It's Easier to Blame Teachers than to Fix Problems

This is an excerpt from a book I'm working on titled Understanding the Science of Reading: Context Matters. ?It will be published by Guilford and coming out in late 2025

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What happens when people outside of education make decisions about education? You get the NRP, NCLB, ESSA, and SoR.

The National Reading Panel

In 1997, congress asked the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to work with the US Secretary of Education to establish a National Reading Panel.? Duane Alexander, the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was a medical doctor.? Richard Riley, the Secretary of Education, had a degree in accounting.?? A physician and an accountant selected 14 people to serve on the National Reading Panel.? Their task was to thoroughly review existing research and identify the most effective methods for teaching children to read.? They were given 18 months.? In 2000, the panel issued a 500-page comprehensive report titled, Teaching Children to Read (National Reading Panel, 2000).? Today it’s known as the National Reading Panel Report.? This report is still widely cited by SoR advocates

The Numbers Don’t Make Sense

The NRP report had limitations.? For example, the NRP report had significant statistical flaws in a variety of areas (Allington, 2004; Camilli & Wolfe, 2004; Camilli, Vargas, & Yurecko, 2003; Coles, 2004; Krashen, 2002; Krashen, 2004; Pressley, Duke, & Boling, 2004).? Also, the research that was used was selectively chosen to favor very limited skills-based, phonics-only reading programs (Braunger, & Lewis, 2006; Garan, 2001).? But the larger problem was the numbers: 2, 14, 18, and 110,000.?? Two government-appointed employees (a physician and an accountant), selected 14 people, who were given 18 months to read over 110,000 research papers and come up with the ultimate answer, once and for all, as to how to best teach reading. ?I am no mathematician, but that certainly seems like bad arithmetic.

?Contrast this with the International Literacy Association (ILA) (formally the International Reading Association) (https://www.literacyworldwide.org/ ) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (https://www.ncte.org/ ).? These are academic organizations consisting of thousands of teachers, researchers, scholars, parents, writers, publishers, and other professionals in areas related to literacy.? In 2000, these organizations had been studying the best ways to teach reading for over 40 years (ILA) and 90 years (NCTE).? Instead of utilizing the expertise, experience, and accumulated knowledge of these organizations, Dewey and Ricky found 14 people to review 110,000 selected studies in 18 months to come up with an answer (see Figure 22.2).

So many questions.? Why was there a need for a panel and a government report?? Who made this decision? ?Who decided that findings from the ILA and NCTE were not acceptable? ?What data was used in deciding to form the panel?? Were literacy researchers consulted in this decision? ?And who stood to gain from the report? ?

Pillarized Reading Instruction

The NRP determined that early reading instruction should focus on five elements: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.? Today these are referred to as the five pillars of reading instruction.? Despite having 18 whole months, the panel found nothing new (Allington, 2006, Pearson, 2004).? In fact, in 2000 we already knew all about the five pillars.? The pillars have never been in question.? The question has always been how pillar instruction should take place, how much pillar instruction should be given, how early, for how long, and for whom.?

The five pillars are neither necessary nor sufficient for learning to read; rather they are necessary for some, in varying degrees, but they are not sufficient for any.?

The biggest problem with the five pillars is that they’re seven pillars short of a full load.? Instead of five pillars, there should be 12 elements included in a comprehensive early reading program (see Figure 2.2).? Also, these elements should be addressed as needed, not given to all children in a predetermined sequence.? As children develop as readers, the need for some elements is diminished and eventually instruction is this area is discontinued.?

No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed in Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in?2001?and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.? However, there were no real educational innovations in NCLB, simply more tests and increased pressure to privatize education.? NCLB did nothing to change the process of how we went about educating our children (Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde, 2005).? Instead, it simply called for more standardized tests with penalties for schools that did poorly.? This hyper-testing was done despite a wealth of “rigorous scientific evidence” that said this was a bad educational practice (Allington, 2002; Bracy, 2006; Nicholes, Glass, & Berliner, 2004; Popham, 2001; Wood, 2004; Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde, 2005).? NCLB mistook measuring schools for fixing them (Darling-Hammond, 2004).?

The untested hypothesis behind NCLB was that all the successful schools (as determined by high test scores) would grow and prosper while all the underachieving schools (as determined by low test scores) would disappear someplace.? The “reasoning” was that this system of competition seems to work well with shopping centers, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores, so it stood to reason that it must work equally well with schools.? Free market pressures were seen as the answer to all of life’s complex problems.? A free-market economy is based on competition.? Supply and demand regulate production and labor. ?Companies sell goods and services at the highest price consumers are willing to pay while workers earn the highest wages companies are willing to pay for their services.? Here the successful flourish while the unsuccessful fade away.?

While this paradigm may work in the business world where profits are the bottom line, it does not transfer to education where people are the bottom line (England, 2003).? NCLB failed to improve the education system for schools, teachers, students, and families (NCTE, 2006).? But that should not have been a surprise.? This is the sort of thing that happens when people outside of education make decisions about education.? In 2015, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a more flexible but equally ineffective version of NCLB.?

The Science of Reading

That brings us up to today.? In preparing this chapter, I was reading an article describing the media’s portrayal of education and No Child Left Behind era (Granger, 2008).? I could have easily substituted SoR, 2024 for NCLB, 2001. The common themes appearing in the media seem not to have gone away.?? These include:

1. There is a crisis in education.

2. Teachers currently can’t do their jobs, and we should be afraid.

3. Teacher quality can be defined as curriculum delivery and measured by test performance.

4. High-quality teaching will reduce societal problems.

Sleight Of Hand

But it’s all a bit of sleight of hand that it diverts the eyes from the real causes of educational failure.? If you can blame students, teachers, and colleges of education, we won’t see the social problems that impact learning (see Figure 2.3).? It’s much easier to blame teachers than to fix the actual cause of social problems.? However, there is one thing of which we can be certain: If Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education, and Scholastic could sell products to fix one of the social problems in Figure 2.3, that would be the cause of the next educational crisis.

*It should be noted that Lexia Learning, the publisher of LETRS, is currently selling products to address inadequate professional development. And they are making oodles of money off of public schools. (How much is an oodle? A little bit more than bundle but a little less than a shitload.) Their paid weasels have convinced administrators and policymakers that their program is "research-based". The next chapter will point out the baloney-ness of that claim.

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