Of course, some observers try to split the difference: "new teachers need textbooks, but experienced ones do not" is often their claim.

  I think overall we are probably better served by teachers following textbooks, though they are certainly far from perfect. When I was director of reading of the Chicago Public Schools I wish we would have relied upon one or two basic reading programs, because it would have made it much easier to target high quality professional development in ways that would more certainly benefit children.

  The choice isn't between good teachers and bad textbooks. In fact, it shouldn't be a choice at all. We want committed well prepared teachers AND we want them to have high quality tools to support their efforts. A teacher who does not have to spend a bunch of time chasing down materials, constructing lessons, and the like has more time to focus on children's needs.

  The following is from a column that I wrote when I was president of IRA. I based it on a wonderful article by Atul Gawande. He was writing about medicine where the same argument rages: are doctors experts or do they need tools and regimentation? Gawande has a new article in a recent issue of the New Yorker that I will write about in this space in the near future:

  If a field is to advance, it has to at least consider whether deeply cherished ideas are correct or not. It might be upsetting to find out that we don’t know how to encourage kids to read successfully or that good teachers often rely on programs, but it would be even worse to proceed with the misconception that the conventional wisdom on such subjects is based on anything more than gut feeling. If we want to succeed in improving children’s reading, we can’t continue to accept “truthiness” over truth.

  Teaching expertise may be overrated. Here’s some conventional wisdom that most of us, me included, have accepted as genuine fact: teaching expertise is the key to learning. There is certainly some evidence on this one, though I suspect it wouldn’t be very convincing if we didn’t already believe in it. Maybe we’ve made teaching expertise a fetish and it’s holding us back!

  What made me wonder about this was a New Yorker article on obstetrics (“The Score,” October 9, 2006, pp. 59-67). I know, I know. That is not a blue-ribbon panel report or a scholarly article from a refereed journal. But Atul Gawande’s article caught my eye because it claimed that to improve effectiveness it may be necessary to rein in or limit expert practice.

  I know that sounds nuts, but Gawande makes a pretty good case that the transformation of obstetrics from a field that stressed skilled craftmanship to one based more on an industrial factory model has led to better outcomes for patients.

  It’s easy to reject medical analogies since they so often depend on biological processes which are so different from what we face in teaching. But let’s not reject this one too quickly since delivering babies is more like teaching than most medical specialties. A successful delivery requires extended involvement and engagement, and depends on the physician’s ability to carry out complex behavioral procedures, often under challenging circumstances.

  According to Gawande, “If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills… You do research to find new techniques. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.”

  “But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability. You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. really could master all these techniques.”

  Gawande goes on to describe the ingenuity of the various delivery procedures (such as the use of forceps) that were invented along the way, and how medical schools emphasized these procedures for difficult births. These approaches were hard to master and few obstetricians ever really learned to use them well (which didn’t stop them—when the use of complex procedures becomes a hallmark of professionalism, then all professionals want to use those procedures no matter what the outcome).

  But things changed. Obstetricians adopted rules more like those of the factory floor than of a learned profession or a skilled craft. To discourage the use of complex procedures by the inexpert, even the skilled physicians who could use them well set them aside. The result of the standardized use of “good enough” practices has led to big improvements in the health and safety of babies.

  I wonder if we define teachers too much by the procedures they use. I wonder if, due to our zeal to protect educator autonomy, we have championed complex and subtle practice at the expense of overall success. Can 3.8 million teachers really do what many professional development programs push?

  The old system of obstetrics created pockets of excellence; some pretty amazing doctors at times pulled off some pretty amazing deliveries. The cost of that, of course, was high: lots of botched deliveries by doctors unable to manage the challenging procedures. Obstetrics eventually surrendered this “heroic physician” model to stress standardization—and the result has been more live births and fewer damaged children. I wonder if we are clinging too tightly to our own traditional “heroic teacher” model and our excellent, but perhaps too ambitious, instructional schemes. We, too, can point to our pockets of excellence, but then think about the very real cost this might represent to the great numbers of children for whom we are responsible.

 Two More Provocative Ideas

Two more provocative reading-relevant ideas that might disturb us came up in the same article: Gawande writes that “evidence-based medicine,” the use of randomized experiments to figure out what works (sound familiar?) has played a very limited role in obstetrics! Unlike other medical specialties, there are few of these kinds of studies in obstetrics and those that have been carried out are often ignored in practice. Obstetrics comes in last in the use of hard evidence among medical specialties, and yet it has done more to extend life than any of the others.

There are, to be sure, differences between medicine and education, but it’s interesting to see this successful use of a very different model of research than the one that I use and that is fast becoming the new conventional wisdom of much of our field.

  How do obstetricians improve practice without experimental study? That question gives rise to one more compelling idea: it may be due mainly to something else that should sound familiar. Gawande attributes the improvements to the use of informal-but-objective assessment results that are reviewed by both the doctor and principal (okay, chief of obstetrics).

  The Apgar score allows doctors and nurses to quickly and objectively evaluate a baby’s condition at 1 minute and 5 minutes after birth. That simple assessment has led obstetricians to try things out—not waiting for research—to see if they can improve their scores. Because they always know the baby’s score, the doctors can easily see the relationship between their actions and the outcomes.

  It is hard not to think about DIBELS (or PALS, TPRI, ISEL, and so on). These tests all provide quick information so that adjustments to practice can be made. But the analogy breaks down, too, since those tests give multiple scores, and don’t involve much in the way of professional judgment. In other words, DIBLERS may be onto something that could allow for more successful practice, but maybe it’s not quite the right something, since trying to keep track of 2 to 4 scores for each of 30 kids simultaneously is overwhelming and would not foster the kind of intense focus that the Apgar score seems to provide.

  Oh well. Questioning conventional wisdom is not for the feint of heart. Deflating overblown claims risks the anger of one’s friends, but it also threatens the comfort of one’s own beliefs. However, that’s the way it should be in a field that is seriously trying to improve measurable outcomes for students.

  In this article, “The Checklist,” Dr. Gawande describes the incredible complexity of Intensive Care Medicine, and the brilliance and courage of the doctors who practice it. But this was not a piece about heroic doctors, but instead explained the need to standardize and regiment such practice in order to maintain quality.

  I know…. I know…. the sentences in the previous paragraph don’t seem to go together. If practice in intensive care units (ICU) is so complicated and important, and physicians are so brilliant and committed, then why would anyone want to regiment that practice? You may want to invest in more professional development or reduce case loads, but adding more rules, regulations, and checklists seemingly would undermine rather than support the delivery of high quality care. As a physician who Gawande quotes puts it: “‘Forget the paperwork. Take care of the patient.”

  Gawande describes how “No Child Left Behind”-style efforts are now being used to script medical practice, and how resistant physicians are to these intrusions. The basal reader-like regimentation of medical practice “pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity.”

  The field of reading shares that devotion to the idea of “expert audacity” in teaching. Think of every movie or television show that you have ever seen on teaching (The Great Debaters, Dead Poets Society, Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love, Mr. Holland’s Opus, and on and on and on). In all of those kinds of stories there is a teacher who against all odds takes on the system with no curriculum, no textbooks, nor colleague support, and makes a difference in the lives of students.

  Good teaching these days is not that individual. Every teacher matters, but no teacher alone really makes the difference—especially in something complex like learning to read. We need teachers who will do a great job and raise literacy achievement and who will then turn these kids over to another teacher, who will also raise literacy achievement. That is more likely to be accomplished when everyone is doing the right thing.

  The right thing in this case is complex, because there are many things that need to be learned about reading and these components all must be orchestrated into a powerful whole. Not teaching essential skills and strategies thoroughly enough that students can master them will do harm. Because of this, we need textbooks and systematically-organized curriculum to better support teacher efforts.

  As Dr. Gawande writes: “It is ludicrous, though, not to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.” He concludes that because requiring doctors to carry out checklists of required procedures is being shown to make a big difference in patient's well being.

  That makes sense to me. Teachers who work closely with their colleagues by adhering to the discipline of a shared systematic curriculum are not surrendering their professionalism. They are just better focusing their courage and intelligence on those aspects of practice where those qualities will help rather than hinder children. If lists and prescribed practices can improve medical care with all of its complexity, I certainly expect that it can do the same for reading teachers. Using a good textbook is not an act of surrender or submission.

  I certainly agree that a steady diet of whole-class instruction is almost certain to lose somebody. Kids learn at different speeds; they get confused or phase out and miss key information; they are absent, and so on. There clearly need to be adjustments to what teachers do in order to meet kids’ needs. Even agreeing with the notion that some educational adjustments need to be made for individual differences, I often feel a pang of discomfort when I hear the complaint about the lack of differentiation.

  Like the teachers who they criticize, far too many supervisors lack a clear conception of what differentiation is or what it should look like. That means when a teacher is delivering a bunch of mini-lessons and sticking kids into different books, these supes are satisfied… even when the instruction is still inappropriate and ineffective. The idea is to give the greatest amount of effective teaching to the largest number of kids; not to lock into any set of procedures without ongoing attention to the effectiveness of these procedures.

  That a teacher is spewing a bunch of different lessons does not guarantee “differentiation.” Mandates that teachers employ centers, small groups, flexible groups, or mini-lessons prescribe symptoms rather than effects.

  There are two basic kinds of differentiation: curriculum differentiation and instructional differentiation. They are both important, but they play out in different ways in terms of what teachers need to do or how pressed for time they might be in their classroom.

  Curriculum differentiation includes increasing or decreasing the emphasis on particular aspects of the curriculum for some kids and not others. In reading this could entail giving greater attention to fluency or phonics for kids who are struggling to learn these skills. Everybody would get some amount of such instruction, but there could be adjustments to increase or decrease how much depending on how students are doing. Curriculum adjustments would also include putting kids in a harder or easier book to practice reading (this approach is often what teachers assume differentiation to be and they often can’t figure out how to handle multiple books).

  Instructional differentiation includes adjusting the amount of instruction or the intensity of instruction (how the lessons are delivered). Even when teachers are predominately giving whole class lessons, if they pay attention to how the students are doing they’ll have to notice that some kids are getting what is being taught and some are not. Responding to this immediate difference by giving those who are succeeding some seatwork or extra practice, while offering more direct interaction and support to those who aren’t getting it is a sound differentiating response. Another change might be to make sure that certain kids have chances to respond during the lesson is appropriate, too.

  Teachers should know how to differentiate both in terms of curriculum and instruction (and these adjustments to teaching can look pretty different). And, to make either work, they need to be able to evaluate—as they teach—how well children are doing. If you cannot discern which kids understand and which do not, appropriate differentiation is impossible.

  Congratulations on your recent well-deserved appointment. Your success as Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools depended greatly on improving achievement. Secretaries of Education aren’t usually held responsible for such gains, but maybe they should be. Given your competitive spirit, why not hold yourself to that standard anyway.

  So what steps can a Secretary of Education take in this regard? I can think of several.

