kitchen table math, the sequel

After decades of what seemed to be an inexorable upward path, the number of students classified as learning-disabled declined from year to year over much of the past decade—a change in direction that is spurring debates among experts about the reasons why.

The percentage of 3- to 21-year-old students nationwide classified as having a “specific learning disability” dropped steadily from 6.1 percent in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2 percent in 2007-08, according to the most recent data available, which come from the U.S Department of Education’s 2009 Digest of Education Statistics. In numbers, that’s a drop from about 2.9 million to 2.6 million students.

A learning disability—a processing disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overall cognitive ability—is the largest, by far, of the 13 disability classifications recognized by the main federal special education law. Forty percent of the approximately 6.6 million students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, fall into that category.

The decrease in the category goes hand in hand with a decrease in special education enrollment overall, though that change is not as large. The percentage of all students covered under the IDEA fell from a high of 13.8 percent in the 2004-05 school year to 13.4 percent in 2007-08—from about 6.7 million students to about 6.6 million students. Enrollment in the categories of emotional disturbance and mental retardation also went down, but students in those groups make up a far smaller slice of the IDEA pie. At the same time, though, enrollment of students classified as having an autism spectrum disorder or “other health impairment” rose.

[snip]

About 80 percent of children who are classified as learning-disabled get the label because they’re struggling to read. So, scholars say, the dropping numbers could be linked to improvements in reading instruction overall; the adoption of “response to intervention,” which is an instructional model intended to halt the emergence of reading problems; and a federally backed push toward early intervention with younger students before they’re labeled.

Learning-Disabled Enrollment Dips After Long Climb Up
by Christina A. Samuels
Education Week

from Anonymous:

The University of Northern Iowa offers a "literacy/reading minor" with endorsements for teaching K-8 as part of its Elementary Education degree.

Most public schools won't even consider a job candidate unless they have a literacy minor.

What's infuriating is that the literacy minor is worthless. It is nothing but taking a few extra "advanced" children's lit courses which amount to learning how to "read multiculturally". This is a euphamism for finding threadbare explanations for how rascism or classism can be found in (insert popular children's literature).

In the classes where we are supposed to learn how to "teach" reading, we're fed a program that consists of whole-language learning disguised in the rhetoric of "balanced-literacy". The funny thing is that none of the professors ever use the phrase "balanced-literacy".

Phonics isn't present anywhere in these teacher-ed programs other than extremely brief lip service paid to it in "Methods of Early Literacy" classes. There is no information on how to effectively implement a phonics program for struggling readers (much less all students).

As a 30 year old 2nd BA student who has returned to college to obtain a teaching degree/licensure I am disappointed by the lack of any real education that I'm receiving in my teacher-ed program. It's too much theory and pedagogy and not enough "here's what to teach and the best to teach it".

It has gotten to the point that I am simply going through the motions to get through the classes required for my degree and licensure. I don't expect to learn anything at all in my ed classes and instead spend time outside of class educating myself on how to be a teacher (by pouring through various phonics programs and other instructional methods).

It is sad that what used to be called "Iowa State Teachers College" is no longer turning out anything resembling a teacher.

from K9Sasha:

It has gotten to the point that I am simply going through the motions to get through the classes required for my degree and licensure. I don't expect to learn anything at all in my ed classes and instead spend time outside of class education myself on how to be a teacher (by pouring through various phonics programs and other instructional methods).

It's been the same for me. Even when I got my elementary teaching credential, some 20 years ago, the classes were "mickey mouse." When I recently got my reading endorsement, I was disgusted at having to pay to "learn" useless information. I refuse to drink the cool aid. Like you, I spent, and spend, a lot of time on my own learning how to teach effectively, especially how to teach reading to struggling students.

The NCTQ report on ed schools and the science of reading is here. (pdf file)

One of my heroes. I finally ordered her book last week. (Was holding off only because of cost.)

