Last Friday, the New York Times ran a story about how school administrators in Madison, Wisconsin, turned down $2M in federal Reading First funds rather than change their approach to the teaching of reading (Diana Jean Schemo, "In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash"). Considering the importance of the topic, it's remarkable how poorly (or misleadingly) reported this article was. The story's key claim:
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
One set of problems with the article is discussed by Ken DeRosa here. Apparently the Madison program "raised reading scores" only because the reading test was changed. Once apples are compared to apples, the test results show that "Madison's Balanced Literacy reading program [...] failed to increase student performance in Madison and actually caused a relative decline in the schools that were supposed to get Reading First funding."
Last night, Mark Seidenberg sent me a note in which he lays out some additional background, and identifies what he calls the "big lie" in Schemo's story:
The school administration (superintendent and others) stated that the RF funds came with unacceptable conditions attached, namely that the district would have to change its reading curriculum. This was false. How the RF money was spent (at 5 low-achieving schools) had no bearing on the curriculum in the rest of the district. None. The evaluation letter, which became the justification for giving back the money, asked for more explicit documentation of how the money was being used but did not question the methods.
Nonetheless the story that accepting this money would require the school district as a whole to change its curriculum from its preferred "balanced literacy" approach was repeated by school administrators, and indeed comes across now, almost 3 years later, in the NY Times article.
In other words, every essential premise and implication of Schemo's article was false. Mark also sent a file of stories and letters from the local papers, which document that all the main elements of this story were published and debated two and a half years ago, so that Schemo's failure to invest a few extra hours of reporting was not the result of any deadline imposed by the timing of real-world events.
The whole of Mark's letter to me is reproduced below.
The Reading First controversy has been going on in Madison for a couple of years. A lot of it is summarized here.
There are links to some letters that I wrote back in 2004-2005 buried in there. I wrote another letter today (to the NY Times) that's on my office computer and I'll send it to you in the a.m.
I'm attaching some of the exchanges that occurred in the local newspapers with the assistant school superintendent, Belmore [archived here -- myl]. Her comments make it clear why they really turned down the RF money: it was perceived as a defense against ceding control over the schools to the feds. A slippery slope argument.
The short story:
The RF funds were being used in schools that have low income kids who are at risk for reading failure. Some of the money was being used for "direct instruction" in phonics. (Aside: Most people distinguish between direct instruction (highly scripted phonics based curriculum like open court) and "explicit instruction," which is less scripted and merely requires explicitly teaching spelling-sound correspondences. But this terminology is not universal and I am not clear which the schools in question were using).
The local school district did not like this, insofar as it was perceived as inconsistent with their "balanced literacy" approach. too much phonics. Note however that the children in question were poor readers, who are most likely to benefit from phonics instruction.
Balanced literacy, as you know, is the term that was adopted in response to criticisms of "whole language". These were based on both scientific concerns (arising from the work of researchers outside the educational establishment who study reading, e.g., psychologists and more recently cognitive neuroscientists) and political concerns (arising from parental complaints about reading achievement in states like CA and MA). Balanced literacy is supposed to combine the best components of phonics and whole language approaches; the problem is that the balance between the two is not specified or monitored closely. Balanced literacy mainly ends up being business as usual, i.e. whole language. See Louisa Moats' article on this ("Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of Balanced Reading Instruction").
Madison's "balanced literacy" curriculum has just this character: how much phonics gets taught depends on the teacher. Since most of them were trained in the whole language approach, not much phonics gets taught. This was true of my own children's reading education (they are now 7 and 11): almost no phonics. This is OK for some children (who will figure out how to read regardless of what happens in the classroom) but not others. In our research we identify a category of children termed "instructional dyslexics". They meet standard diagnostic criteria for dyslexia (e.g., major discrepancy between IQ and reading ability) but there's nothing wrong with them except the way they were taught. Many of these kids will eventually catch up, but at a cost. Given the way painful way they learned to read, they don't enjoy it. Many hate it.
OK: the district applied for and got RF funds and spent the first year of them. There was an evaluation afterward. The evaluation was done by this group in Oregon who the NCLB people contracted with to run RF. I think they are the same people involved in the corruption scandal arising around RF but I haven't checked this myself. The point is that there was an evaluation written in horrible educationese which basically raised procedural questions about how the money was being spent. I.e., it wasn't documented thoroughly enough at the level of "scope and sequence". I describe this in one of letters. I read the evaluation in question. It was horrible but it did not require the school district to adopt any particular curriculum, in the RF schools or the rest of the district.