1. Your boss campaigned on the idea of doubling federal support for preschool education. That’s $10 billion in new funding. The Secretary of Education can require that the curricula for such programs be consistent with the forthcoming National Early Literacy Panel report (it is to be released in Washington, DC on January 8).
2. Reading First should be renewed and reformed, too. As you know, the nation invested $5 billion trying to improve primary grade literacy. The program was wracked with problems, but much was learned. This is a good time to double down (Congressional support is likely to be there if you do) and renew and reform that effort. It can be made to work and it should be made to work.
3. Another area where your boss wants to invest is in STEM programs (science, technology, engineering, and math). Given the great needs in those areas, this is not hard to support. But don’t lose sight of the fact that reading is a cornerstone of success in STEM. Require that STEM efforts address students’ abilities to read science, math, and technology, and you’ll go a long way toward success.
4. President George W. Bush invested in the reading improvement of young children. Don’t just continue these efforts but extend them up the grades. America can no longer afford to teach reading in the elementary schools and to ignore it after that. Support Striving Readers and other programmatic efforts to ensure that adolescent literacy improves (this will be critical if President Obama’s ideas of expanding access to colleges are going to work).
5. U.S. literacy needs are closely linked to the progress of English learners. The Obama education plan calls for doubling the investment in educational research. What a great opportunity to figure out the most effective way to enable immigrant children to succeed in U.S. schools. Earmark a big chunk of that new research money for figuring out how we can teach literacy more effectively to these kids—and pledge to follow the results of that research in federal policy.
6. Don’t forget the adults either. There is a need for increased emphasis and coordination of educational efforts for adults who don’t have adequate literacy. The federal government supports literacy programs through the Department of Education, but it also does so through Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, and Labor. The states have their own patchwork of programs, too. Who is getting helped, where are we double programming, how could we coordinate services better are just a few questions that you could lead the administration to ask.
7. President Obama led efforts in the U.S. Senate to make college more affordable and available to students. What a great idea! But colleges are starting to respond to increased access by lowering literacy requirements. It is critical that any increases in funding for colleges and universities carry the requirement that students improve in literacy achievement during those years.
8. You learned a thing or two as a superintendent of a big city school district, such as how to lower educational standards to increase success. Incent states and districts to raise literacy standards—and to meet these higher standards—rather than allowing them to make themselves look better.
9. Teacher education was a thorn in your side in Chicago. You were always trying to expand the pool of teachers. It would be better if you helped upgrade the quality of teacher education and linked this to student learning. The federal government could do a lot to lead states towards teacher preparation standards that make sense in the area of literacy (and data management plans like those developed in Chicago could do a lot to make these efforts effective).
10. The National Institute for Literacy should be given an independent voice in literacy policy. During the Bush administration, NIFL couldn’t even report to Congress as required by law without the approval of the Department of Education. Allow NIFL to lead on these issues and to provide information to the Congress concerning which federal efforts are working and which are not.

  It’s a big agenda, but literacy is a big problem. Good luck!

  Similarly, our current financial crisis didn’t just blow up in October. This one had been percolating for some time, and the Secretary Treasury was scrambling to keep the lid on it. It turns out these markets had been destabilized years ago and it was just a matter of time until they toppled. The economic train only came off the tracks recently, but that train has been careening recklessly at high speed for a long time, so its recent crash should not have been so surprising.

  I wonder if we haven’t been suffering from our own case of the education sniffles or if our literacy train hasn’t foolishly been picking up speed with curves ahead?

  In 2000, the U.S. census together with the subsequent National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) may have been our ignored canaries in the coal mine. These reports revealed what may be the most important literacy statistics of recent times.

  For the first time in U.S. educational history, increases in numbers of years of schooling have not led to gains in literacy attainment. Additional schooling seems no longer be a potent stimulant to reading achievement.

  In the past, when school years lengthened from 110 days to 180, or when school enrollment became compulsory, or when schools allowed African-Americans to attend, the result has been concurrent improvements in school completion and in literacy.

  Now we are accomplishing levels of educational attainment never before reached in our long history, but literacy levels remain stagnant. Average Americans earn more than a high school diploma now, but they can’t read any better than their older brothers or sisters who got by with less time in school.

  Many educational reform efforts depend on the idea of increasing the amount of schooling. Think of the high school dropout prevention initiatives of groups like the Alliance for Excellent Education or the efforts to expand college access put forth by President-Elect Obama. In the past, such investments would have presaged higher literacy levels, but the problem that is being ignored is that something has changed in high school and post-high school education that has cut the effectiveness of such schooling.

  What happened?

  There are many possibilities, but I think the most likely is that schooling no longer requires sufficient amounts of demanding reading. The students are there, they take classes, they might even learn some information, but they don’t get stretched in reading like they once did. A couple of years ago, American College Testing reported that the best predictor of post-high school success was the amount of challenging reading that students engaged in their academic courses in high school.

  The impending crisis is this: we will beggar ourselves trying to provide our kids with more years of education, but it will not pay off for them in terms of better economic success despite our big investment. The additional education we can buy for our children now appears to be both expensive and a pale imitation of the potent variety that we would have bought them in the past. It is not enough to expand college access or high school completion; we need to ensure that this added teaching leads to added literacy or the game won’t be worth the candle.

  However, I get your point. You aren’t looking for an “effective program,” as much as for a program that has the potential of being effective if used properly by a teacher who knows her stuff. The National Reading Panel (NRP) reviewed 52 studies that showed that explicit teaching of phonemic awareness to kindergartners and first-graders helped them in learning to read. The idea is that if young children can hear the separable sounds within words, they will make a faster start in learning to decode. Phonemic awareness instruction should teach kids to hear the sounds, and phonics instruction then builds on that knowledge. These days most core programs try to include phonemic awareness teaching.

  The purpose of teaching phonemic awareness is to ensure children can hear all separable sounds within words, and that they be able to hold these sounds in memory and do things with them (like separate them or delete them). If a student can fully segment words with proficiency (that is, he or she can break words into all of their separate sounds with ease), then everything that need be accomplished with a phonemic awareness program has been accomplished and you can move on. The issue in evaluating and selecting a program is will it provide enough quality support that students should be able to master that set of skills.

  Towards that end, one thing I would look for in a phonemic awareness program would be the inclusion of phonological awareness instruction. Phonemic awareness is part of a larger collection of auditory skills dealing with language sounds (phonological awareness). Phonemic awareness, the awareness of the individual phonemes or the smallest meaningful sounds in the language, is the most sophisticated of these skills. Before children develop these sophisticated phonemic skills, they go through a continuum of skills development that allows them to first to isolate or separate words, syllables, rhymes and simple beginning sounds (onsets). Some young children struggle to learn to hear individual sounds; a program that includes instruction in these precursor skills can allow these kids to make faster progress (and teachers can skip this part of the program for kids who have already learned these earlier developing skills). The inclusion of lessons aimed at these grosser and earlier-developing skills is a good fall-back position.

  Furthermore, I would look for a program that provides about 18 hours of explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness (approximately 64 15-minute lessons, for example—but this can be organized lots of different ways). Programs may provide more than this amount of teaching, but not less. The reason I say this is because the NRP review found that about 14-18 hours of instruction led to optimum amounts of learning; some kids needed more than this, of course, and some needed less. It is essential to have a program that will provide at least enough support that the average student will be able to accomplish the instructional goals by going through all of the activities (and you might need additional support for students who make slower progress).

  The sequence of instruction of an effective program should be (1) separation of words and syllables, (2) rhyming, (3) separation of onsets and rimes (e.g., b-ig, c-an); (4) the segmentation and blending of the individual sounds. Letter names should be taught throughout this sequence, and it is reasonable to mix phonemic awareness with phonics by teaching students the sounds associated with the various letters.

  A sound program will offer both whole class lessons and small group instruction (groups of three work very well for this). This small group instruction is for the kids who don’t make sufficient progress in the large group and it should increase these children’s interaction with the teacher (making it easier to see the teacher’s mouth and to hear the sounds and to respond more frequently). Of course, if teachers are going to adjust instruction successfully, by giving some kids extra help in a small group, then it is important that the program provides a sound assessment, so teachers can gauge the children’s progress.

  Remember, this teaching is for 5- and 6-year-olds and it is important that it be appropriate for young children. This means simple language in the explanations, attractive illustrations, varied activities, and brief, but frequent, lessons tailored to the short attention spans of youngsters in this age group. Programs should only try to teach one or two skills at a time (don’t overwhelm the children). These lessons should be fun, and can incorporate singing, clapping, stomping, and other movements. It is important to have children use concrete representations of the letter sounds (i.e., clapping, markers, letter cards). Take a hard look at a program to determine if teachers could use it easily and if children would understand both what they are supposed to do in the various activities and what they are supposed to learn from them.

  So here is my open letter to the new president.

 Dear President-Elect Obama:

  Congratulations on your impending historic victory. As President you will have lots of demands on you, but please don’t forget about America’s literacy needs. This is something that you know something about (you’ve set up tutoring programs, served on the Senate education committee, and donated book royalties to the Illinois Reading Council). We need a bipartisan effort to improve reading. Here are 10 things I hope you will do to ensure that America gets stronger in this aspect of education.

1. You want the federal government to increase teacher salaries. Do that, but not on the basis on test scores as you have proposed, but by increasing the lengths of school years. Incent the states to increase the lengths of their school years by about 8 weeks per year. Nothing improves student learning like teaching, so this would be a smart investment. Increasing the time teachers spend with kids will make America more competitive (kids will be safer, and teaching will become more like other comparable jobs in terms of structure and pay which will help attract a new group of talented individuals to teaching).
2. You’ve wisely kept silent on Reading First during the campaign, so you can do what is right rather than playing to any interest group. We need to continue to try to improve reading achievement in the United States. Reading First either must be revitalized or it must be replaced with an alternative program—not just a shift of more funds to Title I.
3. During your Senate years, you have shown great concern for helping kids get through college. You should follow these investments with some kind of sustained reading help and encouragement in grades 4-12, too. Either support Striving Readers or replace it with another initiative that will encourage states to upgrade standards and efforts at these levels.
4. You intend to double the educational research budget. That’s great. Earmark about $10 million of that annually to the study of how to improve reading comprehension for readers who have basic skills (particularly for second language kids).
5. It isn’t enough to do research, it needs to be applied. Don’t back off on federal requirements for following the research.
6. Expand the charge, support, and autonomy of the National Institute for Literacy (involving it in all literacy efforts by all cabinet departments, including Justice which is not included now). Require the Institute to provide a state of American literacy policy report to Congress every fourth year, beginning in 2013 (an independent report that does not need to be approved by any department).
7. You have been saying that we are testing accountability against the wrong tests. I agree. Pay to develop a reading test based on consistency with the American Diploma standards and encourage schools to work towards that test performance.
8. The big increase in preschool that you intend is very exciting. Make sure that money is spent in pursuit of guiding kids with a 21st-century literacy curriculum—one that includes a lot of attention and support in the area of oral language development.
9. Encourage the expansion of Internet-based literacy and language instruction available free to teens and adults.
10. Make sure all Science, Engineering, and Math initiatives address the issues entailed in doing the demanding reading of Science, Engineering, and Math.

  Good luck.

Recently, I received a note from a teacher agitated about her state school board. It seems the board wanted to reject the purchase of an instructional program because it didn’t teach phonemic awareness separately from phonics. The committee of teachers who had selected the program were upset; the vendor was upset. Because of my work on the National Reading Panel, I was being asked to weigh in on the criterion the state was using.

I wanted to know what had led the state board to conclude that phonics and phonemic awareness should be taught separately. I found out that it was because these skills had been listed separately in the state standards.

This reminded me of the Congressional aide who very patiently explained to me that, “Of course, the National Reading Panel was saying that you had to teach phonemic awareness before you could teach phonics, and you had to teach phonics before you could teach fluency, and you had to teach fluency before you could get to reading comprehension.” I wondered where this insight into the National Reading Panel work had come from. He explained that was the order that the topics had been presented. He inferred that ordering of topics was meant to imply a sequence of instruction; something that dumbfounded me since the panelists had never discussed such a sequence and the research reviews never contemplated it.