Why English-Speaking Children Can’t Read

As the universal-education movement began gathering momentum, educators broke ranks with nineteenth-century traditions. Reading instruction got so far off track that the twentieth century will go down in history as the century of the demise of the English alphabet code. The final reckoning of an unceasing attempt on its life came in the 1990s. For the first time, properly conducted national testing, international reading surveys, cross-cultural studies, and classroom research pointed to the inescapable conclusion hat reading instruction in English-speaking countries is a disaster. The functional illiteracy rate for American 9-year-olds is 43 percent (Mullis, Campbell, and Farstrup 1993; Campbell et al. 1996).

International reading surveys carried out by Statistics Canada brought dismal news (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995, 1997). In six English-speaking nations, the proportion of functionally illiterate/very poor readers among 16- to 65-year olds ranged from a low of 42 percent in Canada to a high of 52 percent in the United Kingdom. These figures were in stark contrast to those of many European nations. The comparable figure for Sweden was 28 percent. Sweden’s functional illiteracy rate for 16- to 25-year-olds (level 1 of 5 levels) is 3.8 percent. This rate is nearly three times higher in Canada (10.7 percent), and six times higher in the United States (23.5 percent).

In 1993, an astonishing report came in from Austria. Heinz Wimmer set out to study poor readers and initiated a citywide search. He asked 60 second-to fourth-grade teachers in Salzburg to refer their worst readers for special testing. They identified 120 children, about 7-8 percent of the school population. Imagine Wimmer’s surprise when the worst readers in the city scored close to 100 percent correct on a test of reading accuracy and did nearly as well in spelling. Clearly, none of these children had any difficulty with the German alphabet code. It turned out their problem was reading too slowly. But slow is a relative term. How slow is slow?

To find out, Wimmer collaborated with an English researcher (Wimmer and Goswami 1994) to compare normal 7- and 9-year olds from Salzburg and London. The results were startling. The Austrian 7-year olds read comparable material as rapidly and fluently as the English 9-year-olds, while making half as many errors. Yet the Austrian 7-year olds had had 1 year of reading instruction, while the English 9-year olds had been learning to read for 4 or 5 years. Equal speed and half the errors in one-quarter of the learning time is an eightfold increase in efficiency!

Wimmer and his colleagues (Lander, Wimmer, and Frith 1997) got the same extraordinary results when they compared their worst readers (incredibly slow) with English children identified as “dyslexic” (incredibly inaccurate). The children were asked to read text consisting of nonsense words. The so-called Austrian slow readers were no only more accurate than the English “dyslexics,” but they read twice as fast. The average Austrian “slow reader” would be able to read a 500-word passage in about 10 minutes, misreading only 7 percent of the words. The average English “dyslexic” would read only 260 words in this time, and misread 40 percent of the words. It seems the expression “worst reader” is relative as well.

An even more dramatic study was reported from Italyy. Cossu, Rossini, and Marshall (1993) tested Down’s syndrome children with IQs in the 40s (100 is average) on three difficult reading tests. They scored around 90 (100 is average) on three difficult reading tests. They scored around 90 percent correct, breezing through Italian words like shaliare and funebre. However, they could not comprehend what they read, and they failed miserably on tests of phoneme awareness, the skill that is supposed to be essential to decoding.

What is going on?

The answer is simple. European countries with high literacy rates have a twofold advantage. First, they have a transparent alphabet code, a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence between each individual sound (phoneme) in the language and a visual symbol—a letter or letter pair (digraph). For languages with more sounds than letters in the alphabet (English has 40+ sounds), this problem was handled sensibly. When a letter or digraph is reused to represent more than one sound, it is marked by a special symbol (a diacritic) to signal a different pronunciation. In German, an umlaut distinguishes the vowel sound in Baume (boimeh). And while a sound can occasionally be spelled more than one way, there is never more than one way to read a letter or digraph. The English spelling system suffers from both afflictions: multiple spellings for the same phoneme, and multiple ways to decode letters and letter sequences. This is the definition of an “opaque” writing system.

