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READING FIRST FACTS: Diana Jean Schemo’s recent piece about the Reading First program (In War Over Teaching Reading, Some Districts Clash With U.S., March 9)
- By Ed News
- Published 03/15/2007
- Commentaries and Reports
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Ed News
View all articles by Ed NewsMark Seidenberg comments
Madison WI school officials state that they decided to forgo $2 million of "Reading First" funds because this would have threatened the integrity of Madison's successful "balanced literacy" program.
This account does not hold water. The Reading First program requires that funds be used for instructional activities that conform to the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. That panel recommended a multicomponent balanced literacy approach. The programs that would be funded in this way therefore posed no threat to Madison's existing "balanced literacy" approach. Nor would accepting these funds (which were to be used in 5 low-achieving schools) have any bearing on the curricula used in other schools. Thus the asserted threat to current practices did not exist.
"Balanced literacy" programs raise other questions, however. The term refers to programs that mix elements of phonics and whole language approaches. However, in Madison, as in other districts, the balance between the two is not specified or monitored. When asked why her first grader had not been taught any phonics, one Madison parent was told, "your daughter was absent that day.
" My own experience as the parent of two young readers is that the amount of phonics is up to the discretion of the teacher, most of whom were schooled in the Whole Language method. The needed phonics instruction is then out-sourced, to parents, commercial "learning centers," and private tutors.
Why would a school district decline to accept federal funding for remedial reading programs? There are two main reasons. First, there is resistance to federal control over local education via legislation such as NCLB, of which Reading First is a part. Reading First is seen as the slippery slope toward greater federal interference with local decision making. Madison school officials acknowledged this in articles published in our local newspapers.
Second, there is resistance to two decades of research in psychology and neuroscience about how children learn to read and the importance of phonics in early reading education. The anti-phonics ideology among these educators runs so deep that they would deny funding for children who are at high risk of educational failure. This in a cash-strapped district that announced increases in classroom size and significant program cutbacks the same day your article appeared.
In declining these funds, the Madison school district put its educational ideology ahead of the needs of its students
Mark Seidenberg
University of Wisconsin - Madison
This account does not hold water. The Reading First program requires that funds be used for instructional activities that conform to the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. That panel recommended a multicomponent balanced literacy approach. The programs that would be funded in this way therefore posed no threat to Madison's existing "balanced literacy" approach. Nor would accepting these funds (which were to be used in 5 low-achieving schools) have any bearing on the curricula used in other schools. Thus the asserted threat to current practices did not exist.
"Balanced literacy" programs raise other questions, however. The term refers to programs that mix elements of phonics and whole language approaches. However, in Madison, as in other districts, the balance between the two is not specified or monitored. When asked why her first grader had not been taught any phonics, one Madison parent was told, "your daughter was absent that day.
Why would a school district decline to accept federal funding for remedial reading programs? There are two main reasons. First, there is resistance to federal control over local education via legislation such as NCLB, of which Reading First is a part. Reading First is seen as the slippery slope toward greater federal interference with local decision making. Madison school officials acknowledged this in articles published in our local newspapers.
Second, there is resistance to two decades of research in psychology and neuroscience about how children learn to read and the importance of phonics in early reading education. The anti-phonics ideology among these educators runs so deep that they would deny funding for children who are at high risk of educational failure. This in a cash-strapped district that announced increases in classroom size and significant program cutbacks the same day your article appeared.
In declining these funds, the Madison school district put its educational ideology ahead of the needs of its students
Mark Seidenberg
University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Comment #1 (Posted by an unknown user)
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I think that the (unpublished) replies to the NYT article, written in reaction to Diane Jean Schemo's article (I forwarded about an hour ago) is what the Congress should hear and react to before yet more "studies" and debates over who was selected for what committee and how the results were therefore, invalid...yada, yada, yada... What we hear from the NCLB critics addressing the literacy components of the NCLB statute, comes from those fighting for self preservation....and the continuance of their grip on the vacuous content that comprises teacher preparation...still....bogged down in the morass of "guessing" at words when it comes to "reading" and the controlled exposure to vocabulary development...and forget spelling! Forget the neurology of the brain, forget oral/written language development as well....focus instead on "emotional health", "magic circle time", and "environmental influences"...blame all those "disinterested parents"..for our nation's illiteracy... It's a national shame and sin!
Comment #2 (Posted by an unknown user)
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I just wanted to say that in our District we have seen a HUGE increase in student reading abilities since implementing Reading First. Were the first couple of years easy? Not by a long shot, but 4 years into this we are seeing growth that teachers are proud of. In fact, teachers are worried that Reading First will go away, which could mean losing funding for coaches and professional development. We never thought we would see the day that the staff WANTED to keep their coaches. The biggest hurdle to jump over is the idea that it isn't about what we (the adults) want, it is about what the students NEED. This is what our students NEED!
Comment #3 (Posted by raladyj)
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What a disgrace! It's difficult enough to realize and accept the fact that countless children suffered needlessly from a lack of proper reading instruction. It's a complete abomination that some in this profession will argue vehemently to continue to fail even more generations of innocents.
Comment #4 (Posted by W. Barnes)
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It is telling the Street, Lyon, and Moats don't identify their own bias for phonemic awareness instruction nor their full corporate embrace of publishing phonics-based materials. In essence, these individuals deny that the National Reading Panel was packed with advocates who believe that phonemic awareness, an oral language skill, must be mastered before children can learn to read. Not only can 1st grade children write with invented spellings, but they can read charts of songs, verse, and poetry. Children can study phonetic patterns of words using word sorting at a fraction of the time this trio would drill children on synthetic phonics. Worse, they would exclude teachers reading to children and using literature in the classroom because these "experts" want children to read text of the "Can Dan fan Nan?" variety. They continue to promote their straw man argument that "Whole Language" failed to teach children to use phonics. Since I have 200 hours of video tapes from 1988 and 1989 showing "Whole Language" teachers using literature with children and teaching phonetic features, when needed, the straw man of Moats, Streeter, and Lyon has its hair afire.