To respond specifically to the question about the specific sequencing of phonemic awareness and phonics:

The National Reading Panel conducted two separate research reviews on the teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics for the U.S. government. To ensure that both components received adequate instructional attention, we reviewed studies in which phonemic awareness OR phonics were taught – ignoring studies that combined their instruction. If a study evaluated their combined teaching, we didn’t include it in our review.

We found that instruction in each provided a learning benefit to children. Phonemic awareness instruction was beneficial and phonics instruction was also beneficial. We did not conclude that such instruction should necessarily be separated… in fact, Dr. Linnea Ehri who led these particular reviews strongly believes the benefits of these two areas of teaching to be reciprocal… the teaching of PA enhances the decoding skills taught in phonics, and the phonics instruction helps students to develop the phonemic sensitivity children need to gain.

It would be erroneous to conclude that these skills need be taught separately.

In fact, the Panel noted that phonemic awareness programs that included letters (the connection of sounds and letters being the beginnings of phonics) did better than those programs that did not include letters.

A new report to be released soon from the National Early Literacy Panel has examined the research on teaching literacy to preschoolers and kindergartners, has not separated the effects. It has examined studies of combined phonological awareness and phonics and found them to be good things to teach, either separately or combined (much as did the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth in its review).

State or district learning standards usually specify the skills that are to be accomplished, without any regard to how they should be taught. There is nothing in the California state learning standards that would argue for separating phonemic awareness from phonics – just that both phonemic awareness and decoding ability were to be achieved. An instructional program aimed at both sets of skills fits the bill.

Awhile back I received a similar concern. This one concerned that a combined phonemic awareness/phonics program was teaching those skills appropriately. This program developed phonemic awareness for each phoneme, following up that instruction immediately with letter recognition, letter naming, letter sounding, and letter writing instruction. The teacher who contacted me thought that students should receive several months of PA instruction, followed by 2-3 years of decoding. Her plan might be acceptable, but like Linnea Ehri, I suspect it would be better to move back and forth between PA and phonics. Personally, I kind of liked the idea of focusing so thoroughly on each phonemic element rather than trying to accomplish all PA and then all decoding (especially if there is some ongoing review – so that phonemes and letter-sound relations are revisited frequently).

Federal research reviews and state learning standards have been valuable. I’m just concerned about the inferences some educators and policymakers have drawn from them. Good readers not only draw inferences, they are aware of their inferences and recognized where they came from.

 1. Does research show that reading to kids improves literacy? Yes or no.

  If you read Jim Trelease's books, you're likely to get this one wrong. Reading to kids has been shown to improve kids' language development--and this might have a positive impact on reading--but no studies show that reading to kids improves their reading ability.... Really.

2. When you read to kids should you focus on picture books? Yes or no.

  Research studies don't really tell us much about the impact of reading specific books on children's learning, but the key to having an impact on children's language learning must be a balance among several factors. It would matter that the book presented kids with adequately complex language. It would matter how much the context of the text supports kids understanding the new words and ideas presented. And it would matter that kids found it interesting enough to pay attention. Picture books do a pretty good job of all of these, especially the latter...

  But what if... what if ... you read really long classical books to kids? I must say that's what I did. My wife read picture books to them, and I read books like Wind in the Willows and Black Beauty and Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. I started this practice when they were babies, and continued until they were about 13 or 14.

  These books had a powerful impact on their lives. My oldest daughter (the lawyer, book editor) loves reading, at least in part due to that reading, and several of those books are still on her favorites list. She has read everything Richard Feynman wrote as a result of reading, Surely You Must Joking to her. I think it thrilled her that smart people could do such neat things by thinking. Every summer when she returned home from college she reread The Hobbit, and I have no idea how many times she has read The Odyssey.

  Her younger sister didn't care for reading (or being read to) as much as she did. In fact, when she was a toddler I literally had to capture her to read to her (holding her in my arms, often for no more than one or two minutes while I tried to read and to quiet her at the same time). But over time, it caught on and I read to her a bunch. One day she said, "Why don't I ever get to pick what we read?" I told her she could, and just to test me she pointed to a book on my shelf: In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall's memoir about working with chimpanzees as a young woman.

  I shocked her by reading the book that she picked and not surprisingly it became a favorite. She is still a big Goodall fan and I suspect that was the beginning of her fascination with science (she is now a bioengineer). Other favorites of hers were books like Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World.

  Lots of the books that I read to them became summer vacations. Of course, we had to go to Virginia to see the miniature horses at Chincoteague once we'd read about Misty, and another trip had to spent in Missouri in the cave where Tom and Becky get lost in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain was the subject of my oldest's bachelor's thesis in English as a result of these early reading experiences).

  Still other books led us to see the videos (like The Wizard of Oz or The Yearling).

  I can't claim that reading these challenging chapter books has been proven to be better than reading picture books to kids. However, I once asked my kids to name some of the books their mother read to them. They expressed surprise: Mom read to them? Of course she did, and quite a bit, but as they figured out, those books take only a few minutes, while the books I read often required their attention over days and weeks and even months. Those became unforgettable experiences, in the way that most picture books cannot.

  The books I read to them were rich in language and ideas, powerful in their ability to transport you to different times and places, and demanding of attention and memory all good things for developing young minds. It is clear to me that the books I read, whatever their impact on language and literacy, helped shape their tastes and talents.

  But you know what I like best about reading those kinds of books to kids? We, the kids and I, really enjoyed the quiet time together. It was a real delight.

  Maybe you should read those kinds of books to your kids or to your grandkids. Toward that end I have put a carousel of these read aloud books on this blog site. I'll list more choices in coming days and swap some of the carousel books out. They would make a great Christmas present or Chanukah present (when they were growing up, we gifted them a new book each of the 8 nights of Chanukah). Oh, and by the way, those two little girls that I wrote about above--they both got married this year, one on Memorial Day weekend and one on Columbus Day weekend, and both will be reading such books to their children someday.

  Some of the things that are scaring me:

1.  Reading First kids are comprehending no better than other children in Title I programs.
2.  Reading First teachers aren't teaching reading comprehension any differently than other teachers.
3.  Instructional interventions for English language learners rarely improve their reading comprehension.
4.  No matter what the intervention, effect sizes are smaller when reading comprehension tests are used to evaluate interventions with the  English language.
5.  Comprehension scores continue to languish for American school students despite lots of educational reform and lots of tax money.

The powerpoint for my California presentation is on this website under powerpoints: Ten Things Every Teacher Should Know about Reading.  

  But what does balance really mean? It can mean that teachers provide skills instruction but in the context of sustained silent reading, learning centers, book clubs, big book activities, minilessons and the like. In other words, it is a combination of instructional approaches that clearly make a difference in kids’ learning (as shown by research), and activities that may or may not make a learning difference (they might be good, but there is no research showing it yet).

  The problem is that balance has lots of meanings or metaphors. For instance, I’m a long distance cyclist. If my bicycle is starting to fall to the left, I shift my weight to the right to stay on top. Or, there is the balance accomplished by placing equal weights on the scales of justice. And, there is the claim of many television news shows to be “balanced.” By this, they mean they will include the voices of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, or pros and cons on their broadcasts.

  Those news shows' ideas of balance really bother me. They’ll take an issue, like child pornography, where there just isn’t a legitimate pro- position and put someone in that chair anyway. Why do they do such a foolish thing? Is it really balanced to have a spokesperson for a position held by the vast majority of human beings and with strong research support

counterweighted by someone who speaks for a fringey, weird, hurtful, and non-supportable position? What that does is to make the two positions seem equal. Balanced, but not really.

  Unfortunately, the notion of balanced literacy is something like that. The late Michael Pressley put forth the idea of balanced literacy as a kind of political agreement between warring factions in the field of reading education. Since one group of teachers want lots of explicit teaching in phonological awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and spelling and this other group wants to free kids to “experience” literacy with minimal adult mediation so they can enjoy themselves, can’t we just give each side equal coverage in the classroom? I guess the thinking is, we’ll balance these interests of adults and the kids will be fine.

  The problem is the same as with those talk shows; this make the two positions seem equal and if they are truly equal they obviously should be balanced. That this isn’t the case, upsets those who know they have the stronger evidence supporting their proposals. They see balanced literacy as a trick to keep teachers from finding out what the research really says and to sabotage efforts to make reading instruction more rigorous.

  Of course, many of those who embrace balanced literacy do so, not out of any sense of political compromise, but because of their fear that explicit teaching tends to get reduced to the lowest common denominator. That is, skills instruction often perseverates on the lowest level reading skills that can be taught—rather than focusing on the more complete conception of reading that is evident in the research. They quite rightly fear what happens to kids’ learning when teachers put all of their time into decoding skills while ignoring language development and the teaching of logic and reasoning.

  Research indicates that kids benefit from explicit instruction in a wide range of skills, from differentiating language sounds to matching sounds with letters to making a text sound like oral language to interpreting word meanings in context and thinking about a wide range of texts with an extensive and complex set of intellectual tools. We need the teaching of a complete conception of literacy. We are more likely to accomplish this by following research than by some political compromise, however.

  Unfortunately, there is still too much of a gap in the research record: those who are so passionate about high-level thinking and critical reasoning should be conducting research studies into how to teach these successfully. No matter how strongly one asserts that these are important, it is still necessary to test the assertions through empirical study. The phonics people, to their credit have done that, and their work makes it clear that readers should be taught explicitly how to decode. The “higher level thinking” folks, sadly, have not bothered to make their prescriptions entirely practical or proven; they have acted like all they need to do is avow their claims and teachers and policymakers should fall in line with their wisdom. It doesn’t work that way. From the existing work, I have no doubt that it is possible to teach higher level thinking and to help students to develop more sophisticated language, but there are far-too-few studies to be able to tell teachers how to do this well (I can give them much better advice on teaching fluency than on comprehension).

  So, let’s leave the political compromises and code language of “balanced literacy” behind. But let’s also commit ourselves to teaching literacy thoroughly and completely—and researchers can help realize this vision, by exploring more thoroughly those aspects of reading that we don’t yet understand very well (passionate exhortations aside).

  How can someone square the circle? How can I support NCLB and BBA?

Frankly, I don’t find it to be any kind of contradiction—not even a stretch. I have said for years that I would do anything I could to support improving reading achievement for our kids. Anything.

  So, when it was obvious that poor kids in my town were not getting medical care and this lack of medical care was undermining both their health and chances to learn literacy, I had no problem testifying in court against my employer (the state of Illinois) to try to correct the problem. Similarly, I have worked on any numbers of public health and employment projects over the years for the same reason. To me, the BBA statement is just a continuation of those efforts.

  The Bush administration has tried to reduce the emphasis on those aspects of social policy to put the emphasis on school improvement. I believe that some educators have come to hide behind various social and economic problems. “We can’t possibly improve schools if children are coming from poverty. You fix the poverty and then we can worry about the schools.” I just think that kind of formulation is wrong.

  I work with many inner city physicians and public health workers. They are up against all the same poverty problems we are. However, I’ve never heard them make the claim that there was nothing they could do about lead abatement unless incomes were equalized or housing policy was made perfect. No, they are willing to work all out on that kind of an issue and statistics tell us they have been winning more and more on that one.

  So, when I am working in schools, my total emphasis is on what the schools need to do for kids, not what larger social policy could do to make the job easier. It is not that I don’t think that larger social policy needs to be addressed in ways that support kids better, it is just that issue is irrelevant during professional development or book selection or assessment review. There are lots of tables in this restaurant and sometimes the best thing that can be done to make the restaurant run well is to tend to your own tables.