This is the main big lie in the whole story. The school administration (supt and others) stated that the RF funds came with unacceptable conditions attached, namely that the district would have to change its reading curriculum. This was false. How the RF money was spent (at 5 low-achieving schools) had no bearing on the curriculum in the rest of the district. None. The evaluation letter, which became the justification for giving back the money, asked for more explicit documentation of how the money was being used but did not question the methods.
Nonetheless the story that accepting this money would require the school district as a whole to change its curriculum from its preferred "balanced literacy" approach was repeated by school administrators, and indeed comes across now, almost 3 years later, in the NY Times article.
What really happened? The school superintendent is riding two currents here:
(a) Resistance to federal control over local schools, via NCLB [No Child Left Behind] of which Reading First is a part. Education has traditionally been controlled by the states and school districts within them; NCLB has put the federal government in every public elementary school room in America. This is being resisted.
(b) Resistance to the 20-30 years of research demonstrating unequivocally that skilled reading typically involves developing detailed knowledge of the relations between spelling and sound. (I say "typically" only because there are some unusual readers who do things differently.) Whole language and now balanced literacy advocates reject this research for various reasons that I won't get into; basically educational theorists in the US are not scientists; they rely heavily on insight and intuition about how children learn, and they have relied heavily on gurus who sold them a plausible story. Educators from ed schools to educational administrators are very well insulated from the findings of psychologists and neuroscientists who have studied reading.
The letters in today's New York Times (which were phonics-hostile) accurately reflect the fact that educators cannot or will not grasp the difference between "phonics as an element in a multicomponent instructional program" (as recommended by the National Reading Panel) and "phonics all the way down", i.e., don't teach anything else. Unfortunately, some people on the far right do advocate the latter approach in a punitive, back to basics, "phonics fundamentalist" way, but that is not an implication of our research.
Thus, the MMSD [Madison Metropolitan School District] is using the Reading First program as a stick with which to beat phonics. There is a ready audience for this: people who want NCLB to go away; teachers who were taught that phonics is evil, the path to lifelong poor reading; school administrators who advocate balanced literacy approach because it is laissez faire and allows teachers to do as little phonics as they want.
My main conclusion is that, when people look at problems such as why some children have difficulty learning to read or learning math, they assume they are educational problems with educational solutions. But, to a significant extent, these problems were created by educators themselves, via innovations such as whole language and whole math. These are actually problems about how learning, thinking, reasoning; brain development and plasticity; and language: phonology, writing systems, grammar and so on. In other words, problems we study as psychologists, psycholinguists, and cognitive neuroscientists. So I think we should be looking for scientific solutions, not educational ones.
The people at the MMSD, who actually exert control over what happens in classrooms, feel differently.
Recent Language Log posts about reading instruction:
"The globalization of educational fads and fallacies" 3/2/2007
"The teaching of reading", 3/2/2007
"Reading corruption?", 3/9/2007
"Ken DeRosa on the Reading First controversy", 3/13/2007
[Update -- here's the text of the letter that Mark Seidenberg sent to the New York Times:
Madison WI school officials state that they decided to forgo $2 million of "Reading First" funds because this would have threatened the integrity of Madison's successful "balanced literacy" program.
This account does not hold water. The Reading First program requires that funds be used for instructional activities that conform to the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. That panel recommended a multicomponent balanced literacy approach. The programs that would be funded in this way therefore posed no threat to Madison's existing "balanced literacy" approach. Nor would accepting these funds (which were to be used in 5 low-achieving schools) have any bearing on the curricula used in other schools. Thus the asserted threat to current practices did not exist.
"Balanced literacy" programs raise other questions, however. The term refers to programs that mix elements of phonics and whole language approaches. However, in Madison, as in other districts, the balance between the two is not specified or monitored. When asked why her first grader had not been taught any phonics, one Madison parent was told, "your daughter was absent that day." My own experience as the parent of two young readers is that the amount of phonics is up to the discretion of the teacher, most of whom were schooled in the Whole Language method. The needed phonics instruction is then out-sourced, to parents, commercial "learning centers," and private tutors.
Why would a school district decline to accept federal funding for remedial reading programs? There are two main reasons. First, there is resistance to federal control over local education via legislation such as NCLB, of which Reading First is a part. Reading First is seen as the slippery slope toward greater federal interference with local decision making. Madison school officials acknowledged this in articles published in our local newspapers.
Second, there is resistance to two decades of research in psychology and neuroscience about how children learn to read and the importance of phonics in early reading education. The anti-phonics ideology among these educators runs so deep that they would deny funding for children who are at high risk of educational failure. This in a cash-strapped district that announced increases in classroom size and significant program cutbacks the same day your article appeared.
In declining these funds, the Madison school district put its educational ideology ahead of the needs of its students.
]
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 13, 2007 07:18 AM