How School Districts Thwart the Public’s Concern Over Reading Instruction
April 19, 2010
How School Districts Thwart the Public’s Concern Over Reading Instruction
by Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus, San Diego State University who has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.
Public school districts often proclaim that they encourage and cherish reasoned, intelligent, and constructively critical input about educational matters from parents of students, and from other members of the community that the schools serve. However, it has been my experience as a long-term member of the education establishment, first as a teacher and later as a teacher educator, that invitations from school officials to the general populace to participate in school districts’ decision-making processes frequently are not made in good faith.
In this regard, public school managers putatively solicit help in resolving educational issues from the respectable members of society who pay their salaries. In actuality, however, they ordinarily expect the community volunteers they recruit to do nothing more than submissively endorse school policy, as this is determined in sub rosa fashion by educational bureaucrats. Nonetheless, unfortunate but true, school districts, generally speaking, have a high rate of success in obtaining the services of compliant lay persons willing to participate in this charade.
The hypocrisy of public school districts in this respect was exemplified during 1997 by the Snohomish, Washington, School District. It invited Susan Esvelt and Sandy Brandt, who have no official connection with the Snohomish schools, to serve on its “Communications Task Force.” One of the primary goals of the Committee was to identify, and recommend for use in grades K-4 in the Snohomish schools, reading instruction textbooks that best represent how relevant experimental research has indicated children should be taught to read.
Esvelt and Brandt (who found Snohomish special education teacher, Bill Ash, an ally on the Committee) took seriously this mandate to make sure that Snohomish school children in the future would be provided the greatest opportunity possible to learn to read. They determined that for that purpose they must follow the scientific evidence on this matter wherever it led, eschewing distractions to their efforts by the ideological-style loyalties that school districts often hold toward reading instruction.
In pursuit of this goal, Esvelt, Brandt, and Ash first familiarized themselves with the latest conclusions drawn by experimental investigations as to how children in primary grades best acquire reading skills. In this regard, they consulted the opinions of Douglas Carnine, of the University of Oregon, who is without doubt one of the nation’s leading authoritative sources as to what empirical findings indicate about reading instruction. Beyond this, they identified over two dozen other recent critical summaries of pertinent experimental findings on children’s reading development, all of which agree with Carnine that direct and systematic teaching of reading skills is the preferred instructional methodology.
As well, the trio became informed as to the content of the new (1995-1996) reading instruction laws in California that direct public schools to teach reading in a direct and systematic fashion. These laws were passed in the wake of reliable information that California children had become the least competent readers in the nation. The culprit here was the “Whole Language” (WL) approach to reading instruction, which was more popular in California than in any other state.
The WL movement brazenly disdains the experimental research on reading that Carnine, and other educational empiricists honor. The latter were joined in this matter in 1995 by forty of the nation’s highly distinguished professors of linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, cognitive science. and neurology, who informed the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education that principles and practices novel to WL are not supported by empirical evidence in their academic fields.
Nevertheless, WL maintains, despite any substantiating empirical corroboration, that school children should learn to read in the same natural way they learned to speak, as preschoolers. Thus, WL teaching sharply de-emphasizes direct and systematic teaching of reading skills, especially how phonics information is applied to decode written words.
After a careful review of the available reading instruction textbook series, Esvelt, Brandt, and Ash determined, rationally enough, that the Open Court series followed the lead of the experimental findings on children’s reading development far more closely than did other text book series. They thus recommended that it be adopted for their school district. This is a highly reasonable conclusion to draw since Open Court has stood alone during the past ten years, among other prominent textbook series, in its emphasis of direct and systematic instruction of children’s reading skills, and particularly their phonics competency. Scientifically speaking, it is nonpareil in its class.
Nonetheless, the Snohomish School Board voted overwhelmingly to reject the Open Court series, and to adopt the reading textbook series published by Harcourt Brace (HB). My close analysis of how well reading textbook series comply with the existing experimental evidence on how children best learn to read leads me to conclude that this was an ill-advised decision, one that does not best serve the reading education needs of primary-grade children in Snohomish, nor elsewhere, for several reasons. For example:
1. The “senior author” of the HB series, Dorothy Strickland, is a leading theoretician of WL. She is noted for her remark that direct and systematic instruction of phonics information “should be relegated to the ash heap of history.” Her influence in infusing WL practices into the HB series is readily apparent.