Reading instruction is the second part of the equation. To a great extent, reading instruction is a function of the complexity of the spelling code. Teaching a transparent writing system is far easier than teaching an opaque one, because it is obvious (transparent) how it works. Teaching can be streamlined and proceeds at a rapid pace. In Austria, children are taught the sounds of the German language and which letter(s) represents each sound. Reading and spelling are integrated at every step, which reinforces the code nature of a writing system—that is, the fact that the operations are reversible, involving both encoding and decoding. No clutter or noise clogs the process, such as teaching letter names or lots of sight words. Because basic reading instruction is fast and pretty well guaranteed, it can begin late – at 6 in most countries (age 7 in Scandinavian countries) –and early (after 1 year or less) Parents sleep soundly in their beds, safe in the knowledge that their child will be reading and spelling by the of the first year of school. (This is not to say that inappropriate teaching methods cannot mollify the advantages of a transparent alphabet.)

The cross-cultural comparisons reveal that the source of English-speaking children’s difficulties in learning to read and spell is the English spelling system and the way it is taught. These comparisons provide irrefutable evidence that a biological theory of “dyslexia,” a deficit presumed to be a property of the child, is untenable, ruling out the popular “phonological-deficit theory” of dyslexia. For a biological theory to be accurate, dyslexia would have to occur at the same rate in all populations. Otherwise, some type of genetic abnormality would be specific to people who learn an English alphabet code and be absent in people who live in countries with a transparent alphabet, where poor readers are rare. A disorder entirely tied to a particular alphabetic writing system is patently absurd and has no scientific basis. English-speaking children have trouble learning to read and spell because of our complex spelling code and because of current teaching methods, not because of aberrant genes.

Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading
by Diane McGuinness, pages 1-3

It's always worse than you think.

(I've asked Liz Ditz to weigh in on the question of what biologically-based reading and/or learning disabilities are.)

Le scandale de l'illetrrisme (nouvel obs: the scandal of illiteracy)
dyslexie, vraiment? ) (nouvel obs: true dyslexia? - whole language in France)
Comment en est-on arrivé là? (nouvel obs: How did we get here?)
French spelling

Why English speaking children can't read

Lucy Calkins on teaching children to write
Becky C on starting at the top

instructional casualties in America
curriculum casualties: figures
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
Rory: I frickin' hate whole language!

thank you, whole language

At least 30% of whole language taught readers will learn the code for themselves, but that doesn't always mean that they will always be fluent readers. I've been having discussions with young campaign workers in their mid to late 20's, almost all who have gone through whole language. These days I don't mince words anymore and am blunt, "Your generation was screwed." One English professor at OSU told me that she no longer can teach Dickens because the sentences are too long (i.e. readability level too high). If any group of college students were immersed in whole language, it's in Ohio where WL is still the order of the day.

They 20-year olds want to talk about their reading experiences and those who struggled always start by saying, "I'm not stupid, but........." Basically they fall into three camps.

1. the readers who broke the code for themselves or had parents who as they read to them did some sounding out things and don't understand what the big deal is because it's so easy to learn to read (unfortunately, this is the group of people that I suspect usually become gen ed literacy professors.)

2. the readers who started to fail early and whose parents of means got them early phonics tutoring. It's interesting that they still feel like failures in reading because they had to have this additional help. We can't forget that trauma starts young.

3. the readers who broke the code enough to be successful until they hit law school or medical school where the words were so "big." The kids I talk to made it through, but it was painful and remains so. THey talk about having to use rulers under the sentences and sounding out loud. When I remark that reading so slowly must have made it difficult to comprehend the text, they look at me as if I"m a sage. How did I know that? Everything took twice as long for them. These were the WL kids who needed the fluency and advanced word reading practice when they were younger.

