New Study Might Spell the End for Federal Reading Program
For the past six years, the federal government has made a $6 billion investment to boost the reading skills of the nation's low-income children. But a new, federally mandated study reveals that students attending elementary schools that receive the funding have not made significant gains. The three-year study monitored the achievement of tens of thousands of students in nearly 250 elementary schools using the reading curriculum Reading First. The curriculum is a major component of the No Child Left Behind law. According to researchers, students in schools that use Reading First performed no better on comprehension tests than students in schools that don't participate in the program. One of the benefits of the program, however, was that it helped improve first graders' decoding skills, or their ability to recognize letters and words, which leads to reading.
Conflicts of interest and poor management on the part of Education Department officials who initially oversaw the reading program had already made lawmakers leery about its effectiveness. Two congressional panels subsequently recommended cutting all funding. The latest findings could spell the end of the program. However, in a statement, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings highlighted the study's positive findings and said the program should continue. "Reading First helps our most vulnerable students learn the fundamental elements of reading while helping teachers improve instruction," she said. "Instead of reversing the progress we have made by cutting funding, we must enhance Reading First and help more students benefit from research based instruction."
Other supporters of Reading First questioned the validity of the study. They said it failed to take into account the possibility that teachers shared Reading First strategies with teachers in schools that are in the same district but are not officially part of the program. The study's authors dismissed the criticism, saying their classroom observations didn't support that theory. Conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm for the U.S. Department of Education, the study is said to be one of the largest federal education studies.
"I don't think anyone should be celebrating the fact that the federal government invested $6 billion in a reading program that has shown no effects on reading comprehension," Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the outgoing director of the institute, told Education Week.
Tags: education | No Child Left Behind | federal spending | elementary school
Tools: 
Share
|
| Comments (8) | Print
Reader Comments
In a New York Times article (November 26, 2006), Paul Tough explained why urban students have more literacy problems than suburban children. He summarized the classic study of Hart and Risley as follows:
Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.
What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.
Mandatory Reading Classes
As a certifed reading teacher who taught high school for 8 years and middle school for 2, I KNOW every child should be in a formal reading class yearly (grades K-12). The kids should be grouped by reading level with good and appropriate-level materials selected. Reading teachers need to be creative, interesting and well-trained to teach the subject. As a Maine public school child growing up, I had one class of reading and one class of grammar/English EVERY day. Reading and writing are my strengths and I owe much of that to the public school system. It's time we return to the basics; there's nothing more basic than learning to read and learning to appreciate fiction, non-fiction, poetry, magazines, newspapers, etc. Teaching is harder due to duel-income families, broken families, uneducated and apathetic parents (etc), but that's no excuse for the public schools not to rise to the challenge. What we need FIRST is to rid the public schools of lousy administrators and lousy teachers (the latter protected by greedy unions). Once we get the right people into the top spots, the public schools can and WILL improve. We owe that much to our children!
Another baby/bathwater situation
A more pertinent investigation would have examined various districts (such as Los Angeles) where students DID make significant gain. What were the variables in place? How were teachers trained? What materials were provided? What administrative support was provided? How were classrooms monitored to ensure that what was supposed to be taught was actually being taught? What was the long-range plan, and how was the plan carried out?
Too often, taxpayers spend huge amounts of money on studies that are flawed.
The truth is that many districts made exemplary gains. We should learn from them, rather than tossing away everything that has been done - although that is a prevalent pattern in education.
advertisement