2. Under Strickland’s leadership, the HB series for at least a decade clearly has become increasingly WL-oriented. It remains so in its current education. Nowhere in the sales literature that HB provides prospective customers is found any negative criticism of the obvious flaws of WL.
3. The HB series fails to heed the fundamental directive from experimental research that words in beginning reading instruction textbooks must be “decodable.” A word is decodable if students have been sufficiently prepared ahead of time, through phonics instruction, to sound-out correctly all of its letter-speech sound correspondences, and blend them together to form words. Only a low per cent of words presented in beginning readers’ books in the HB series meets this criterion.
A high percent of words that are decodable in primary-grade reading materials is imperative if young children are to gain confidence as independent readers. I thus challenge the Snohomish school district to calculate and publicize the percent of decodable words in the Open Court as versus the HB series. I have no doubt but that Open Court would emerge the victor.
4. The fact the HB series was approved for use in California schools in 1996 by its State Board of Education (CSBE) is no proof the series conforms to the scientific evidence on reading. The Board did not use the criterion of decodable words in making its decisions. The HB series was as WL-oriented as other textbook series that the Board rejected for not following new state laws in California that mandate explicit and systematic teaching of phonics information. In this regard, the main distinguishing feature of WL-oriented series that were approved was that their publishing houses are part of huge financial conglomerates that have the necessary financial resources to heavily lobby education officials for their approval.
5. The decision by the Snohomish schools to adopt the HB series because it is a “balance of phonics and whole language” thus is indefensible. The WL approach expressly was designed to persuade teachers to abandon direct and systematic teaching of reading skills, including those involved in the application of phonics knowledge. Furthermore, no unique principle nor original practice of WL is corroborated by experimental research findings. Surely a reading program that haphazardly mixes empirically unverified practices, with those that have been experimentally proved, is not the kind of reading instruction that parents, or concerned members of the public want children subjected to.
6. The source of the contention by Kathy Klock, Snohomish school official, that the HB “series scored 100 points (perfect score) in the recent California adoption process” is unknown to me, although I have been a faithful observer to this process. As far as I have been able to discover, the CSBE did not issue a rank-ordering of the reading series which it approved. It thus did not advise California schools that the HB series was the best one available.
7. Kathy Klock further contends that the HB series has been experimentally tested, and proved itself superior (presumably to other series, such as Open Court) “in 16 classrooms in 8 states.” I attend closely to reports in the experimental literature on children’s reading acquisition. I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that the supposed research data on the purported superiority of the HB series cannot be found in educational journals. The truth is, with rare exceptions (the Reading Mastery series), the instructional formats of different reading textbook series have not been compared experimentally with each other to determine their relative proficiency in developing children’s reading skills. Instead, reading instruction series typically are purveyed to educators much like any other commercial product, through the use of the same kind of marketing inducements.
It therefore must be concluded that adoption of the HB series by the Snohomish schools is not in keeping with the primary special learning need of beginning readers. This need is not best fulfilled during the reading instruction period, the HB series to the contrary notwithstanding, by development of children’s oral language skills. It is wise, instead, to use the rest of the school day to expand the children’s speaking and listening skills.
Instruction time for beginning readers should concentrate on teaching them how to recognize written words (they already know the meanings of) quickly and accurately, i.e., automatically. This is the fastest and most secure way to develop children’s reading comprehension since automatic word recognition relates more closely to young students’ understanding of what they read than does almost any other factor. The Open Court series heeds this truism better than any of its major competitors.
The Snohomish case study amply illustrates, as well, how obstinate ideological allegiance to certain myths of reading instruction by educators can handicap children’s chances for learning to read. That in turn illuminates the difficulty that external criticisms of school practices, even though they be well-intended and constructive, face in being accepted by school officials. Nevertheless, the Snohomish area should congratulate Susan Esvelt, Sandy Brandt, and Bill Ash for making a valiant, noble, and exemplary effort on behalf of the best reading instruction available. Their community needs to encourage them to continue their useful campaign in this regard.
Reprinted with permission by The National Right to Read FoundationPO Box 490, The Plains, Virginia 20198-0490
1-800-468-8911
E-mail nrr@erol.com
Tags: Curriculum Trends, reading
How School Districts Thwart the Public’s Concern Over Reading Instruction
by Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus, San Diego State University who has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.
