snyder is developing tools for the K-12 corporate classroom like contracts that students and teachers sign based on the KIPP chain gang work model.  Listen again carefully to his intro: "It's not a metaphor, it's an acronym for the KIPP schools, it's the word SLANT, and a lot of you might have read about this.  These are school, the KIPP schools, are working very well in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where, I don't know the kind of districts you guys are from, but these are challenging [knowing nod to communicate black and scary], these are highly volatile, highly poor, highly damaged, and they've been working in Chicago, Louisiana, uh, I don't, off the top of my head I don't know the other cities . . . .]

But let us notice, white kids don't learn that way...

President Obama, I believe that every child in this nation deserves the kind of creative, exciting, and culturally open education your children are getting at Sidwell Friends. And I believe that forcing a traditional concept of attention on children in order to make them "white enough" to be unthreatening second-class citizens is wrong on every level.

Let me quote this from the Middle School at Sidwell: "We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds. We offer these students a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.  We encourage these students to test themselves in athletic competition and to give expression to their artistic abilities.  We draw strength from silence—and from the power of individual and collective reflection."

Now let us see how much less KIPP kids get: "KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School will create an environment where the students of Lynn will develop the academic skills, intellectual habits and character traits necessary to maximize their potential in high school, college and the world beyond." "Academic Skills - Calculate accurately - Read fluently - Write effectively - Comprehend fundamental knowledge." "KIPP Academy Lynn will relentlessly focus on high student performance on standardized tests and other objective measures."

What research is it, Mr. President, that Secretary Duncan cites to indicate that the students of KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School deserve so much less - of life, of creativity, of respect, of freedom, than your daughter's classmates at Sidwell?

No Mr. President, KIPP Academies are not innovation. They are the oldest colonialist form of oppression in the school manual. They are institutions of the elite's cultural power, and their purpose is to protect the elites by ensuring that underclass children will never catch up.

But, if you really want to prove me wrong, send your daughters to a KIPP Academy. Your i3 grants mean there should be one coming to the White House neighbourhood soon.

- Ira Socol

Thanks, Ira.  Here are some more of the dangerous black children that Tom Snyder has contracts for, this time learning how to walk the line in the parrot learning chain gangs that became so popular during the Reading First heyday of corruption that was led by the direct instruction gurus at the University of Oregon, the same ones who manipulated Reading First so that 46 states ended up adopting these methods for Title I schools, i. e. poor children:

Notice the invisible straightjackets that the children are wearing later in the clip:

Gary Stager's "The Surge Against First Graders"

From Huffington Post, posted May 8:

by Gary Stager

When overseas colleagues criticize American foreign policy, I've been known to respond, "If you like Iraq, you'll love what the Bush administration has done to public education." Late last week, the US Department of Education proved my point when they released the Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report.

Like the invasion of Iraq or the disastrous Katrina aftermath, Reading First is the latest in a string of colossal failures of the Bush administration. As in the other cases of malfeasance, the White House is spinning news of the Reading First fiasco. This denial of culpability has gone unchallenged by the mainstream media disinterested in matters of education policy. Children and our economic security are the ultimate losers.

Reading First is the centerpiece of the Bush Administration's unprecedented takeover of public education, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Public school teachers and students have endured a half dozen years of terror as NCLB used shame, blame and crackpot theories to turn classrooms into Dickensian test-prep sweatshops devoid of creativity, joy or relevance. Veteran educators were handed scripts to follow, rather than teach.

The recent report concludes, "Reading First did not improve students' reading comprehension... The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level." In other words, a $6 billion federal program spending had no positive impact. Additionally, local school districts have made inestimable investments to support Reading First.

The failure of Reading First represents more than a course correction for a well-intentioned attempt to benefit the nation's children. Reading First was rife with politics, contempt for professional educators and conflicts of interest from the outset. It is particularly ironic that an administration insistent that every classroom practice must adhere to "scientifically-based research," to the exclusion of research it did not like, continues to insist that Reading First should be the law of the land, despite its own evidence to the contrary.

How did we get here?

Faulty Intelligence
Like the invasion of Iraq, Reading First was justified with ideological theories and bogus intelligence. NCLB and Reading First were based on the purported success of the "Houston Miracle" from when George W. Bush was Governor of Texas and his first secretary of education, Rod Paige, was the Superintendent of the Houston Schools. Although the "miracle" was quickly exposed as a fraud in which data was cooked in an Enron-like fashion and at-risk students disappeared, Congress decided that what flopped so spectacularly in Houston should be applied to the nation.