  In other words, I’m willing to work all out trying to solve our children’s literacy problem through my role as an educator, but in other venues I am willing to push for changes that will make that work less hard. (That means at times, my disagreements with Bush policies have tended to be in areas other than education, in other words, in areas outside my special expertise. One exception to this has been the administration's discouragement of efforts to support parents’ involvement in their kids’ schooling: something done to keep schools from just blaming the literacy problem on the parents—which I agree with, but which reduces the chances of these parents being an active force for helping their kids do better in school—which I disagree with).

  I signed the BBA statement because it supports kids, not because it contradicts current education policy per se—it does not.

  Reading First also requires that kids get 90-minutes of uninterrupted reading instruction each day because research overwhelmingly shows that the amount of teaching provided makes a big difference in kids’ learning.

It requires that kids who are struggling be given extra help in reading through various of interventions. Again, an idea supported by lots of research. Early interventions get a big thumbs up from the research studies.

  It requires that teachers and principals receive lots of professional development in reading, the idea being that if they know how to teach reading effectively, higher reading achievement will result. The research clearly supports this idea, too.

  It requires that kids be tested frequently using monitoring tests to identify which kids need extra help and to do this early before they have a chance to fall far behind. Sounds pretty sensible to me, but where’s the research?

  Truth be told, there is a very small amount of research on the learning benefits of “curriculum-based measurement” and “work sampling, but beyond these meager—somewhat off-point—demonstrations, there is little empirical evidence supporting such big expenditures of time and effort.

  This isn’t another rant against DIBELS (the tests that have been used most frequently for this kind of monitoring). Replace DIBELS with any monitoring battery you prefer (e.g., PALS, Ames-Webb, ISEL, TPRI) and you have the same problem. What do research studies reveal about the use of these tests to improve achievement? Darned little!

  There is research showing that these tests are valid and reliable, that is they tend to measure what they claim to measure and they do this in a stable manner. In other words, the quality of these tests in terms of measurement properties isn’t the problem.

  The real issue is how would you use these tests appropriately to help improve kids’ performance? For instance, do we really need to test everyone or are there kids who so clearly are succeeding or failing that we would be better off saving the testing time and simply stipulating that they will or will not get extra help?

  Or, are the cut scores really right for these tests? I know when I reviewed DIBELS for Buros I found that the cut scores (the scores used to identify who is at risk) hadn’t been validated satisfactorily. Since then my experiences in Chicago suggest to me that the scores aren’t sufficiently rigorous; that means many kids who need help don’t get it because the tests fail to identify them as being in need.

  Perhaps, the monitoring test schemes (and the tests themselves) are adequate, but in practice, you can’t make it work. I have personally seen teachers subverting these plans by doing things like having kids memorizing nonsense words, or having kids read as fast as possible (rather than reading for meaning). Test designers can’t be held accountable for such misuse of their tests, but such aberrations cannot be ignored in determining the ultimate value of these testing plans.

  There are few aspects of Reading First that make more sense than checking up on the students’ reading progress and providing extra help to those who are not learning… unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence showing that such schemes—as actually carried out in classrooms—work the way logic says they should. I think it is worth continuing to try to make such approaches pay off for kids, but given the lack of research support, I think real prudence is needed here:

1. Administer these tests EXACTLY in the way the manuals describe.
2. Limit the amount of testing to what is really needed to make a decision (if a teacher is observing every day and believes that a child is struggling with some aspect of reading, chances are pretty good that extra help is needed).
3. Examine the results of your testing over time. Perhaps if you systematically adjust the cut scores, you can improve student learning. It is usually best to err on the side of giving kids more help than they might need.
4. Don’t neglect aspects of reading instruction that can’t be measured as easily (such as vocabulary or reading comprehension). Monitoring tests do a reasonably good job of helping teachers to sort out the performance of “simple skills.” They do not, nor do they purport to, assess higher level processes; these still need to be taught and taught thoroughly and well, however. A special effort may be needed to ensure that these are adequately addressed given the lack of direct testing information.

During the past decade, the anti-textbook sentiment has receded quite a bit. Districts have been ditching the “book room” for the “program,” but there are still those who are aghast that I think textbooks are a good idea. I have said that if I could have, I would have adopted a reading program in Chicago, and I am now a core program author myself. There were times in my career (like when I was a beginning teacher), that I was anti-textbook, and over time I have increasingly come to believe that textbook programs are necessary (not a necessary evil, but necessary).

Here’s why:

1. Quality textbooks tend to offer more thorough and explicit instruction than many teachers can provide on their own.

  I recognize that textbooks vary in quality and some are better than others. But, generally, a well-designed textbook program tends to support a greater amount of well organized, systematic, explicit instruction than teachers do on their own. For example, studies suggest that texts encourage higher level questioning than teachers ask, and my own observations suggest that textbooks offer more thorough coverage (such as explicit repetition) than teachers provide.

  Research says that explicit instruction is good for kids. Teachers can certainly provide such teaching without textbooks, but they are more likely to do so when they have supporting materials. Look at all areas of language arts instruction: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension including critical reading (of narrative and expository text), writing, etc., and I think you’ll see more explicit systematic lessons than the average teacher offers on his or her own.

2. Greater continuity of content coverage from class to class and grade to grade.

  Bob Marzano documented how disorganized the curriculum is when teachers make it up themselves, often even having kids reading the same books year after year. A textbook program is organized across several years, so there is a clear effort to make sure that the learning experiences build one on another, to help kids to develop greater levels of sophistication. Even in something as straightforward as vocabulary or spelling teaching, textbooks make sure that kids are getting a progression of instruction.

  Also, kids move around a lot, especially in low-income areas. The average mobility rate is about 35% in high poverty schools, and I have worked with some schools with greater than 100% mobility. The idea that every teacher has an individual curriculum is a disaster for such kids because they are certain to move (often to a different school in the same district) and with each move, they truly have to start over. There is a real benefit to having content coverage that is consistent across classrooms and even schools, and that builds over time into something greater than what an individual teacher can do on his or her own.

3. Reduces the amount of planning/searching time for teachers making it possible for them to put more attention on the kids.

  Maybe those who argue for teachers to make up their own lessons, identify and select their own literary selections, and so on just don’t understand how time-consuming such work is. Teachers have complex lives: they go through marriages and divorces, childbirth and child raising, and the need to care for elderly parents—all while trying to take care of their homes, finances, and other aspects of their lives.

  Teacher work time is better spent focusing on the needs of kids rather than trying to hunt up a story that they can use in a lesson. It would be foolish to have surgeons grinding their own scalpels rather than operating on patients in need, and it is foolish to have teachers trying to do all of this kind of work themselves when their attention is needed for the students.

4. Standardization of practice in a school or district increases the possibility of powerful professional development opportunities.

One thing I learned in the Chicago Public Schools, is that having 26,000 teachers working with so many programs and combinations of programs, makes it hard to create any kind of systematic change. If everyone had been working with a single program (or even if there were a few programs of choice), we could have better used our professional development opportunities to focus on improving common areas of weakness, than is possible with such a hodge-podge of supports and weaknesses.

5. Allows for greater inclusion of content area specialization on a school staff.

  As a reading guy, I guess I should support the idea of all teachers should be specialists in reading. Of course, that means that we won’t have too many who have a depth of expertise in science, social studies, math, the arts, or other subjects. Textbooks allow even those without a great depth of expertise to do a pretty good job. We can hire more diverse staffs and expose kids to people with a wider range of expertise if we use textbooks.

6. Reduces the temptation to illegally photocopy.

In many schools that eschewed textbooks, it was common to accomplish this by having teachers violate the fair use laws, photocopying other people’s intellectual property. That’s a bad example for our kids.

7. Increases the chance for equal opportunity.

I have often heard the claim that it is the poor, inner city kids who get stuck with textbooks, while their more advantaged suburban counterparts get to do fun stuff in children's books. Yeah, right! (Reading Jeanne Oakes analysis of data on this issue and I think you'll see that poor kids have less textbook access.)

  Our nation is still struggling to offer kids equal opportunity to learn, and textbooks are part of the solution. The standardization that textbooks provide gives us the chance to equalize opportunity across a broad range of barriers. Individual--idiosyncratic--teaching, ultimately, is inherently unequal.

  Textbooks can't guarantee that all kids learn—only good teachers can do that. Textbooks do, however, support teachers in accomplishing that goal. That's why I think they are a good idea; they increase the chances that our kids will succeed.

  I suggest the following steps.

 1. Talk to your child about school.

  “What did you do in school today, Johnny?”

  “Nothin.’”

  Sadly, that is a pretty typical exchange between most parents and kids, and it does nothing for improving home-school relations, for making children feel supported, or for helping both teachers and kids to succeed.

  As a parent and former teacher, I suggest a different kind of questioning, one more likely to elicit a helpful exchange. Most important is being specific; it shows kids that you are really interested, and it is harder to deflect your attention.

  Try questions like, “What are you learning about in math class?” Or, “Tell me about the story that you are reading in your reading class?” The more specific you are, the more likely you'll have a real conversation about school. 

2. Talk to your child’s teacher, too.

  Many parents are WILLING to talk to their child’s teachers. I encourage a more proactive approach.

  Don’t wait for a teacher to call you, but contact the teacher early on. Perhaps ask for an after school or before school appointment in the first few weeks of the year, or make a phone appointment. Let the teacher know of your interest. Ask specific questions about curriculum and homework. Share your concerns and special hopes. And, make yourself accessible by offering your phone number or email address. One thing I can promise is that if you make this contact the teacher will pay attention to your child (and that is a good thing)!

3. Take a look at your child’s school books.

Have your child bring home their school books (whatever they are allowed to bring home). They don’t need to bring them every night but have them show you what they are working on. One key thing to do is to have your child read a page or two aloud to you from the books. Are they making a lot of mistakes and struggling to make sense of the material? If they are having that kind of trouble, they are likely to need some of your help along the way. Better to know that now rather than getting surprised later.

4. Find out what your child is supposed to learn.

  Talk to your child, talk to his or her teacher, look at the books… all of those actions will help you to know what your child is supposed to learn. What kinds of words are they supposed to be able to decode or spell? What words will they be learning the meanings of? How hard are the stories they are supposed to be able to read? And so on. The better understanding you have of what your child is supposed to learn, the better chance you have to help them to accomplish it. Some teachers (and kids) are good at asking for help and others are not; in any event, these requests tend to come once the child is failing—reach out and find out what is needed so that you can provide help now, rather than after it a real problem.

5. Set a positive plan for getting homework done from the very beginning.

  Lay out your homework rules. For example, some parents won’t allow their kids to go out and play until homework is completed. Others prefer that the homework gets done immediately after dinner. In still other cases, parents may want to consider each day's homework demands, making a decision when they see how much work has to be done (this can even be done over the phone if parents can’t be home). In any event, set it up some rules for getting the homework done. One of those rules should be that when homework is being done the television is turned off or in another room.

  These are all small things, but together they can make a big difference in a successful school year. Start with these from the very beginning and you can help your child to succeed.

  Good luck and have a great school year!

  Sadly, politicos have been badly misled on the accuracy of tests, and technically achievement testing has just gotten really complicated—well beyond the scope of what most legislative education aides can handle. And so, here in Illinois, we have a new test scandal brewing (requiring the rescoring of about 1 million tests).

  Two years ago Illinois adopted a new state test. This test would be more colorful and attractive and would have some formatting features that would make it more appealing to the kids who had to take it. What about the connection of the new test with the test it was to replace? Not to worry, the state board of education and Pearson publishing’s testing service were on the game: they were going to equate the new test with the old statistically so the line of growth or decline would be unbroken, and the public would know if schools were improving, languishing, or slipping down.