4. The group that failed with WL didn't make it as far as these kids. They are already filling up the prisons in disproportionate amounts; they are working menial jobs; the brightest are entrepeneurs where they can hide their lack of reading.

Thus when you give that nonsense word test to whole language readers, those in group 1 and 2 will be able to do it, although there will usually be some errors for a few letter-sound combinations. Group 3 will do fine with the easier nonsense words and then start to slow down and make more errors as the multi-syllable ones are introduced. Group 4 bombs out.

I feel fairly confident that C. could have been in Group 3 without Megawords. He started Book 6 this weekend. 

Reading First is gone.

NCLB is vague in its requirements with respect to measuring reading ability. NCLB is concerned with "proficiency in ... reading or language arts." That is the extent of the guidance given to us.

We know that reading is a complex skill comprising various subskills and content knowledge. But, what does it mean to be a proficient reader? What standardized test or battery of tests exist that accurately measure the "reading" ability of children and whether they are proficient?

Further, under NCLB it is the educators whose performance is being measured, even though the students are the ones taking the test. So the testing instrument must not allow educator subjectivity and must not be capable of being gamed by the educator. For example, Elizabeth's example in the post below describes a test that can be gamed by an educators since students can be taught to memorize the words appearing on the test and, thus, the test is not a true reflection of reading ability.

So, pretend you are a new superintendent of a school district who wants to accurately determine the reading ability of the children attending the schools in your district and how well they are being taught. So, for example, you want to know that your third graders are reading at a third grade level and will be capable of reading at a fourth grade level next year. You get to pick the standardized test(s) to be used. You will have non-reading-specialists monitoring the administration of the test(s). The monitors can identify outright cheating by teachers and/or students but nothing more subtle than that, i.e, they are incapable of making substantive determinations related to reading of any kind Otherwise, the administration of the tests is out of your control. Only the results of the test(s) will be reported to you.

What assessments do you select and why?

How easy do you think it is to guess your way through a reading comprehension test up to grade level 3 with just 220 Dolch sight words and 95 Dolch nouns?

Look over these 3rd grade Texas silent reading compehension tests and see what you think before the reading the rest of the post.

Here are the 220 Dolch Sight Words and the 95 Dolch Sight Nouns (scroll to bottom for list).

Now, here are all the words in the first paragraph of the first story that are included in these 2 lists above:

They, had, cows, horses, and pigs, a, dog, cat, bird, were, the, chickens, she, eggs, from, but, to, eggs, by, her---- [her is a sight word, actual word is herself], ?henhouse [hen and house are sight words, you may or may not be able to figure that out]

Here are all the above sight words in the answer for question #1:

where, does, live, by, a, in, the, on, farm

Coincidentially (or not?), the only answer that consists of all sight words is the correct answer.

The second story, all the connecting words are sight words, and the nouns that are sight words are: horse, dog, car. While this selection has a slightly lower percentage of sight words overall, a smart student can figure out the entire story from the picture.

The third story, the noun sight words are: kitty, dog, bird, house, box, ?parties [sight word is party, you may or may not be able to figure this out], ?sunflower [sun and flower are sight words], song, seeds, girl. There is also a picture that tells most of the story.

There are also elements of an IQ test in several of the questions.

This is why Geraldine Rodgers, in her book "The Case for the Prosecution, Charged with the Destruction of America's Schools," says,

“All those silent reading comprehension tests are a massive fraud. Back before 1911, when Binet of France originated the FIRST real intelligence tests, he used oral reading comprehension to test native intelligence, which is itself un-teachable. Binet’s reading comprehension paragraphs are STILL used to test intelligence. So reading comprehension scores are really IQ scores!”

You can read more about her book and the link between reading comprehension tests and IQ in this post.