Profiteering
Reading First has its own Halliburton and Blackwater-like profiteers. In 2006, I wrote an analysis of the Department of Education Inspector General's report detailing the widespread corruption, cronyism and fraud endemic in Reading First. Untested and obscure strategies, such as Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) reduced reading to a series of one-minute tests of mechanics having nothing to do with students understanding what they read. DIBELS went from obscurity to ubiquity virtually overnight and made millions for its creators.

A handful of textbook publishers were greatly enriched while others were demonized and their books declared ineligible for purchase. Internal Department of Education memos indicate a conscious effort to create winners and losers in the marketplace. Before being forced to resign in 2006, Reading First Director Christopher Doherty called representatives from publishers the program shunned "dirtbags" and "would-be party crashers" and said, "We need to beat the [expletive] out of them."

The Connection to September 11, 2001
Reading First even has connections to 9/11. As the terrorists attacked the United States, President Bush was in a classroom where a teacher read The Pet Goat to a group of young children. The trip was part of a calculated campaign to sell No Child Left Behind and Reading First.

The Pet Goat is an exercise from a "literary classic" titled, Reading Mastery 2, by the father of Direct Instruction, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. In the 1960s, Engelmann invented a controversial pedagogical approach that reduces knowledge to bite-sized chunks presented in a prescribed sequence enforced by a scripted lesson the teacher is to recite to a classroom of pupils chanting predetermined responses. Every single word the teacher is to utter, including permissible and prohibited words of encouragement, are provided. There is no room for individuality. The Direct Instruction Web site states, "The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instructional practices."

Engelmann also said, "We don't give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels."

Engelmann's publisher, textbook giant, McGraw-Hill, has ties to the Bush family dating back to the 1930s. Company namesakes served on George W. Bush's transition team and the board of his mother's literacy foundation. The publishers received honors from both Bush administrations and they in turn bestowed awards on Secretary Rod Paige, who then keynoted their business conference. The company's former executive vice president was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, National Intelligence Czar and current Assistant Secretary of State, John Negroponte. Direct instruction became synonymous with the "scientifically based methods" required by No Child Left Behind and Reading First.

Direct Instruction appears as effective at teaching reading comprehension as the War in Iraq is at spreading democracy.

Enemies Everywhere
On February 23, 2004, then Education Secretary, Rod Paige called the nation's largest teacher's union, "a terrorist organization" during a meeting with the National Governor's Association. Two years earlier, Reid Lyon, one of the architects of NCLB and Reading first said the following in a government-sponsored forum, "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education." These are just two examples of the paranoia manifest by the "you're either with us or against us" worldview, even when the declared enemies happen to be your child's teacher.

The Surge
Underlying Reading First is one of the religious right's favorite issues, phonics instruction. Educators have long understood that some students need help sounding out words while learning to read. However, the "reading wars" is an offensive by neoconservatives and religious fundamentalists convinced that every child learns to read in exactly the same way by being taught 43 phonemic sounds in a lockstep sequence. Some suspect that the promotion of "highly structured, systematic sequential explicit phonics" instruction is a Trojan horse for public school privatization while others suggest that phonics is embraced by religious fundamentalists happy to reduce reading to the literal interpretation of text. Either way, Reading First is the federal government's program for mandating uniform phonics instruction. Any parent who has watched a child spontaneously learn to read must question mechanistic theories of human development that oversimplify complex issues.

The Department of Education's attempt to spin the devastating conclusions of their own Reading First evaluation demonstrates how they are fueled by phonics fanaticism and choose failed ideology over science. The Department of Education made the incredulous claim that the Secretary of Education planned to look at the study "to inform our efforts," and would "look forward to reviewing the final report." Then they started spinning.

According to the May 1st edition of USA Today,

"On the plus side, researchers found that Reading First teachers spent more time emphasizing phonics and other aspects of what many experts consider solid instruction -- about 10 minutes more a day, or nearly an hour more a week. "Teachers' behavior was changed," Institute of Education Sciences Director Whitehurst says.

The White House wants us to believe that teachers spending more time executing a failed strategy is cause for celebration. Reading First doesn't work, but the good news is teachers are doing more of it -- all in the name of science. Got it?

Mission accomplished!

Apparently, what our schools really need is a phonics surge against little children, the collateral victims of Reading First.

Just Saying No to Abstinence Only Funding Is Only A Start

From the NY Times:

New York is rejecting millions of dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, the state health commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, announced yesterday. The decision puts New York in line with at least 10 other states that have decided to forgo the federal money in recent years.

New York has received roughly $3.5 million a year from the federal government for abstinence-only education since 1998. The abstinence program was approved as part of welfare overhauls under the Clinton administration and was expanded and restructured under President Bush.

In a statement posted on the Health Department’s Web site, Dr. Daines said, “The Bush administration’s abstinence-only program is an example of a failed national health care policy directive.” He added that the policy was “based on ideology rather than on sound scientific-based evidence that must be the cornerstone of good public health care policy.”