  A funny thing happened, however: test scores jumped immediately. Kids in Illinois all of a sudden were doing better than ever before. Was it the new tests? I publicly opined that it likely was; large drops or gains in achievement scores are unlikely, especially without any big changes in public policy or practice. The state board of education, the testing companies, and even the local districts chimed in saying how “unfair” it was that anyone would disparage the success of our school kids. They claimed there was no reason to attribute the scores sudden trending up to the coincidental change in tests, and frankly they were not happy about killjoys like me who would dare question their new success (it was often pointed out that teachers were working very hard—the Bobby Bonds’ defense: I couldn’t have done anything wrong since I was working hard).

  Now after two years of that kind of thing, Illinois started using a new form of this test. The new form was statistically equated with the old form, so it could not possibly have any different results. Except that it did. Apparently, the scores came back this summer, much lower than they had been during the past two years. So much lower, in fact, that the educators recognized that it could not possibly be due to a real failure of the schools, but it must be a testing problem. Magically, the new equating was found to be screwed up (a wrong formula apparently). Except, Illinois officials have not yet released any details about how the equating was being done. Equating can get messed up by computing the stats incorrectly, but they also can be influenced by how, when, and from whom these data are collected.

  It’s interesting that when scores rise the educational community is adamant that it must be due to their successes, but when they fall—as they apparently did this year in Illinois, it must be a testing problem.

  Illinois erred in a number of ways, but so have many states in this regard.

  The use of a single form of a single measure administered to large numbers of children in order to make important public policy decisions is foolish. It turns out there are many forms of the test Illinois is using. It is foolish that they didn’t use multiple forms simultaneously (like they would have if it had been a research study), as this can help to do away with their “rubber ruler” problem. Sadly, conflicting purposes for testing programs have us locked into a situation where we’re more likely to make mistakes than to get it right.

  I’m a fan of testing (yes, I’ve worked on NAEP, ACT, and a number of commercial tests), and am a strong proponent of educational accountability. It makes no sense, however, to try to do this kind of thing with single tests. It isn’t even wise to test every child. Public accountability efforts need to focus their attention on taking a solid overall look at performance on multiple measures without trying to get too detailed about the information on individual kids. Illinois got tripped up when they changed from testing schools to testing kids (teachers didn’t think kids would try hard enough if they weren’t at risk themselves, so our legislator went from sampling the state to testing every kid—of course, if you want individually comparable data it only makes sense to test kids on the same measure).

  Barack Obama has called for a new federal accountability plan that will make testing worthwhile to teachers by providing individual diagnostic information. That kind of plan sounds good, but ultimately it will require a lot more individual testing, with single measures (as opposed to multiple alternative measures). Instead of getting a clearer or more efficient picture for accountability purposes—and one less likely to be flawed by the rubber ruler problem, it can’t help but be muddled as in Illinois. This positive-sounding effort will be more expensive and will result in a less picture in the long run.

  Accountability testing aimed at determining how well public institutions are performing would be better constructed along the lines of the National Assessment (which uses several forms of a test simultaneously with samples of students representing the states and the nation. NAEP has to do some fancy statistical equating, too, but this is more likely to be correct when several overlapping forms of the test are used each year. By not trying to be all things to all people, they manage to do a good job of letting the public and policymakers know how are kids are performing.

The Impact Study showed that the Reading First schools made no improvements in reading comprehension, so the program did not work, right?

No, that’s not correct. The Reading First Impact Study collected no comparison data from these schools for years prior to their entry into the Reading First program. With no comparable data from previous years, it is impossible to determine if the Reading First schools improved or not.

That makes no sense… the schools had to have test data from previous years to be identified as Reading First eligible. Why not use those test data?

There definitely are past year’s test data from all of the Reading First schools and from all or most of the comparison Title I schools. Unfortunately, these data are not comparable or combinable. The problem here is that with so many states and districts participating in the Impact study, it would be very expensive and nearly impossible to do enough equating studies. Of course, many districts and states have been reporting that they are doing better on their local measures. This may seem like the state data are contradicting the national data, but they are not. The Reading First Impact Study did not attempt to measure these kinds of improvements against past years’ achievement levels, though at least some of the states did and Reading First did well in those analyses.

If the Impact Study didn’t look at reading improvement against past years’ performance levels, what did it look at?

The Impact Study compared reading achievement gains for Reading First and non-Reading First schools. The study attempted to tell, from the beginning of the study to the end of the study, whether kids learned to read better as a result of being in Reading First schools.

Is it true that the comparison group schools were too different from the Reading First schools to allow a fair comparison?

No. Although the kids and the schools were not exactly the same at the beginning of the study, the research design that was used provides the closest comparison possible without a randomized control trial. If the schools had been randomly assigned to the Reading First treatment and control group it would have been an even better study. Nevertheless, the regression discontinuity design that was used should have provided a fair and conservative test of the effectiveness of Reading First since it guarantees a comparison with the most similar non-Reading First schools with regard to initial reading achievement, student mobility, free lunch eligibility, and so on. Reading First schools tended to be very slightly worse performing in these various measures at the beginning of the study, but not significantly so.

Why not just do a randomized control trial if that is better?

The Institute of Education Science that commissioned and supervised this study definitely wanted to do it that way, but the study began too late and the Reading First money was already distributed by the time the study was under way. Various Department of Education officials and consultants were very angry about this but ultimately agreed with the research experts and statisticians that regression discontinuity would provide the best comparison under the circumstances.

If the study compared the performance of Reading First schools with the performance of very similar controls, then doesn’t the study show that Reading First doesn’t work?

That was certainly the idea of the study and it may be showing that, but there are reasonable alternative explanations of the data that can’t be ruled out. That’s the problem. If everybody was nearly equal at the beginning of the study in instructional context and student achievement and then you put Reading First programs in half the schools, you should be able to determine whether Reading First kids were advantaged. That was the idea of the study. But it might not have worked the way it was planned.

Why didn’t the study work?

The assumption that the comparison group schools would continue with their initial instructional practices while the Reading First schools were changing theirs seems not to have been met. Researchers refer to this as “contamination.” For a comparison to work, the two groups have to engage in different practices. If they are doing the same things, why would you expect outcome differences to result for one of the groups?

  For example, if I were setting up an experiment, I would try to arrange it so that my experimental and control classes were in different schools if possible, because teachers may share ideas in the teacher’s lounge and then my experimental innovations may start appearing in the control classrooms. The more this happens, of course, the less chance I have of finding differences in the end, and when my experiment shows no effects does it mean that my treatment didn’t work or just that it worked in both sets of classrooms.

Is there any reason to believe that kind of contamination affected the Impact Study?

Yes, in fact, there are lots of reasons to think this was the case. First, let’s start with the Reading First law itself. The U.S. Department of Education distributed approximately $1 billion per year for Reading First. About 80% of this money was given to the states to pass onto the Reading First schools to be used to purchase materials, hire coaches, provide professional development for teachers and principals, and for interventions for struggling readers. The other $200 million per year was to be spent by the states to try to contaminate the comparison sample.

You made that up. Does NCLB really say that the states were to contaminate these data?

The law reads differently than I said it, but in fact, that is exactly the idea of it. The President and Congress recognize that there are too many failing schools for the feds to bail out all of them (that would just be too expensive). What they do instead is provide money for the establishment of quality programs with the hope that this will leverage state and local dollars towards solving the rest of the problem. In this case, they actually earmarked about $1 billion to be used by the states to try to encourage Reading First reforms through the entire school system, especially with those other failing schools. As I said earlier, the more the other schools adopt Reading First practices, the less meaningful any comparison becomes. (Not only were the states strongly encouraged to spread the program beyond the Reading First schools there were other Department of Education initiatives to encourage this: from presentations of Reading First approaches at Title I conferences to special initiatives like “Expanding the Reach” that set out to incent schools to use their Title I funding to carry out Reading First style initiatives).

Just because lots of money was spent by the feds to get other schools to adopt Reading First strategies does not mean that they actually did it, right?

That’s true. But my own personal experience in visiting various districts suggests to me that there are many examples of districts that adopted Reading First practices district-wide. Let’s say, you have 25 schools in your district and four of these schools were Reading First eligible. You take the Reading First funds and carry out the initiative in those four schools, but what about the other schools? You could continue what you have been doing in the past, or you could repurpose your funds to duplicate the Reading First efforts in all of your schools. That means 25 schools would be using the Reading First model, even though only four were funded. That’s a terrific deal for the federal government (they managed to guide a reform in a large number of schools for a relatively small amount of direct expenditure). If your district was part of the Impact Study, however, it would certainly have contaminated the sample to some extent.

This week I sent a few emails to friends around the country. I told them that I personally knew of districts that had done this kind of district-wide Reading First effort and I wondered if they knew of any others. Below I have listed the districts that this very informal (and unscientific) survey uncovered. These are sizable districts and at least some of them actually did take part in the Impact Study. I wonder what a more formal study would show? Given how many contaminated districts I identified without looking hard, I suspect we’d find that many of the Reading First reforms were intentionally duplicated by comparison schools which wreck the comparison. (I have not listed those schools and districts that partially adopted the reforms. For example, in many districts, since the Reading First schools were getting a core program, they bought the same program district wide. Or, places like Chicago, adopted DIBELS testing in all primary grade classrooms, not just the Reading First schools. These situations certainly would introduce contamination to the study, but this kind of partial replication is so common and so widespread, I would likely need to list most of the Reading First districts (and a large percentage of states).

  In a survey of California Reading First's 121 school districts, 47 of the 52 respondents indicated that they have duplicated the practices of Reading First district wide.

  Also, Florida has a state policy requiring that all districts have a core program, a 90-minute literacy block, and screening and monitoring assessments. Of course, some local districts in Florida have made particular efforts to carry over Reading First to their other schools (some of those are listed below). I've been told that the same is true in Alabama, but I haven't been able to verify.

  The Bureau of Indian Education has expanded Reading First into 35 non-Reading First schools, too.

Here are some school districts, large and small, that adopted the Reading First reforms district wide. If I hear of more, I’ll add them to the list. You can see the problem.

East Aurora, IL

Syracuse, NY

North Platte, NB

Roseburg, OR

Hillsboro Co., OR

Jefferson Co., OR

Klamath Co., OR

Butte, MT

Helena, MT

Great Falls, MT

Laramie, WY (Albany #1)

Medford, OR

Ontario, OR

Alamogordo, NM

Moriarty, NM

Espanola, NM

Delta, CO

Fort Morgan, CO

Lamar, CO

Tacoma, WA

Topeka, KS

Ogden City, UT

Richmond Co., GA

North Sanpete School District, UT

San Juan School District, UT

Collier County, FL

Broward County, FL

Wilmington, DE (Christina District)

If a bunch of non-Reading First schools adopted the same reading reforms, would that mean the study was contaminated?

No matter how widely this phenomenon occurred, if it didn’t occur in the districts that participated in the study, then it would not matter. However, as I indicated above at least some of the districts in the study did follow a policy that required the use of Reading First practices in non-Reading First schools. (And my list above only includes districts that were trying to duplicate the entire Reading First effort in their other schools. There were also districts that did this more partially: for example, the Chicago Public Schools adopted DIBELS monitoring district-wide, but didn’t try to spread the entire reform package. Partial imitations are contaminating, too.)