Public school districts often proclaim that they encourage and cherish reasoned, intelligent, and constructively critical input about educational matters from parents of students, and from other members of the community that the schools serve. However, it has been my experience as a long-term member of the education establishment, first as a teacher and later as a teacher educator, that invitations from school officials to the general populace to participate in school districts’ decision-making processes frequently are not made in good faith.
In this regard, public school managers putatively solicit help in resolving educational issues from the respectable members of society who pay their salaries. In actuality, however, they ordinarily expect the community volunteers they recruit to do nothing more than submissively endorse school policy, as this is determined in sub rosa fashion by educational bureaucrats. Nonetheless, unfortunate but true, school districts, generally speaking, have a high rate of success in obtaining the services of compliant lay persons willing to participate in this charade.
The hypocrisy of public school districts in this respect was exemplified during 1997 by the Snohomish, Washington, School District. It invited Susan Esvelt and Sandy Brandt, who have no official connection with the Snohomish schools, to serve on its “Communications Task Force.” One of the primary goals of the Committee was to identify, and recommend for use in grades K-4 in the Snohomish schools, reading instruction textbooks that best represent how relevant experimental research has indicated children should be taught to read.
Esvelt and Brandt (who found Snohomish special education teacher, Bill Ash, an ally on the Committee) took seriously this mandate to make sure that Snohomish school children in the future would be provided the greatest opportunity possible to learn to read. They determined that for that purpose they must follow the scientific evidence on this matter wherever it led, eschewing distractions to their efforts by the ideological-style loyalties that school districts often hold toward reading instruction.
In pursuit of this goal, Esvelt, Brandt, and Ash first familiarized themselves with the latest conclusions drawn by experimental investigations as to how children in primary grades best acquire reading skills. In this regard, they consulted the opinions of Douglas Carnine, of the University of Oregon, who is without doubt one of the nation’s leading authoritative sources as to what empirical findings indicate about reading instruction. Beyond this, they identified over two dozen other recent critical summaries of pertinent experimental findings on children’s reading development, all of which agree with Carnine that direct and systematic teaching of reading skills is the preferred instructional methodology.
As well, the trio became informed as to the content of the new (1995-1996) reading instruction laws in California that direct public schools to teach reading in a direct and systematic fashion. These laws were passed in the wake of reliable information that California children had become the least competent readers in the nation. The culprit here was the “Whole Language” (WL) approach to reading instruction, which was more popular in California than in any other state.
The WL movement brazenly disdains the experimental research on reading that Carnine, and other educational empiricists honor. The latter were joined in this matter in 1995 by forty of the nation’s highly distinguished professors of linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, cognitive science. and neurology, who informed the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education that principles and practices novel to WL are not supported by empirical evidence in their academic fields.
Nevertheless, WL maintains, despite any substantiating empirical corroboration, that school children should learn to read in the same natural way they learned to speak, as preschoolers. Thus, WL teaching sharply de-emphasizes direct and systematic teaching of reading skills, especially how phonics information is applied to decode written words.
After a careful review of the available reading instruction textbook series, Esvelt, Brandt, and Ash determined, rationally enough, that the Open Court series followed the lead of the experimental findings on children’s reading development far more closely than did other text book series. They thus recommended that it be adopted for their school district. This is a highly reasonable conclusion to draw since Open Court has stood alone during the past ten years, among other prominent textbook series, in its emphasis of direct and systematic instruction of children’s reading skills, and particularly their phonics competency. Scientifically speaking, it is nonpareil in its class.
Nonetheless, the Snohomish School Board voted overwhelmingly to reject the Open Court series, and to adopt the reading textbook series published by Harcourt Brace (HB). My close analysis of how well reading textbook series comply with the existing experimental evidence on how children best learn to read leads me to conclude that this was an ill-advised decision, one that does not best serve the reading education needs of primary-grade children in Snohomish, nor elsewhere, for several reasons. For example:
1. The “senior author” of the HB series, Dorothy Strickland, is a leading theoretician of WL. She is noted for her remark that direct and systematic instruction of phonics information “should be relegated to the ash heap of history.” Her influence in infusing WL practices into the HB series is readily apparent.