On my webpage, I describe how poor sight word taught readers guess their way through texts and have more quotes from Rodgers, and explain how this is hurting vocabulary acquisition. I also link to a comparison of Romans 12 in the KJV to the vocabulary dumbed down NIV and show how it looks to a reader taught with sight words. Here is the first paragraph of each below (KJV first), black words are in the first 2,000, so could be read by most adults taught with whole word methods, red words are 2,000 - 5,000, readable for most but more difficult for someone with a poor visual memory, purple for 5,000 - 10,000, and the first and last letter only of words outside the most common 10,000 words--you would have to guess the word from the first and last letter and the context. (Those with poor visual memories would have to also guess varying portions of the red and purple words, as well.)

I b_____h you therefore, b______n, by the mercies of God, that y_ present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, a________e unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not c_______d to this world: but be y_ transformed by the renewing of your mind, that y_ may prove what is that good, and a________e, and perfect, will of God.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not c_____m any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Now, the Reading First connection.

A spelling test or a phonics skills test is a better measure of reading ability up to grade 3 (and even after, but especially up to grade 3 when it is so easy to pass a reading comprehension test by guessing.)

The Reading First Impact Study Interim Report, page 28, states,

"The RFIS had initially planned to use a battery of individually-administered tests to assess students across the specific components of reading instruction targeted by the legislation: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). When the study’s design shifted to a RDD, with a quadrupled number of schools and students in the study sample, the individualized student assessment data collection was no longer practical."

For various reasons described on pages 28 - 29, they selected the SAT 10 Reading Comprehension test.

Many of the students at the schools in the Reading First study are also, unfortunately, the type of students especially vulnerable to doing poorly on a test that includes IQ as an element of the test. These are also the students that benefit the most from explicit, systematic phonics.

Guess what grade levels were testing with these silent reading comprehension tests for the Reading First study?

Grades 1 - 3.

When I worked in the Air Force as a scientist and a statistician, I met plenty of very smart rocket scientists, and they made me feel stupid in comparison.

A recent informative post about Reading First stated "Louisa Moats' comment that "Teaching Reading is Rocket Science" is not to be ignored."

Having met actual rocket scientists and seen what actual rocket scientists really do, I can tell you that teaching reading with phonics is definitely NOT rocket science. I have also tutored students in Algebra and Trig, and tutoring with phonics is easier!

However, it is hard for teachers who have not learned about the phonetic structure of the English language and have only been taught whole language and sight words techniques which not only contradict basic phonics principles, I believe they make it harder for the brain to learn phonics because of sight word picture overshadowing.

I have posted before, here and here, about sight words and guessing. You really have to see the guessing to believe it for yourself. Without nonsense words and teaching words in isolation, it is hard to break the habit. In Rudolf Flesch's 1955 (and republished in 1985!) "Why Johnny Can't Read," he has an entire chapter titled "Word Guessing--its Cause and Cure." He states on page 114 of this chapter,

"To begin with, let's try to isolate Johnny from his word-guessing environment....Let him stop all reading--all attempts to read. Explain to him that now he is going to learn how to read, and that for the time being, books are out. All he'll get for several months are lessons in phonics."

(There are easy to use phonics lessons in the back of this book.) One warning about Flesch--he is very sarcastic, he fought unsuccessfully for years with schools and teachers and it shows in his writing.

Guessing and its cure is discussed in this RRF thread.

Now, this might seem to make it sound like teaching phonics is a hard thing, as well as facts like "There are 166 letter-sound correspondences, which are too many to learn." promoted in whole-word oriented linguistics texts.

However, it really is not, if you start with an open mind, have no whole word teaching practices to overcome, and use a good phonics book that is designed to take the rocket science out of teaching reading.

I can't find the quote, but either Adams or Chall in their review of different reading methods found that when teachers made the switch from phonics to whole word or vice versa, they retained much of their old teaching methods. This seems to be happening in many Reading First classrooms.

Toe-by-Toe, a good remedial phonics program used in the UK that uses syllable division and nonsense words (but too many sight words, they need to read my sight word page to find out how to teach them phonetically!) has this tidbit:

Q: Is this book solely for the use of teachers or other professionals?
A: No! Teachers are often restricted by classroom procedures. Parents have no such procedures to inhibit them; they start with a 'clean slate'.