Also, the feds did not just do an Impact Study. They carried out an implementation study that examined the instructional practices in the two sets of schools. Some of these data have already been reported and more will be reported this fall. What the already released data show is that Reading First and non-Reading First schools were quite similar in their instructional practices and that they became increasingly similar as the study progressed year to year. So, in Year 1 Reading First schools were much more likely to adopt a new, research-based core program than were the comparison schools (a big difference). But by Year 3, most of the non-Reading First schools were using the same kinds of programs (and often the identical program). The same thing seemed to happen with coaches. Coaches were prevalent in Reading First schools from the beginning, but they became increasingly available in Title I comparison schools as the study progressed. This also happened with setting aside an uninterrupted instructional block for reading, as well as for some of the other significant instructional reforms.

Usually in a multi-year experiment of this type, the impact of the treatment grows each year as more innovations are implemented and as the distance between the schools grows with regard to their instructional practices. With the Reading First study, big initial differences declined over time as other schools parroted the Reading First practices.

If lots of schools took on the Reading First reforms we might not be able to see differences among those schools, but should achievement be improving overall since so many schools would be using these practices?

That’s a fair point. And yes, that appears to be the pattern that we are seeing with the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In fact, NAEP scores have been rising during the period in question. NAEP shows small but clear significant improvements for fourth graders (particularly on their trend items) and the various local studies are saying that state test scores have been rising, too. Yes, it is possible that these increases are real and that they have been stimulated by Reading First.

Wouldn’t that mean that Reading First was actually a big success?

It would if it could be proven that the changes in instructional practices that have been taking place are actually due to Reading First. Although there clearly are instances noted above where schools adopted practices because they were used by Reading First, there are also cases where other factors may have actually led to the change. Districts like Los Angeles and Chicago had already hired reading coaches before Reading First money was even available (they were relying on the same research base used by the Reading First creators, but were acting independently). Many districts that use core programs refurbish those programs every 4 or 5 years; their latest adoption may have been a program that could be used in Reading First, but that might not have been why they selected the program. Reading First might have been the pivot point for all of these changes, or it might have been just one of many sources of information used by the districts.

  One of my candidates for improvement in a next program is a more concerted and research-based efforts towards addressing the literacy learning needs of English learners. Most states just carried out the Reading First mandates with these kids despite the fact that the National Reading Panel report (the basis of Reading First) didn’t consider studies of English learners. The panel recognized the importance of this issue but left it to another panel and that means Reading First directors were stuck trying to adhere to mandates that were at best insufficient for these kids. Fortunately, what Reading First was doing wasn’t that far off so no great harm was likely done, but what a lost opportunity. One suspects with a more tailored approach we could have seen greater success for this significant group. That is what I am doing here in Nashville: talking about the report of the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children Youth and what it says we need to do to help second language learners. At least for this group, wouldn’t it have been terrific to have had a sixth instructional element—one focused on the development of oral English?

The information that surprised the Reading First audience the most? They seemed startled when they found out how little research has been carried out with second language learners. I included a chart showing the comparison of the numbers of studies on various topics that the National Reading Panel looked at for first language learners and the numbers available on those topics for second language learners, and that got a visible response from the conference attendees here. This is definitely an area where we could use some more research help, but even if we had more information, we’d need policies that guided the implementation of such research-based efforts.

The new discussion in the Times is great. Some of it gets a bit precious, but ultimately it helps to sharpen the discussion of the value of reading and how hard we should push for kids to read. There are those in education (and in the media) who want everyone to read, and they evidently believe that reading has some positive impact on students.

  The new discussion underlines that reading enthusiasts want kids to read, but they want this because they assume reading practice will focus on particular types of reading materials and particular types of reading. Reading a book and reading a book online are somewhat different activities for most of us. I find myself skimming more, for instance, when I read on a computer; for a more intensive experience with a text (to really make sure I get it), I tend to print it out and mark it up.

  A good deal of reading online is of the skimming and scanning sort; the reader dips in and reads shallowly for a brief period and moves on. Of course, lots of book reading is of this type, too. Most interventions aimed at increasing the amount that students read in books tend not to find improvement in reading skills, perhaps because the kids aren’t really reading or are picking materials not likely to have any learning impact or because they are reading too shallowly. The impact of reading practice is likely to be pretty thin if the readers aren’t deeply engaged with the text (and when you are reading only because 20 minutes of class time has been assigned for this, how deeply do you need to engage?).

  I suspect that many people want kids to read because they believe it will foster habits of mind that are grounded in a kind of intellectual depth or perseverance. The energy required to read a 400-page book and to keep ideas alive across such a thorough a presentation is an example of the strength of mind that we want students to develop. A comic might be a reasonable place to start, but the benefits of that kind of practice run out pretty quickly. On the Internet a lot of the reading is of the 5- to 10-second variety (kids move onto another page after such brief immersions), and that won’t have much of an impact.

  We don’t really want to know if kids read anymore, because when phrased like that the question doesn’t get at anything that matters (sorry NEA). We want to know what they read, how much they read, how they read, and what they do with what they read. The adolescent boy who can read a sports page well enough to find out if the Cubs won yesterday or what time Saturday’s NASCAR race will be on television is reading, but not in ways that will likely increase literacy skills. A girl always lost in a romance novel, but who never talks about them or thinks about them beyond the reading is probably doing little to improve either. When we tell parents that it is important that their kids read, what do we mean? What should kids read? And how can they do this so that it helps to sharpen their critical thinking abilities and their intellectual perseverance?

Okay, the National Reading Panel found that vocabulary instruction improved reading achievement, especially for older readers. And, research has been showing a clear, substantial empirical link—especially for older kids—between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (both within reading and readability research) for almost a century. The National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth found an even bigger impact of vocabulary teaching with children who were learning English as a second language, and the about-to-be-released National Early Literacy Panel report indicates that vocabulary seems to be a proxy for even more sophisticated oral language skills in reading development. Whew, that’s a lot of research support (especially when one considers that those syntheses, for the most part, were looking at different studies).

For years, I was strictly a contextual reader. I never looked words up in dictionaries, except to do the silly assignments my teachers gave me. Consequently, I read a lot but didn’t understand a sufficient amount. Finally, when I decided to go to graduate school and had to prepare for the entry tests, I started teaching myself word meanings (literally teaching myself the meanings of hundreds of words). Every time I came to an unknown word, I would write it on a card, look up the word in the dictionary so I could record the meaning on the back of the cards, and then I practiced… while driving, while supervising recess at school, etc. As my vocabulary improved, so did my understanding (in other words, I believe the research on this one, in part because of my personal learning experience—though, with this much research, there is no real reason to depend on experience).

 Like most educators, I think teaching students word meanings is a great idea, and I’m finding the Internet to be an incredible resource for teaching activities. I know there are lots of sites out there, but here are three of my very favorite ones. I think these are must haves for teachers, as they include some pretty cool stuff.

One Look

http://www.onelook.com/

This is the online dictionary that I have programmed into all my computers. It is on the favorites list of everyone. And for good reason. One Look includes 109 different dictionaries and word lists. You can look words up in English or in other languages. You can see alternative definitions across dictionaries, there is a reverse dictionary, and it pronounces the words. When you are searching for child-friendly definitions, having so many choices can really help. This is the source that Cyndie and I use to settle our semantic arguments at dinner! This not only has lots of information it is easy to use. (There are some things the Oxford English Dictionary can do better than this one, etymology for example, but OED is proprietary. I can get it through my university, but it isn’t available on the net without cost. One Look will likely be sufficient for most purposes, and it is free.)

Visual Thesaurus

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Okay, this one isn;t exactly free. You can run some free trials, but then you have to buy a site license (which isn’t very expensive—about $20 per year). If I had an alternative to this wonderful site, I would not be encouraging it. Yes, I know there are perfectly good thesauri available online, but this one is exciting because it provides semantic maps for the words. What a great teaching aid. Take this week's vocabulary words and you can see in an instant what other words they are linked to. This is almost a toy it can be so much fun to play with, and it has lots of information about words, but the real stuff here is the visual thesaurus, that reveals and explains the various links among words.

World Wide Words
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm

This site is not one that I would turn over to the kids. I like this one because it provides lots of explanations of idioms and peculiar words. My friend, Don Bear, of Words Their Way fame, is always pushing for teachers to show kids an active curiosity about words and language (and spelling), and this is one great site for exploring that kind of stuff. Lots of morphological expeditions here—I always come away knowing more about the language as a result of spending time at this great site.

Hope these help parents and teachers to support their kids’ vocabulary development! I think they will.

  The big topic of discussion was the implementation of interventions. One thing that stands out from recent experiences with trying to implement research-based practices is how often these practices fail to work once adopted in the classroom. There are lots of reasons that we should pay attention to if we want research-based instruction to work.

  First, one aspect of the problem is the research itself. Just because something works under research conditions doesn’t mean that it could work on scale when the researcher is forced to be more distant and detached. Education has been a field of small studies, but one suspects if we started trying those innovations out under less ideal conditions we would find some pretty important limitations in those initially workable ideas. Meta-analysis helps us to pull together the results of lots of small studies, but it cannot ever overcome this particular limitation.

  Second, the research-to-practice folks don’t pay close enough attention to matching the thoroughness or intensity of the original studies. Comprehension strategies instruction that leads to higher achievement tends to be thorough and intensive; providing kids with lots of practice over a period of time. Often textbooks and teachers try to deliver this “research-based instruction,” but they fail to match the dosage level that was provided in the study. If it took 25 hours of lessons to get an effect, what would lead any of us to believe that we could get the same effect in 3 hours (and even if we believed that, why wouldn’t we at least study the dosage change rather than just adopting it)?

  Third, research in education is not written in a fashion that allows its implementation to be duplicated. Researchers do a lot of things to carry out their study. For instance, it is becoming increasingly common that the researcher has someone visit the classrooms with some frequency to check on fidelity. That is noted in a research study as part of the research method, but in fact, it is an important issue for the implementer (if you adopt this plan, have someone check up with the teacher with a similar frequency). Research studies typically tell the amount of time of an intervention, show lesson plans, and sample text passages to help folks understand the nature of the instruction. They are much less likely to provide the protocols of what teachers and principals were told or how these interventions were brought into the schools (and what was done to get buy-in). That information is essential to implementation, and they should be provided more often in research studies.

  I am often told by school administrators that a program failed because of poor implementation. It is time that educators and researchers take this serious issue on, rather than continuing to treat it as an annoying side issue.

In a deft unsigned editorial, USA Today called for continuation of funding for Reading First, albeit with some needed reforms. Their position: “let’s keep funding a good program even as we try to improve upon it” was their very reasonable position. They paid attention to reports by the GAO, the Center on Education Policy, and a recent U.S. Department of Education review of state reading data and concluded this experiment to improve reading for kids should continue. They still claim this is mainly phonics reform (it is not, or at least, it is not supposed to be that), but their overall view of this is sound and reasonable.

For this kind of editorial, USA Today fairly invites an opposing view to counter their position. Fair enough, but that means if they come out pro-Mother in their Mother’s Day paper, they need to find someone who is anti-mother to state the opposing view. In other words, the opposing position can just be an ill-advised and ridiculous position, as was the case today.

Two things stand out in this editorial: one, the politicians who are leading the charge to stop improving reading instruction for young kids didn’t have the courage to respond. They apparently were ashamed of their political position and figured the fewer people who knew they were voting against Reading First the better. Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa and Congressman Obey from Wisconsin want to hide their dirty work for some unknown reason (I suspect Senator Harkin knows that schools in Iowa have been doing great with Reading First—what an impressive group of teachers and principals—and he probably doesn’t want to make it too public that he is willing to undermine their efforts for some political reason).

