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

Scripted “Parrot” Learning Is Not in the Best Interests of Children and Society

Reshaping Reading Instruction In U.S. Public Schools to Support the 60% of Children in America who are Coping with Adverse Childhood Experiences and Potentially Life-Long Traumas by Denny Taylor

Read on Substack

The Newest Old Politics of Reading

I subscribe to the Hall Pass Newsletter from Knox County Schools, where I worked as a high school librarian many years ago. 

The most recent issue offered evidence that the current administration has taken the repackaged bait of the phonics fanatics and are running with it.  I took a moment to write a response to this revolting development:

Dear Dr. Wilson:

Reading requires understanding, and none of the mandated exercises that you are bragging about require students to understand anything. The ability to pronounce words or even nonsense syllables is a measurement to the shortsightedness and stupidity of those in charge of this reading pedagogy that was popularized over 250 years ago. 

Like the rest of the Neo-fascist orthodoxy that is now running amok in the country, your “changing the game in literacy” represents several steps backward to an era when pedagogy focused on memorization, recitation, and chain gang rigidity. 

 

“Quick phonics" and "quick spelling" are just tired retreads of an approach most recently tried and failed during the Bush NCLB heyday that began over two decades ago.

More attention to more quality reading materials, validated reading programs, and better school libraries have to be first steps to successful reading outcomes—if you want students to become competent, self-directed, and thoughtful citizens who love reading and who understand what they read. But then, that is not the goal at all, is it, sir?

Instead, KCS has embarked upon campaigns to censor library and classroom collections and, thus, replace teacher enthusiasm with fear and trepidation that they might be fired for not following Christian nationalist dictates that have been approved by the convicted felon now living in the White House.

The people of Knox County deserve leaders who can distinguish leadership from craven kowtowing. 

Sincerely,

James Horn, PhD

Former West High School Librarian (1982-1996)

Reading "Research" Presents More Questions Than Answers

Stephen Krashen recently noted that a "group called The74’s posted an outrageous but slick-looking column":  “Curriculum case study: How grade-level literacy doubled in just two months in a rural Tennessee District.” 

Dr. Krashen posted this comment following the propaganda piece:

Some questions and a comment

 

“Grade level literacy doubled in just two months”  meant that in the beginning of the year, seven first graders were reading at “grade level” and two months later 15 were. Thus, the spectacular headline is based on the improvement of only eight children.  What about the other children?

 

The usual definition of grade level is the 50^th percentile. Did children move from the 49^th to the 51^st percentile or from the 5^th to the 95^th? We have no idea.

 

We also don’t know what kind of tests were used.  We are told only that it is based on the district’s “universal screener.” It has been established that instruction based on the “science of reading” involves heavy phonics. Studies show that heavy phonics results in better pronunciation of words  presented on a list but not in improved comprehension.

Only one case history is provided, a first grader who was “really behind and is now writing stories.” Is she the only one? 

Strong claims about “unprecedented rates of reading growth” should be made of sterner stuff. 

 

Stephen Krashen

Prof Emeritus, University of Southern California

Source: 

The effect of heavy phonics: 

Krashen, S. 2009. Does intensive reading instruction contribute to reading comprehension? Knowledge Quest 37 (4): 72-74. https://tinyurl.com/jc6x8mk

British Study Finds Phonics Fanaticism "is uninformed and failing children"

 A new British study reported in The Guardian finds that the imbalance created by dependence on phonics in reading instruction to the exclusion of balanced literacy approaches effectively limits children's comprehension and understanding of what they read, children's desire to read, children's appreciation of books, and their reading achievement scores. 

So what's not to love about concentrated phonics instruction, especially for disenfranchised children?  After all, it is best child neurological training regimen for a life without independent thinking, individual initiative, a broad understanding of how the world works, or the capacity for imaginative problem solving.

The study concludes with a call for national reading curriculum and instruction policy control to be removed from appointed officials whose job it is to pursue an education agenda based on political ideology rather than empirical evidence. How quaint!

From The Guardian:

A landmark study has described the way primary school pupils are taught to read in England as “uninformed and failing children”, calling on the government to drop its narrow focus on phonics.

Researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education say the current emphasis on synthetic phonics, which teaches children to read by helping them to identify and pronounce sounds which they blend together to make words, is “not underpinned by the latest evidence”.

They claim analysis of multiple systematic reviews, experimental trials and data from international assessment tests such as Pisa suggests that teaching reading in England may have been less successful since the adoption of the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.

The UCL researchers are among 250 signatories to a letter which has been sent to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, calling on the government to allow for a wider range of approaches to teaching reading, which would allow teachers to use their own judgment about which is best for their pupils. . . .

Part 2: Red State Governors Pick Up Where DeVos Left Off

More than 15 years before the Trumpers arrived in DC to initiate the latest "back to basic stupidity" era in all things social, cultural, economic, and intellectual, there was another Republican, George W. Bush, who had his own particular backwards fixation, which found its way into education policy in general and K-3 reading instruction in particular. 

Following his appointment to the Presidency by the Supreme Court in December 2000, Bush's first big initiative was No Child Left Behind, and reading instruction was the centerpiece of that legislation. 

In shaping NCLB reading policy, Bush leaned heavily on NIH neuropsychologist and self-declared reading guru, Reid Lyon, who viewed learning to read "the right way" as important for neural wiring as it was for academic success.  In a 2002 speech, Lyon told a group of Maryland teachers that "[w]e have to realize that education has to take on the same importance as medicine. . . . Teachers are the best brain surgeons around, the best at developing the nervous system." 

Lyon's enthusiasm for regimented phonics instruction as the best way to hard-wire receptive, convergent learners was matched by his animosity toward professional teacher preparation and research-based methods for teaching reading that go beyond . Just two months after Lyon spoke to Maryland teachers about the importance of their craft, he said this at a national policy forum:  "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education."

Five years later, however, Lyon was helping to launch a for-profit college of education focused on preparing reading teachers the way God and Reid Lyon intended (my bolds): 

What I learned at NIH and what guides our course development at American College of Education is that children's brains can literally be molded, changed, by the teaching they receive. Our goal now is to close the gap between our science tells us about learning and what our teachers apply in the classroom. A graduate degree from American College of Education means that teachers know the science behind how children learn.

Despite five years and over $5 billion spent on Reading First federal discretionary grants that were used to cajole, pressure, and bribe school systems to adopt and implement direct phonics instruction methods, DOE's own research, in both the interim and final reports, showed that Reading First was a big flop. From the NCEE Final Report Summary: 

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. 

To add insult to Lyon's injury, a 2007 study by the federal "What Works Clearinghouse" found that the only reading program to pass muster in all reading domains was one that Reid Lyon and the Reading First goons had excluded for its lack of fidelity to the reductionist catechism preferred by right-wing code breakers. From Education Week:

Just one program was found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers.

The bankruptcy of current education reform initiatives is evident in ongoing attempts to resuscitate explicit, phonics-based methods that seeks to convert learners into compliant code breakers and rule followers, thus using neurological and behavioral patterning to influence children's brain functions. Phonics fanatics believe this can be done "during the reading initiation phase." 

Part 3 will examine the latest efforts to impose the antiquarian science of reading in South Carolina and Tennessee.

Gerald Coles Documents the Re-emergence of the Phonics Zombies

…it is the sign of a competent “crap detector” that he is not completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in which he happened to grow up. Teaching as a Subversive Activity, p. 17

Midway through the first decade of this century's widespread reading instruction malpractice that was enforced by No Child Left Behind and funded by the corrupt Reading First program, the U. S. Department of Education released a long-awaited study that identified the most effective reading programs used in American schools.  

The direct instruction and phonics zealots, who had seized control of the federal Reading First billions in 2002, could not have been more unhappy with the results.

The study, released by the What Works Clearinghouse, found that the balanced program known as Reading Recovery, which Bush II's chief reading ideologues had singled out as dangerously "non-scientific," was the only program in the study "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based. 

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

That was then, this is now, and just as the phonics zombies have been re-animated repeatedly over the past century by the spirit of corrupt and oppressive fanaticism, the phonics zombies have once more been turned loose to restore a fearful order and intellectual rigor mortis among poor black and brown children everywhere.