With my first student, I made several mistakes and taught her some sounds incorrectly at first, but she still made amazing progress--just learning that all the letters had sounds and that all words could be sounded out if broken up into syllables was a revelation and a motivation for her, she learned rapidly despite my initial errors--in fact, she was relieved that I made mistakes--it actually gave her more confidence that she could learn to read.

I had started with whole word teaching for a month, and was very excited about it after hearing its praises sung by the literacy organization I was tutoring with. However, she only learned 3 words in the 3 months I worked with her using whole word methods. In her first phonics lesson, she learned to sound out around 30 words she had never seen before, including three 3-syllable words.

When teachers used phonics in one room schoolhouses, there were not many problems learning to read, and the teachers were often girls as young as 16 (Laura Ingalls Wilder was 15, but she's obviously an exceptional person) and they taught everyone the 3R's while keeping order with boys often bigger and older than them in the classrooms.

In 2003 and 2004, I visited a nursing home with my daughter and met a then 94-year-old woman who had taught for a while (11 years?) in a one-room-schoolhouse in Texas. She said she used phonics and ALL of her students learned to read. She also said she never had any discipline problems. (She was a small lady, too!) She didn't think it was any big deal what she did, and changed the subject rapidly when I tried to get her to go into more detail. Two of her 4 brothers died fighting for our country, and all 4 went to war. She didn't think she had done much in comparison, and thought nothing of the fact that all her students learned to read.

I'll post later about the nuts and bolts about teaching phonics and how easy it actually is if you do it right and have the proper tools. In the meantime, if you're interested, you can find good resources for that here:

My free online spelling lessons (2 hours total, teaches all the phonics you need to teach someone to read.)

Don Potter's Education Page (lots of free good phonics programs and instructions on how to teach phonics--including Remedial Reading Drills, the method used to teach Flesch's Johnny how to read.)

My list of good phonics and spelling books

How to teach with Webster's Speller (syllables!)

How to teach a remedial reading student

How to teach a beginning reading student

I have recently joined the UK Reading Reform Foundation (RRF) discussion forum. You may see some names you recognize there! One of their commentors also has a very interesting dylsexia website that I like. ("School-Proof your child.")

There is a ton of good information on the RRF website, especially this list of links; however, they don't think you should teach the alphabet first, only letter sounds. I happen to be a firm believer in both the alphabet names and sounds, and also syllables, which have not been popular since 1826. (Although syllables are currently taught in some French and Spanish phonetic reading programs, but syllables in words, not taught first in an isolated syllabary.) According to many researchers, "knowing the letter names is the best predictor of beginning reading achievement." (Marilyn Adams, 1990, Beginning to Read, Thinking and Learning about Print.)

The Brits evidently have their own Reading First type of program which is also meeting resistance, "The details above reveal nothing less than slight-of-hand by government ministers and the Reading Recovery people. "

You can also find some good comments about our Reading First program on their forum.

I've got exactly 5 seconds to sit down at the kitchen table - dang!^* (have been in a lather -- book revisions,^** Reading First obsession, trouble with proofs, all the usual ... plus, a revelation: now that ktm really is a group effort, I can get behind on reading my own blog! Who knew?)

I have a big stack of cool stuff to post, all of which will have to wait except for this one: another memo from inside the ice cream shop. Not just any old ice cream shop ---- the Reading First ice cream shop.

It's always worse than you think.

Frankly, I’m not surprised that when looking at the entire RF project, there were no gains across country. Bob Dixon predicted this at the start of the project in his article "Sometimes Phonics Sucks," when he wrote about what happens when substandard "phonics" is taught which then triggers the sight word folks to say, "Look it doesn't work," and the pendulum completely turns away from the beginning phonics inroads.