USA Today couldn’t get any of these brave political souls to explain why they were going to swipe the kids’ reading money, so they brought in Steve Krashen to do it. Krashen has opposed teaching kids to read for years (he believes that if we just give kids books they will read just fine without all that messy teaching). He manages to pack an amazing amount of misinformation into 300 words, including claims that 99% of American adults can read at a basic level (a finding at variance with all data that have ever been collected on this population), and that the impact study shows that Reading First has made no difference on children’s reading.

I worked on the impact study and think the results are important, but as I have written before, this study can’t possibly prove what Krashen now claims. I appreciate that USA Today seeks opposing views, but Krashen knows nothing about why Obey and Harkin want to swipe the kids’ reading money and, therefore, he couldn’t possibly provide insightful commentary on this issue.

I suggest readers ignore Krashen’s irrelevant opinions, and reply to Harken and Obey directly. Krashen loves libraries, but he continues to show little respect for the work of teachers. (In this piece he says nothing about improving reading instruction for kids, professional development for teachers, or the organization and management of challenged schools—claiming that if we just put more libraries in poor neighborhoods we won’t have a reading problem). Write to Obey and Harkin or your friends and family in their districts. I appreciate that they hope to tweak the administration, but screwing the kids out of this reading program is not a good way to do that.

  The first one was an Education Week story that said the House Appropriations committee intended to kill off Reading First. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43budget_web.h27.html?print=1

This is no surprise since Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., is the chair of that committee and he has shown a strong penchant for using his power for political reasons with little regard for educational needs. He has been anti-Reading First for a long time (mainly, I suspect, because it was proposed by a Republican), and the unfortunate management problems along with the recent interim report (see my earlier Reading First blog) make it easy for him to play politics with this. Lots of Congressmen will be sad to see Reading First go, since their home districts like it, but Obey will make this pill go down easier by expanding Title I funding (more money to schools that still aren't sure how to spend it in ways that will help kids).

  A little later I received a press release from the U.S. Department of Education: NEW READING FIRST DATA FROM STATES SHOWS IMPRESSIVE GAINS IN READING PROFICIENCY.

This report claims that "students from nearly every grade and every subgroup show improvement" and goes on to report on information drawn from the states. This study provides a picture of Reading First very much at odds with the one evaluated in the recent Institute of Education Sciences study that found no reading comprehension improvement. According to these new data, kids improved in reading comprehension, second language kids improved, etc. and these gains were big.http://www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/performance.html

  So what does all that mean? In science, when you have conflicting data, you sharpen your pencil and try to figure out how to collect new data that will resolve the differences. In politics, you hold a finger up in the air and try to determine which way the wind might be blowing. I suspect Congressman Obey's finger is going to win the day over any scientific approach. Translation: Reading First is dead. It could have withstood the corruption described in the Inspector General's report or the interim impact study--but not both!

  Under the circumstances, "Reading First" is politically toxic, no matter how effective it may be or how popular with the schools. I doubt that any candidate can easily embrace Reading First (Senator Obama seems to have enough money and a large enough margin in the election that he could afford to take a risk on it, but he didn't embrace Reading First when it would have been easy to do so, so I wouldn't look for any support there). His proposals for reforming education have a lot more to do with increasing funding and improving the tests than rethinking curriculum, professional development, or interventions for struggling kids (I documented his education views in an earlier blog).

  So, if I am right that Reading First is dead, where are we? I hope that everyone will think of Reading First as only a first salvo in a much-needed rethinking of Title I spending. The demise of Reading First will simply mean that we need a second attempt to rethink Title I spending (one that again will provide strong guidance to states and local districts in how to expend certain additional funds in ways more likely to raise reading achievement than what the districts have been doing on their own). This new effort has to be different from Reading First, but clearly based on lessons learned from it. That means, those aspects of Reading First that were positive (and there were many), need to be preserved--and those that were problematic need to be rethought. I described some key changes that I thought were necessary for a second attempt at using federal money to improve schools and not just fund them.

  The idea of this new Reading effort would be three-fold: (1) to try to immediately and powerfully improve a small set of struggling schools (something Reading First might have been doing, but it is impossible to be sure given the conflicting evidence); (2) to serve as an immediate model for all Title I schools to start trying to emulate now (as they so clearly did with Reading First--look at the degree of emulation described in the Reading First implementation study); and (3) to ultimately identify a set of policies that will eventually become requirements for all Title I schools (we cannot continue to spend more than $15 billion of federal money each year in high poverty schools without a sound educational return for that money--Congressman Obey might think that is okay to continue like this, but it has been a meat grinder for poor children!)

I am a mother of a child with a reading disability (as well as processing and short term memory) who will be entering middle school in the fall. Our middle school is planning on heterogeneously grouping the students in reading/language arts classes. As I'm sure you know this would be the lowest level readers blended with college level readers. Also, reading interventions will be cut from every day to every other day. I am a little concerned about the implications this may have on the students. Do you happen to know what research says about this concept? What are your feelings?Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help! :)

 Dear Concerned Parent,

  Thanks for your letter. Generally, research has not been positive about homogeneous group or tracking by class when it comes to reading instruction (though most of this research has been done with younger kids or older kids in subjects other than reading). Overall the findings are that homogeneous grouping provides a slight academic benefit to the highest kids and no measurable benefit to the others, but of course those are averages and kid’s experiences are individual.

  One concern about trying to group all kids by level is that it segregates them which can be socially disruptive and cuts kids off from models of proficiency. Your child benefits from interacting regularly and meaningfully with kids who might not be challenged in the same ways and who might find it easier to see themselves as upwardly mobile when it comes to academics.

  One reason there is so little benefit to grouping kids by ability is that most kids are at or near the middle where not much benefit would be expected (think of it this way: if a 7th grade teacher teaches from a 7th grade book in an average school, nearly 70% of the kids are likely to be reading between a 6th and 8th grade level; there would be very little benefit from such a small adjustment for these kids). That leaves 30% of kids who are far enough off the mark who might benefit from an alteration of level, but even a two-year reading difference at this grade level is not that big, especially on the high end, so that means about 85-90% of the kids will likely do fine when they are taught “on grade level” rather than reading level (some teachers might even make some within classroom adjustments reducing the homogeneous advantage even more).

  My claim isn’t that there could be no benefit to the vast majority of kids under any conditions, but just changing the book level and placing kids only with those who perform like themselves will not, by itself, change things enough to matter to most kids. For example, one of the big gains that could come from homogeneous grouping would be that the teachers could move along more quickly and cover more instructional ground… Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a school put in place a more ambitious curriculum as a result of such grouping (yeah, the kids often get exactly the same instruction they would have with or without the grouping).

  Okay, so homogeneous grouping for reading/language arts could be beneficial 10-20% of kids in the middle and high school grades. About half of those kids are reading above grade level. Perhaps they'd make faster progress in a homogenous setting, but schools are notorious for not actually raising the level with such gifted kids anyway, and school districts tend not to worry about the gifted much in these days of AYP and moribund reading scores.

  That means that homogeneous grouping for reading in middle school will probably be of greatest value to the 5-10% of kids at the bottom; the ones reading more than two years below grade level. The ones the teacher really can’t “pull along” to adequate progress with the other kids. The ones who either suck up way too much teacher time in a heterogeneous classroom or who simply fade into the wallpaper and don’t make much progress at all. Schools definitely could (and often do) create an alternative reading class for such kids (or in some cases, it is an additional class—the strugglers take both the regular language arts class AND the special reading class).

  Sadly, even when schools create such possibilities they often fail to provide the resources needed to make them work. Remember how far these kids are behind? Just adjusting the instructional level of the materials will probably not alone be sufficient to meet their needs. Struggling readers have to make gains that will help close the learning gap with their peers (that means they need more than a year learning for a year of teaching).

  One thing I found when I was doing the research to create my adolescent literacy program (for kids reading 2nd to 5th-grade levels) was the great need for intensive instruction with these kids. It isn’t enough to alter the reading level of the materials, but skills and strategies need to be taught with a heightened thoroughness and consistency. Programs for average kids tend to flit from one strategy to another rarely spending even a couple of days on the same thing (I guess in fear of boring this generation); but the effective approaches demonstrated in research studies had a very different design: they stayed with something for days and even weeks, trying the new strategy out in lots of different texts and under varied circumstances and with lots of review. That kind of teaching is especially necessary for kids like yours.

  If your child is more than two years below grade level in reading performance, I would push for the school to do some special programming for such kids. The ideal would be to provide them with a special reading class (don’t segregate them, keep them together with everyone else for the rest of their day), and that class should be daily--time matters. I would assign fewer kids to such classes so the instruction could be as individualized as possible. I would push for the use of a reading or special education teacher who knows a lot about this kind of teaching. I would push for the use of the kinds of materials reviewed above. I would even consider pushing for an afterschool program to get my child even more of this kind of teaching than can be afforded in a school day. (Of course, if that isn’t possible or the school isn’t responsive then you need to try to create such a situation for your child away from school. Unfortunately, I don’t know what resources of this type might be available in your community).

  I don’t know where you are located, but if you want to see the kind of teaching that really can make a difference with learning-disabled children, I would suggest that you try to visit the Benchmark School in the Philadelphia area. Their teaching is remarkably good and would provide you with a vision for your schools to work towards. http://www.benchmarkschool.org/

  Good luck.

 Tim

  The bad news in the report (and this is not new—I’ve found surveys all the way back to World War I with the same pattern) is that older students read less than younger students do. Preschoolers like books more than elementary kids do, and elementary kids like them more than teens. Similarly, boys were somewhat less taken with reading than were girls.

  Of course, this is all self-report (though there was some corroboration from parents in this study). Kids might be reading, but perhaps they don’t read enough when they do read, and maybe they don’t push themselves to read more challenging or worthwhile stuff. In any event, the big problem with kids reading is not that they don’t see its value or that they never practice—neither is true for most kids, not even for adolescent males. Indeed, it would be great if kids practiced reading more—but, the report suggests to me that the problem here has less to do with convincing kids that they like reading, and more to do with making sure they can read well enough that their reading skills match their interest levels (nothing worse than wanting to read a book that matches that emotional and developmental interests of a young teen and finding that you can only handle primary texts—sort of like being on an all liquid diet).

  The questions to parents indicated that preschool and primary grade parents read to their kids, but that parents of older students do not. While this isn’t surprising, I can’t say that it makes me happy. I read to my own children until they were in 8th grade, but that was more for closeness between us than to help them read. To help them read better the research indicates that I would have been better off listening to them read or at least talking to them about what they were reading and what it meant. Sadly many parents back away from "reading with kids" once they stop reading to kids, and that is a big mistake.

  Set aside time for your family to read (yes, turn off the TV and limit access to the computers and cell phones). Listen to your kids read. Talk to them about the ideas in the books they are reading. Show an interest in their reading lives (my two daughters are grown up and accomplished young women: one is a managing editor/lawyer and one is a bio-engineer: I rarely get together with either of them when the conversation doesn’t turn to what they are reading).

  I'm asked frequently by schools to come and help with reading comprehension, but as with the Reading First folks, I often sense that there are many things that these folks don't know enough about in order to make real progress in improving reading comprehension. However, I sometimes think they mess up for the opposite reasons that the Reading First people do.