Fortunately, Gerald Coles has once more activated his dedicated crap detection unit, which Coles has grown over the past 30 years for just such occasions. Coles has penned an astute synopsis of the current state of affairs in the latest not-so-great awakening of the phonics zombies, and it is a must read for everyone, whether or not you have read his very important book from 2003 on the hegemonic ideology of reading "scientists." Here's a clip from Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper:

. . . . As I noted at the beginning of this article, the new insistence that phonics-heavy reading instruction can provide the pathway to academic success, regardless of the poverty afflicting students, spotlights the beginning-reading program in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Reporting on the instruction in Bethlehem, journalist Emily Hanford insists that hundreds of scientific studies have “shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read,” if they are taught to read with a method in which “explicit, systematic phonics instruction” is central.

The 60-plus years of the resurrection and failure of phonics to overcome the impact of poverty on educational achievement leaves the question of the “science” purportedly supporting phonics. Can it be that phonics instruction does indeed have substantial scientific evidence favoring it, but it has not been deployed properly in the classroom?

It’s not apparent what “science” Hanford has in mind, but having written about the research on reading, learning disabilities, and dyslexia since the late 1980s, beginning with my first book, The Learning Mystique (1987), what’s clear about this so-called “science” is that much of it is contrived evidence to “prove” pre-existing conclusions. For example, Hanford is much taken with the research on dyslexia, which has searched for neurological dysfunction in beginning readers. However, she fails to consider the decades-long confusion in this research of correlation and causation. That is, the brain functioning of poor readers (“dyslexics”) is different from that of competent readers, but that is largely because of a difference in competence. Similarly, for example, readers able to read Czech will show brain functioning different from those who cannot, but that is not reason to brand the latter as “czechlexic.” (See my essay on the deficiencies of this research in “Brain Activity, Genetics, and Learning to Read” in Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy, Joanne Larson and Jackie Marsh, eds., 2012).

Hanford frequently references the “science” on the side of heavy-phonics-and-skills-instruction-for-reading-success, but offers nothing about the evidence on the other side of the dispute. Neither does she explore the purported “scientific evidence” the George W. Bush educators used to push through the mandated skills-based instruction, purportedly based on “the findings of years of scientific research on reading,” that subsequently failed children who were victims of it. (For a thorough review of this bogus “evidence” see my Reading the Naked Truth).

Succs For All: From One Form of Scripted Bullshit to Another

During the heyday of the Paige/Spellings federal disaster-in-motion-at-ED, Reid Lyon, Doug Carnine, Roland Good, and other disciples of Engelmann's Direct Instruction held sway, with Robert Slavin's brand of parrot reading shut out of the Reading First dollar bonanza. 

It is predictable to see Slavin re-emerging to claim his millions in delayed expertise, with another version of the same teacher-proofed crap passed off as reading instruction.  The only literacy approach that ever passed in all four categories of reading literacy was Reading Recovery, which is too expensive to encourage when you have billions to give away to the Oligarchs' sidekicks in the charter biz and the testing industry.  From an old post:

Six years ago when Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings), Reid Lyon, and Doug Carnine loaded the Reading First review panels with their direct instruction stooges and cronies, they set back reading instruction by decades, who knows how many. As ED's own Inspector General's reports have shown, states that applied for Reading First grants were manhandled into choosing reading programs aligned with the Lyon and Carnine back-to-brutality phonics orthodoxy. And if grantees ended up off the direct instruction reservation, Reid Lyon's Reading First Director, Chris Doherty, could simply pull the plug, as he did in Rockford, Illinois:

Mr. Doherty then directed the state to freeze the district’s funding, and ultimately to withdraw the grant. Those actions prompted another e-mail from Mr. Lyon: “wow – Talk about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls,” he wrote. “I am talking about you Chris.”

The Lyon and Carnine Cabal's most hated reading program was the balanced literacy methodology of Reading Recovery, a holistic and humane literacy approach grounded by empirical research. It is suitably ironic, then, that Ed Week reports that Reading Recovery has emerged in the latest federal research from Spellings's own shop as the only program "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

How sweet it is!! It's just too bad that so many states are now stuck with the McGraw-Hill Open Court parrot reading system that they were force fed by hacks and crooks in order to get Reading First grants.