What we need to analyze now is where those gains in RF schools did occur and what were those schools/states with the gains doing to have increased success. The medical community would never abandon or "diss" a drug that had been given at too low of a dosage. They would use their data to see with whom the drug was effective and how much of an increase was needed to get results. What can we learn from the effective schools and there were effective schools where RF made a huge difference. With the exception of the better RF schools, in most places schools are still in the midst of the sight word approaches to reading they started using 20 years ago. The college students who went through that dreadful instruction are now the most illiterate generation in remembrance, and colleges across the country are having to increase dramatically the number of remedial reading courses they hold. Viewing the "Children of the Code" web site is a chilling reminder of the legacy sight word approaches have left. I urge Mr. Bracey to watch the interviews at that web site with the cognitive psychologists, neurologist, ophthalmologists, and high level education researchers whose body of work remains largely ignored to this day.

Given that for the past 20 years whole language aka "balanced literacy," was the predominate teaching method in most states, RF represented baby steps in trying to swing the pendulum back to phonics approaches. More than 90% of universities still do not train teachers to teach systematic and explicit phonics and these skills take a long time developing. Just relearning what myths they learned in education classes is challenging for teachers and only happens when training in the district addresses these "hot button" issues (ex. teaching with the 3 cueing system which in essence is teaching children to use the word reading strategies that persons with Dyslexia use is a difficult habit to break). Too often these issues were typically ignored in many states' RF training. Louisa Moats' comment that "Teaching Reading is Rocket Science" is not to be ignored. In too many RF schools, I have observed most of the sight word based teaching practices she describes in her article "Whole Language Hi Jinks." These practices are so ingrained that after a three day workshop on systematic and explicit phonics, we found out to our horror, that almost all teachers were still having children listen to the stories that they were supposed to read; sometimes listening several times to the CDs that the big 3 reading curricula provide. The teachers were astonished that we were telling them to have the children do "cold reads." A few even became angry. "How will the children ever develop fluency if the don't first hear the story read by someone who is fluent reading it?" is what I heard.

In the RF classes that I saw or talked to administrators about (in Ohio, Georgia, Illinois, and Florida) these are variables that contributed to a lack of results.

1. In order to gain larger market share, the major phonics publishers (Open Court, Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin) wrote their curricula to be taught either with a phonics emphasis or a sight word based one. I've watched the same Open Court series taught as both. Many RF schools bought the Big 3 Phonics curricula and continued to teach them with a sight word based approach which takes much less planning time for the teachers. The guided reading books on their shelves remained the major curriculum. Many schools never used the decodable books that are purchased separately with the Big 3 phonics curricula or teachers never copied the decodable books (contained in a "sent home to parents" extra workbook). Each of those curricula has guided reading books that go with each unit and it was these that were purchased for the teachers or that the teachers decided to use. Omitting the decodable books so that students do not get the necessary practice reading the newly learned words (remember the repetition research recently discussed on this group), removes a key element from a phonics program. When teachers use Open Court, etc. and do not have students practice saying the new sounds, then practice reading the new words, and then practice reading the decodable text with the new sounds, and instead focus on the guided reading books, they are simply not teaching systematic and explicit phonics. I saw a lot of this. Sometimes I would have to show teachers (who had been using the curriculum for two years) where to find the decodable books that they needed to print out.

2. Although the RF training was wonderful and teachers who went through it were steps ahead of teachers who didn't, because most of this generation of teachers has had no effective phonics instruction back in college, they don't know how to say sounds without schwas, they don't know how to show children how to blend sounds into words, they don't know how to divide words into chunks that children can then read. And a few RF workshops could compensate for this lack. Typically, the level of state RF instruction never became this explicit.