  Many teachers, especially in the upper grades, think that they only need to teach comprehension and everything will be fine--neglecting the need for instruction in decoding, fluency, and vocabulary. I think in Reading First teachers too often lost sight of two key points: (1) that reading comprehension can and should be taught explicitly and (2) that the enabling skills (decoding, fluency, vocabulary) need to be taught in ways that aim them at reading comprehension. Decoding needs to be taught, but lessons in decoding should always end with kids reading new text with their new skills. Vocabulary needs to be taught, kids need to read text that uses that vocabulary, and they need to think about what the word meanings have to do with interpreting the text. Fluency instruction should be supported by having students answering questions or reacting to the meaning after each rereading (it is more than a race to read fast).

  But what about young readers who struggle (or older ones who are far below level)? It is estimated that more than 85% of those children have problems with the phonological aspects of reading; and instruction, if it is to be successful, is going to have to address these phonological problems explicitly and thoroughly.

  Recently, I received a heart-rending letter from a mother with concerns about her daughter:

  I located your name and vita on the internet and was hoping with your education background that you might be able to direct me to documentation that would be helpful towards making education decisions for my daughter. ________ hit her head on a fire hydrant at school and now has a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) diagnosis in 3 deficient areas: Auditory Decoding, Tolerance-Fading Memory, and Integration Type-1.

Are you aware of any data that compares Fast ForWord and Earobics Reach? Are you aware of any studies using either program (Fast ForWord [FFW] and Earobics Reach) for students with TBI and/or CAPD?

  _______ is 9 years old and currently has the auditory processing ability of a 5 year-old as a result of the accident.

  Any information or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

An expanded version of my response follows.

Dear Mrs. ________:

I only know one study that directly compared Fast ForWord and Earobics...

Pokorni, J., Worthington, C., & Jameson, P. (2004). Phonological awareness intervention: Comparison of Fast ForWord, Earobics, and LiPS. Journal of Educational Research, 97, 147-157.

This study compared the performance of younger (7.5-9.0 years old) language-impaired poor readers. After 60 hours of training, there were no differences in any measure between Earobics and FastForward (the Lindamood-Bell group did a bit better on one measure of phonemic awareness, blending). But that was it: no reading or language learning differences among these groups.

  Then, I checked the What Works Clearinghouse (this is the U.S. Department of Education site that reviews research evidence: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/

It listed one study of Earobics that met their research standards, and it reported small positive effects for Earobics on children’s learning of alphabetics and fluency, with no evidence of any impact on reading comprehension or writing. Fast Forword had six studies that met the WWC criteria, and these reported positive effects with regard to the learning of alphabetics and mixed effects for reading comprehension. (I also came across a new study on Fast Forword by Gilliam, et al., 2008 and it found no benefits to Fast Foeword).

  What these studies suggest to me is that both of these programs CAN have a positive impact on students’ auditory processing skills (at least with regard to phonemic awareness), but that does not automatically transform into better reading achievement. It is not clear whether one of these programs is actually "better" than the other given this evidence, but there is no reason from these research studies to conclude that one is consistently superior to the other (which mans that price and motivation should be big factors in the choice--if one costs much more than the other, save your money, or try out both programs with your daughter to see if she likes one better than the other).

  Whichever of these programs may eventually be used with your daughter, it must be supplemented by a serious effort to teach her to read and write beyond the alphabetics work in these programs. Your letter does not tell her reading level, but given her age and auditory processing levels, I assume she is very low in reading. That would mean I would work hard to teach her beginning sight vocabulary (build up a long list of words that she can recognize quickly and easily, no matter what her alphabetic skills), involve her in lots of writing activities (with invented spelling where she tries to spell as she thinks the words sound), oral reading fluency work (reading while listening or repeated reading), and reading comprehension too (having her reading stories and trying to retell them or to answer questions about them).

  It is important that students learn to decode (to sound out words), but those skills are only part of a larger constellation of skills that must be developed. Although for most children, the development of these phonological skills presages growth in oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing, with disabled children, sometimes these other skills precede and even support the development of the phonological skills. I recommend a full instructional response to your daughter’s needs—not just a targeted, surgical strike at the auditory problems that you describe.

  Good luck to you.

  Since then, I’ve tried to keep my eyes out for stuff that would help them and their counterparts elsewhere. Especially free stuff. I’ve come across two helpful sites that I wanted folks to know about; you might find some helpful materials, activities, and information at these sites.

  The first one is the ReadWriteThink site supported by the Verizon Foundation in collaboration with the International Reading Association and other professional groups. This is the single most helpful place to go if you are looking for lesson plans or cool activities. This even provides on-line professional development resources for teachers, as well as neat things parents can do with their kids (or that kids can do on their own). You definitely want to add this to your favorites lists.

  The next one provides online books for free:  Open Culture

There is growing interest and concern in the reading of older students (grades 4-12). There are many reasons for this, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that most thoughtful observers are convinced that most students leave high school with insufficient reading and writing skills--insufficient for college success or economic participation.

  Over the past few years, we have seen growth in the numbers of reading programs aimed at a student in the upper grades (including my own AMP program. I believe that, once we get through the presidential election, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will be reauthorized, for the first time including literacy help for older school age students. This week we saw the Department of Education put out requirements that will make it more difficult for states and local districts to continue to hide or disguise horrendous high school dropout levels.

  My wife, Cyndie, and I have been involved in some important work with the support of the Carnegie Corporation. We have been studying what is increasingly referred to as disciplinary literacy. By disciplinary literacy we mean the specialized skills and codes that someone must master to be able to read and write in the various disciplines (science, math, literature, history) and technical fields. Basic reading skills tend to be highly generalizable, but various scholars have shown that increasingly, with development, literacy involves language skills and cognitive processes (and even values) that are specialized. That means that our students, by the time they reach high school, need to start learning unique aspects of literacy.

  Recently Peter Afflerbach, David Pearson, and Scott Paris published a nifty article, “Clarifying differences between reading skills and reading strategies” in the Reading Teacher (February 2008, pp.364-373). They did a great job of that. Below I have summarized some of their major points, added some explanation of why you should care about the distinction, and showed the differences in assessment and instruction for strategies and skills.

1. There are no widely-accepted definitions of strategies and skills.

To tell the truth, most teachers don’t stay up nights puzzling over this distinction. In common discussion, strategies and skills are used interchangeably, as synonyms, rather than distinctive terms. (You can further complicate this by adding the term “process” from writing instruction where that is used in a similar way to how reading experts talk about strategies). The reason it matters that we recognize the differences between skills and strategies is because they get assessed differently and they need to be taught differently.

2. One distinction between strategies and skills has to do with size or scope.

Strategies are larger or more overarching than skills; skills tend to be smaller and more specific. We may, for example, teach children the skills of sounding out the letter p or recognizing the silent e, or we could teach an organized strategy for sounding out words (such as breaking the word into syllables, then sounding the first letter or combination of letters, etc.). In this example, the skills of sounding specific letters end up being used within a larger strategy. Such skills tend to be simple and discrete, while strategies tend to be multi-step and complex. Skills tend to be embedded within strategies, but not all complex or multi-skilled activities are strategic (figure skating obviously involves many skills strung together into a beautiful performance, but figure skaters when they are firing off this sequence of skills try to keep them skillful rather than strategic because of the speed needed to carry them out effectively).

 3. Automaticity and/or intentionality are another second important distinction.

Skills need to be automatic, while strategies are intentional. Skills need to be learned to a point where you don’t consciously think about them. When I’m reading, I don’t consciously decide to move my eyes to the next word or to focus on the first letter for decoding. Instead, I learn to do those things so well that they just seem to happen: being able to do the action with a high level of success but without conscious attention. Those are skills. It’s not just decoding that has to be learned to that level of automaticity either; fluency, where one learns where to pause appropriately within sentences has to become automatic, as does most vocabulary interpretation, and most local inferencing. Even the ability to determine gist (especially for brief messages) has to become quick, easy, and seemingly unintentional. Strategies tend to be multi-step processes carried out intentionally in varied ways depending on circumstances.

4. Reading comprehension tests measure reading skills directly and strategies indirectly.

Tests may measure the ability to determine word meanings or to draw an inference or remember or be able to locate a discrete piece of information. Students are not usually asked to demonstrate how to predict or infer, or to describe the steps they used to come up with a good summary of a story. They can be asked for a prediction, inference, or summary, and only brief time is usually provided, suggesting that typical tests are aimed at automaticity (skills), not strategic processing.

Strategies and skills might ultimately be thought of as a continuum rather than discrete or absolutely different items. Don’t see these terms as too distinct, as some operations or actions can be learned as either a strategy or a skill, or someone can carry out an action skillfully or strategically. For example, you can teach students to be strategic in their thinking about the setting of a story. To do this you might teach them to intentionally make several specific determinations about the functioning of the setting, and when you would have them do this: deciding whether the story took place in the past, present or future, whether it was realistic or fantasy, how the setting enables the plot actions, establishes a mood or creates distance for the reader/viewer, etc. Students could learn to intentionally carry out this planful analysis of text at strategically helpful times, but it would also be possible for the reader to simply read and to notice the setting without conscious attention, and to weigh it only as it was brought into consciousness by the author’s moves—or even to just touch on this aspect of story within the context of some larger strategy, like story mapping. Skills and strategies may be psychologically different, but the various actions of readers can often be characterized both as strategies or skills—depending on how they are learned and used. (That means lots of state standards call for schools to teach strategies, but the state tests will measure the skill versions of these strategies.)

5. An important distinction between strategies and skills is in how they are taught and learned.

Skills need to be learned to the point of automaticity. If you want something learned to that point, you need to provide lots of repetition and practice (yes, drill and practice do have a place in reading instruction). Time can be a real issue in that practice as well (speeded practice helps). But strategies are more about analysis and reasoning and they require a different kind of teaching impetus. Strategies take longer to learn, they need to be tried out under varied circumstances and in varying contexts, students need to learn procedural steps that specify when and how to carry them out, and there needs to be a real opportunity for reflection and explanation. To master a strategy students need to know what it is, how to use it, when to use it, and under what circumstances to use it. That means lots of modeling, guidance, practice, and reflection (no drill here).

Dear Dr. Shanahan:

My response: 

  Lots of folks figure I must be for high-stakes testing: I was appointed to the Board of Advisors of the National Institute for Literacy by President George W. Bush, I served on the National Reading Panel, and I am very interested in seeing reading scores improve. That isn’t the case, however. I’m against high-stakes testing for a simple reason: for the most part, it hasn’t worked. Various analyses show that such tests narrow curriculum, encourage students to leave school early, reduce the amount of instructional time, and have not led to improved reading achievement.

  Politicians and taxpayers believe that schools are not doing a good job. I agree with them as our kids aren’t learning enough. The politicos are certain that if teachers and principals would try harder, then things would change. And that’s where I disagree. For the most part, teachers and principals are trying very hard. The reason testing hasn’t motivated higher achievement is that higher achievement is not an issue of motivation. Too few teachers know how to teach reading effectively. In many cases, quality instructional materials are not available. Schools are often disorganized and fail to provide teachers with sufficient support.

  Motivating folks to try harder when an outcome depends mainly on determination is a good idea. Pressuring them to do better when they don’t know how or lack the necessary tools is a losing strategy. I would gladly see states and the feds move their accountability dollars into professional development, after-school programs, truancy prevention, and other things that can work. High stakes testing is a motivation strategy. So are teacher incentive plans. Neither is likely to improve students’ reading, however, until teachers have sufficient knowledge and support so they can expend the right extra effort. That means that someday I may support test-based incentive pay or high-stakes testing, as my opposition isn’t political, it is about effectiveness. Our literacy needs are real: we can’t afford to continue to waste hundreds of millions of dollars, and millions of children’s education hours on a losing strategy.

I often make presentations about the key elements for improving reading achievement.