2. Under Strickland’s leadership, the HB series for at least a decade clearly has become increasingly WL-oriented. It remains so in its current education. Nowhere in the sales literature that HB provides prospective customers is found any negative criticism of the obvious flaws of WL.
3. The HB series fails to heed the fundamental directive from experimental research that words in beginning reading instruction textbooks must be “decodable.” A word is decodable if students have been sufficiently prepared ahead of time, through phonics instruction, to sound-out correctly all of its letter-speech sound correspondences, and blend them together to form words. Only a low per cent of words presented in beginning readers’ books in the HB series meets this criterion.
A high percent of words that are decodable in primary-grade reading materials is imperative if young children are to gain confidence as independent readers. I thus challenge the Snohomish school district to calculate and publicize the percent of decodable words in the Open Court as versus the HB series. I have no doubt but that Open Court would emerge the victor.
4. The fact the HB series was approved for use in California schools in 1996 by its State Board of Education (CSBE) is no proof the series conforms to the scientific evidence on reading. The Board did not use the criterion of decodable words in making its decisions. The HB series was as WL-oriented as other textbook series that the Board rejected for not following new state laws in California that mandate explicit and systematic teaching of phonics information. In this regard, the main distinguishing feature of WL-oriented series that were approved was that their publishing houses are part of huge financial conglomerates that have the necessary financial resources to heavily lobby education officials for their approval.
5. The decision by the Snohomish schools to adopt the HB series because it is a “balance of phonics and whole language” thus is indefensible. The WL approach expressly was designed to persuade teachers to abandon direct and systematic teaching of reading skills, including those involved in the application of phonics knowledge. Furthermore, no unique principle nor original practice of WL is corroborated by experimental research findings. Surely a reading program that haphazardly mixes empirically unverified practices, with those that have been experimentally proved, is not the kind of reading instruction that parents, or concerned members of the public want children subjected to.
6. The source of the contention by Kathy Klock, Snohomish school official, that the HB “series scored 100 points (perfect score) in the recent California adoption process” is unknown to me, although I have been a faithful observer to this process. As far as I have been able to discover, the CSBE did not issue a rank-ordering of the reading series which it approved. It thus did not advise California schools that the HB series was the best one available.
7. Kathy Klock further contends that the HB series has been experimentally tested, and proved itself superior (presumably to other series, such as Open Court) “in 16 classrooms in 8 states.” I attend closely to reports in the experimental literature on children’s reading acquisition. I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that the supposed research data on the purported superiority of the HB series cannot be found in educational journals. The truth is, with rare exceptions (the Reading Mastery series), the instructional formats of different reading textbook series have not been compared experimentally with each other to determine their relative proficiency in developing children’s reading skills. Instead, reading instruction series typically are purveyed to educators much like any other commercial product, through the use of the same kind of marketing inducements.
It therefore must be concluded that adoption of the HB series by the Snohomish schools is not in keeping with the primary special learning need of beginning readers. This need is not best fulfilled during the reading instruction period, the HB series to the contrary notwithstanding, by development of children’s oral language skills. It is wise, instead, to use the rest of the school day to expand the children’s speaking and listening skills.
Instruction time for beginning readers should concentrate on teaching them how to recognize written words (they already know the meanings of) quickly and accurately, i.e., automatically. This is the fastest and most secure way to develop children’s reading comprehension since automatic word recognition relates more closely to young students’ understanding of what they read than does almost any other factor. The Open Court series heeds this truism better than any of its major competitors.
The Snohomish case study amply illustrates, as well, how obstinate ideological allegiance to certain myths of reading instruction by educators can handicap children’s chances for learning to read. That in turn illuminates the difficulty that external criticisms of school practices, even though they be well-intended and constructive, face in being accepted by school officials. Nevertheless, the Snohomish area should congratulate Susan Esvelt, Sandy Brandt, and Bill Ash for making a valiant, noble, and exemplary effort on behalf of the best reading instruction available. Their community needs to encourage them to continue their useful campaign in this regard.
Reprinted with permission by The National Right to Read FoundationPO Box 490, The Plains, Virginia 20198-04901-800-468-8911
E-mail nrr@erol.com
Tags: Curriculum Trends, reading