3. Fidelity was low or lacking, especially in states where the state education bureaucracy personnel did not support Reading First. In all of our systematic and explicit phonics multi-tier programs, after a state visit from the RF "experts," teachers would run to us or email us to let us know what things we had trained them to do were unacceptable to the RF experts. In Illinois, it was not enough guided reading even thought the children had not yet developed alphabetic principle); in Georgia it was a distaste for large group (homogeneous) oral reading -- even with all of the differences, the "experts" couldn't see how our SAFER reading (conducted like DI large group reading) differed from the more ineffective Round Robin reading. Some of the experts wanted "small groups" at all times. Explanations about how in a typical class that meant that students would be sitting for long extended periods doing center activities and not receiving direct teacher instruction, fell on deaf ears.

4. Some states like Ohio, simply never implemented a phonics based approach in most RF schools-- they probably increased their use of phonics by a few minutes each week. I saw a lot of this in two large Michigan cities also. Whether it was Dayton or Columbus or Springfield, the district personnel would unabashedly tell you that "yes," they were using "Houghton Mifflin," but they were also continuing their use of 4 Block or Literacy Collaborative. Yes, they were still using the 3 cueing system, and yes, they focused on the guided reading books, and yes, they gave the DIBELS, but because results were so low, they still spend hours and hours away from instruction each semester giving the non valid DRA assessments that accompanied whatever guided reading approach they were using. They didn't like the DIBELS because it didn't show them the gains that their students were making, but the invalid DRA's did.

5. In Jacksonville and Michigan, I observed a number of RF classrooms where the only reading was either silent or whisper reading and I don't think that the phonics curricula ever came off of the shelves. In the Ohio as well as the Jacksonville classrooms, parents and community groups were tracking the DIBELS because they knew how poor the reading instruction was and they were disappointed that the sight word approaches were continuing in the schools after they were designated RF. Despite coming to their school administrators with that information, nothing changed. The administrators circled their wagons and continued on as before. In districts, typically the persons most responsible for sabotaging a move to systematic and explicit phonics is the district literacy coordinator. All of their graduate work has been in sight word based approaches making their resistance much higher. Back when we were one of the first 4 OSEP multi-tier programs, we were the only one that wasn't stopped in its track from establishing systematic and explicit phonics because of district literacy coordinators. It takes a combination of outwitting, orneriness, and going to higher administrative levels to defuse the influence these people have.

6. The wimpy Tier 3 instruction done in so many schools could not be expected to catch those students up to grade level. If there is anything I've learned these past 8 years, it's that Jerry Silbert is right on target when he talks about 90 minutes of intensive DI reading instruction being needed to catch students up to grade level. Look at Haskin Lab's brain research and recognize that the children whose brain function normalized as they acquired reading skills were receiving 2 hours a day of 1-1 systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Most Tier 3 programs are tutorial. The Big 3 phonics intensive intervention programs used in places like Dayton are worse than useless. Not only are they not systematic, they don't even coordinate with classroom instruction and thus wouldn't be effective even for Tier 2 instruction.

It's time to roll up sleeves and find the individual schools in districts where gains have occurred. My hypothesis would be that these are the schools that have embraced systematic and explicit phonics and abandoned more ineffective practices for their below grade level students, but a closer look is needed. Every RF school I've observed where there are no results has continued to do balanced literacy with the scale tipping way over to a sight word approach.

Reading First has been responsible for explicit, systematic phonics starting to re-emerge after 20 years. We have to remember and remind others that it's only the first step down a long path. How anyone can look at the brain research and continue to promote sight word methods seems like a decision out of the Dark Ages. To see how systematic and explicit phonics when taught with fidelity and intensity can actually change what happens in the brain when someone reads.....how a struggling reader with what the researchers term a "Dyslexic brain" not only will learn to read but will have profound changes in both hemispheres of the brain during reading tasks and to ignore this knowledge is simply unfathomable.

OK, I'm off.

I've got homework to do.


from the ice cream shop
control theory in a failing district
the phonics page


^{* I wonder if Wikipedia has anything to say about the concept of "crashing a book"...
** I have permission to post.}