The state had also spent $2.6 million annually to fund the same programs over the last decade. That money will now be spent on other existing programs for sex education, Dr. Daines said in an interview. . . .

Now if New York and other states would just say to the behavioral literacy training that the lead quacks, Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine, have packaged as reading instruction for the poor, we could begin, perhaps, to repair the damage done to millions of American children who are taught how NOT to think for several hours of every day.

By the way, the other day when I was sharing with my students some of the pornographic clips from the Association for Direct Instruction website, one student commented on the ominous music behind the clinical narration. He noted that only the harmonica is missing to truly make it jailhouse-worthy. Effective Behavior Management, now that's a good one. Taking it off here, Boss!

Maybe we should send some of these videos to the ghouls in charge of Friday nite programming at the Prison Channel, MSNBC--call it Prison Prep or Carnine's Cages!! How about Reid's Redemption?

Reading First and Direct Instruction: A Reprise

For those who would like a good summary of events and players within the Reading First corruption crimes brought to full light last year, check out this one at Institute for Language and Education Policy. Here is a brief clip related to Reid Lyon's handsome young Direct Instruction disciple and protege, Chris Doherty, who was hand selected by Lyon and Neuman to head the billion dollar a year federal program with credentials that would not justify appointment to a principalship (good background on Chris here):

The three people Doherty nominated with connections to DI reviewed 23 state applications, according to the OIG. When a Baltimore school official complained to the department about possible conflicts, the report said, Doherty e-mailed one of the panelists he had selected, “You know the line from Casablanca, ‘I am SHOCKED that there is gambling going on in this establishment!’ Well, ‘I am SHOCKED that there are pro-DI people on this panel!’”

Based on this and other e-mail exchanges with the panelists, the OIG concluded that Doherty’s actions exhibited an “apparent intent to include and give a significant role to panelists who reflected his personal preference in reading programs.” In fact, said the OIG, Doherty’s response to a similar internal e-mail discussing Reading Recovery “suggest[s] that he may indeed have intended to ‘stack’ the expert review panel.”

In another instance, the report said, Doherty worked to ensure that a commercial reading program that relies on DI was featured more prominently in Maryland’s list of reading programs used by the state’s districts and schools to qualify for Reading First funds. Reading Mastery, published by SRA-McGraw Hill, is the most widely used reading program to utilize DI. Doherty said in an e-mail that “we need to ENSURE that when MD *does* do its application ... that Reading Mastery is NOT relegated to supplemental status, which would be HORRIBLE for so many ... schools in Balt[imore].”

Subsequent to Doherty’s intervention, according to the OIG report, Reading Mastery became one of Maryland’s seven core reading programs, raising “a question as to whether he was acting with the restraint envisioned by Congress.”

In poking around at the Association for Direct Instruction yesterday, I came across the announcement for THE 22ND ANNUAL ATLANTIC COAST DIRECT INSTRUCTION CONFERENCE & INSTITUTE. And kicking off the Conference in Harrisburg this year is none other than Mrs. Doherty, Laura, who has been a trainer now at ADI since the late 1990s, long before her husband was put in charge of force feeding a chain gang curriculum to America's poor schools. I would guess that business is booming.

Essentials of Coaching................................................Laura Doherty

Direct Instruction: Learning for Rats, Applied to Children

In a recent post of a post from Daily Kos that summarized a speech by Jim Cummins, the author noted the following:

Cummins challenged educational practices resulting from federal No Child Left Behind legislation, with its emphasis on standardized tests and consequent teaching "to the tests," saying instructional approaches now being imposed are something that most in the audience wouldn’t want their own children to suffer. These approaches have, he said, more to do with teaching rats than humans. He urged his audience to reclaim good instruction with attention to the lessons of social constructionism instead of treating students with a behaviorist approach in which, as B.F. Skinner proved, even pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong.

One prominent venue for training the trainers of poor children in the new mind control (not so new, really) is the Association for Direct Instruction, a spin-off of the U. of Oregon's Reading First mafia headed by Doug Carnine and Roland Good.

Here principals and teachers come to receive the gospel according to Siegfried Engelmann, whose Direct Instruction has become today's federally-sanctioned child abuse for poor children. DI is a steroidal scripted behaviorist methodology very popular with urban school policymakers and the Reading First thugs who make their curricular choices for them in Title I schools.

No middle class suburban parent would ever permit this kind of cognitive decapitation of their children.


As you have a look at these video clips here, count how many white children are in these groups. By the way, note the spelling in the title of the first clip below of "explanation" and "othography." Orthography is the study of the correct spelling and usage of words. You could not make this stuff up.