New York’s DOE “truth squad” could learn a thing or two from Reid Lyon. Find an article about the imminent demise of Reading First, scroll down to the reader comments, and there he is. And here. Over here too. More? Try this.
I have, however, found at least one stone that Reid and his brother-in-arms, Patrick Riccards (aka Eduflack) seem to have left unturned. On Edweek’s Curriculum Matters blog, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo writes, “I’m no researcher, and I admit that I could use a bit of tutoring, or more coffee, to absorb the findings of many of the research studies I read, but I haven’t really seen any rigorous evidence that Reading First is working overall.”
Get busy, gentlemen.
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“Teaching comprehension strategies is not the same as equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.” — Sara Mead, Early Ed Watch
Nice to see Sara Mead at Early Ed Watch pick up on what E.D. Hirsch and others at Core Knowledge have been arguing, that reading is not a skill that exists in a vacuum. All the reading “strategy lessons” in the world won’t help if you don’t have background knowledge to apply to what you’re reading.
Mead weighs in on Reading First noting the IES research released last week “raises serious questions about Reading First’s effectiveness, but it’s worth taking a closer look before writing the program off entirely.”
“Finally, we should ask whether the person who should really be declaring victory here is not Reading First’s critics, but E.D. Hirsch,” Mead notes “This study focused on one indicator of children’s reading performance: student reading comprehension as assessed by the Stanford Achievement Test. The researchers did not assess children’s phonemic awareness, decoding ability, or fluency, for example. That makes sense because comprehension is, in the researchers’ words “the essence of reading.” But it’s also problematic because, as Hirsch has argued passionately in recent years, reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must also have a rich content knowledge that enables them to connect what they read to existing knowledge. (Hirsch is fond of citing an article describing a baseball game as an example here: Poor readers who know a lot about baseball will comprehend the article better than excellent readers who have never seen a baseball game.) Teachers observed in this study spent substantial time teaching children reading comprehension, but teaching comprehension strategies is not the same and equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.”
The way we teach reading—endless focus on comprehension strategies—has limited efficacy as Dan Wilingham and others have shown. If we really want our kids to succeed, we’ll arm them with decoding skills, then a content-rich curriculum that gives them broad background knowedge. Teaching content isn’t something to do after kids have learned to read.
Teaching content IS teaching reading.
Everybody on the bandwagon. Instructivism is en fuego!
Sure, Daniel Casse of the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting firm, writing in the Weekly Standard is merely catching up to Sol Stern’s City Journal piece and the attending sturm und drang. (Aside to Petrilli: See?) But it’s national ink for an important idea, which Casse credits to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: you either make curriculum content part of the agenda, or you leave it to “bureaucrats, textbook writers, and political activists” to have their wicked way with what gets taught. “That’s not only what parents really care about,” writes Casse, “it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement.”
“That’s why the next political agenda for school reform, if it ever emerges, will be one that figures out how to redefine the notion of the public school so that traditional school authorities lose their grip on local school systems,” Casse concludes. “In other words, school reform will have to be about not just the way we think public schools ought to be organized, but also what we want them to teach in the classroom at every grade level. Neither the incentivist nor the instructionist side of the debate has been willing to take on both sides of the argument. But Sol Stern’s second thoughts suggest that a successful political movement for better American schools will have to do just that.”
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