After the National Reading Panel was packed and the desired results published, the committees for adoption, and the Reading First program officials acted in collusion to exclude any program that did not fit the original prestidigitation of the NRP results. The Inspector General' report showed this clique published brochures for choosing reading programs using their check-off system which would exclude any but their own conflict-of-interest programs.
Lastly, you see Louisa Moats accusing Richard Allington of not being a scholar or a scientist. Anyone who knows Allington's publishing record in peer-reviewed journals and his success in textbook publishing is aware of Moat's dishonesty on this issue. However, the casual reader may not know of her affiliation with corporations that sell phonics-based and phoneme-based reading programs. She has a distinct bias that includes a failure to admit that the National Reading Panel research has been thoroughly repudiated. It was neither scientific nor scholarly.
Comment #5 (Posted by Anne/IJAM)
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In surveys done in youth prisons, over 80% of the youths in prison were illiterate. It costs over $23,000 per year to incarcerate them, verses just over $6,000 a year to educate them. What's wrong with this picture?
In my dyslexic son's school district, from the year 2000 - 2006, the district did not have a phonics program in place. Funnily enough, they were taking Reading First money, but not using it as dictated by Federal Law. They pretended they were using it, by sending teachers on a weekend workshop. They never understood why one workshop didn’t a reading teacher make.
From 2000 - 2004, our district had 4 school years to remediate my son. At one point, he had 25 hours per week on his IEP for "special education"; they kept him at a 4th grade reading age for 4 years. With excuses such as: "You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink", or "Some children just don't want to learn to read", or "If we had had your son since Kindergarten he would be reading to grade level by now", (he came here reading to grade level, having had a private education for 7 years). "He is doing really well, you should be more supportive" (Huh? Really well? He is 4 grade levels behind in reading, and you think he is doing really well?)
Finally, not having the money to hire an educational attorney, we paid for a private Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) who, incorporating methods that are based on scientifically proven principles of instruction. Amazingly to the school district, she managed to teach my “thirsty horse”, and remediated my dyslexic son from a 4th grade reading age to an 11th grade reading age in 18 months of teaching, one hour a day, five days a week. My son was in 8th grade with an 11th grade reading age.
Now the district administrators tell me: "Well, that was just your son" -- as if it was a lucky coincidence or a miracle. When will these people wake up?
I spent 5 years changing Colorado State Law, to include dyslexia as a specific learning disability, and that went into effect on 4th April 2006. Around that time, the district finally woke up, because of this one excellent new Administrator who "got it", and realized whatever the district had been doing, wasn't working, (and whatever we were doing was.) Currently, my son's CALT therapist is training five district teachers to become CALT therapists. Next school year 2007-2008, she will train another five.
People like Louisa Moats, Mel Levine, Sally Shaywitz and Reed Lyon -- deserve praise. I don't care if some of you are whining that the Reading First program is promoting a phonics based approach, because it is a scientifically proven method of teaching -- and guess what? It works. Fact: Whatever rubbish our school district was promoting or teaching as a reading method for the past 7 years, does not work.
Our dyslexic children are dropping out of High School. The National Institute of Health estimates that 15-20% of American students are dyslexic. In our district that amounts to upwards of 800-1000 students.
Are we to leave that many students behind in our small mountain town, just because our district is arrogant enough not to use their Reading First money in the fashion the Federal Government required?
I think we can safely say that Whole Language doesn’t work. We have a whole generation of students who cannot read. I read somewhere that over 40% of this country where illiterate. Astonishing statistics don’t you think?
In Colorado, we lose $4.2 billion dollars a year from the economy in lost income, due to High School dropouts. $190 billion annually across the nation. Don’t you think someone would put all these statistics together and see the bigger picture? Maybe we could get Mom’s to run education. We seem to have more commonsense.
Public education won’t get any better, unless the Federal Government give our school district’s more money. I’m removing my son from High School at the end of May. He will be 10th grade and a High School dropout. I can’t bare it anymore. I can educate him by using local resources that have nothing to do with the public education system. We don’t have private schools to fall back on for his age/grade level, so I will use Professors from the local college and all the art, music, sport facilities that are available to educate him for the next two years, before sending him back to London for college.
Telephone The Gow School on the east coast, and ask them to send you their FREE DVD called “Demystifying Dyslexia” – they supported the making of the DVD, and it shows you just how well phonics based programs/programs with a scientifically proven method of teaching are working in public schools in Washington and Florida. One teacher was remediating her students TWO whole grade levels in SIX months! She beats our school district hands down, and she had far more “free and reduced lunch” students than we do. That’s another terrible excuse I hate hearing our administration bleat on about. “If we were Telluride or Cherry Creek, where parents were wealthy….well….we too would be passing AYP and doing a good job, blah, blah, blah”. Bottom line: We are not. We are not that bad off either. This is a reasonably “rich” town. So follow the guidelines, do it properly and get on with the job in hand. Teach our children to read, write and spell to grade level!
IJAM: I’m Just a Mom – is a program taken across the country to the International Dyslexia Association Conferences. If you see one in your city, and you have done something positive and powerful for dyslexic children, or even your own child, then ask the organizer of IJAM to be part of the panel!
