in another ice cream shop

I've got exactly 5 seconds to sit down at the kitchen table - dang!^* (have been in a lather -- book revisions,^** Reading First obsession, trouble with proofs, all the usual ... plus, a revelation: now that ktm really is a group effort, I can get behind on reading my own blog! Who knew?)

I have a big stack of cool stuff to post, all of which will have to wait except for this one: another memo from inside the ice cream shop. Not just any old ice cream shop ---- the Reading First ice cream shop.

It's always worse than you think.

Frankly, I’m not surprised that when looking at the entire RF project, there were no gains across country. Bob Dixon predicted this at the start of the project in his article "Sometimes Phonics Sucks," when he wrote about what happens when substandard "phonics" is taught which then triggers the sight word folks to say, "Look it doesn't work," and the pendulum completely turns away from the beginning phonics inroads.

What we need to analyze now is where those gains in RF schools did occur and what were those schools/states with the gains doing to have increased success. The medical community would never abandon or "diss" a drug that had been given at too low of a dosage. They would use their data to see with whom the drug was effective and how much of an increase was needed to get results. What can we learn from the effective schools and there were effective schools where RF made a huge difference. With the exception of the better RF schools, in most places schools are still in the midst of the sight word approaches to reading they started using 20 years ago. The college students who went through that dreadful instruction are now the most illiterate generation in remembrance, and colleges across the country are having to increase dramatically the number of remedial reading courses they hold. Viewing the "Children of the Code" web site is a chilling reminder of the legacy sight word approaches have left. I urge Mr. Bracey to watch the interviews at that web site with the cognitive psychologists, neurologist, ophthalmologists, and high level education researchers whose body of work remains largely ignored to this day.

Given that for the past 20 years whole language aka "balanced literacy," was the predominate teaching method in most states, RF represented baby steps in trying to swing the pendulum back to phonics approaches. More than 90% of universities still do not train teachers to teach systematic and explicit phonics and these skills take a long time developing. Just relearning what myths they learned in education classes is challenging for teachers and only happens when training in the district addresses these "hot button" issues (ex. teaching with the 3 cueing system which in essence is teaching children to use the word reading strategies that persons with Dyslexia use is a difficult habit to break). Too often these issues were typically ignored in many states' RF training. Louisa Moats' comment that "Teaching Reading is Rocket Science" is not to be ignored. In too many RF schools, I have observed most of the sight word based teaching practices she describes in her article "Whole Language Hi Jinks." These practices are so ingrained that after a three day workshop on systematic and explicit phonics, we found out to our horror, that almost all teachers were still having children listen to the stories that they were supposed to read; sometimes listening several times to the CDs that the big 3 reading curricula provide. The teachers were astonished that we were telling them to have the children do "cold reads." A few even became angry. "How will the children ever develop fluency if the don't first hear the story read by someone who is fluent reading it?" is what I heard.

In the RF classes that I saw or talked to administrators about (in Ohio, Georgia, Illinois, and Florida) these are variables that contributed to a lack of results.

1. In order to gain larger market share, the major phonics publishers (Open Court, Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin) wrote their curricula to be taught either with a phonics emphasis or a sight word based one. I've watched the same Open Court series taught as both. Many RF schools bought the Big 3 Phonics curricula and continued to teach them with a sight word based approach which takes much less planning time for the teachers. The guided reading books on their shelves remained the major curriculum. Many schools never used the decodable books that are purchased separately with the Big 3 phonics curricula or teachers never copied the decodable books (contained in a "sent home to parents" extra workbook). Each of those curricula has guided reading books that go with each unit and it was these that were purchased for the teachers or that the teachers decided to use. Omitting the decodable books so that students do not get the necessary practice reading the newly learned words (remember the repetition research recently discussed on this group), removes a key element from a phonics program. When teachers use Open Court, etc. and do not have students practice saying the new sounds, then practice reading the new words, and then practice reading the decodable text with the new sounds, and instead focus on the guided reading books, they are simply not teaching systematic and explicit phonics. I saw a lot of this. Sometimes I would have to show teachers (who had been using the curriculum for two years) where to find the decodable books that they needed to print out.

2. Although the RF training was wonderful and teachers who went through it were steps ahead of teachers who didn't, because most of this generation of teachers has had no effective phonics instruction back in college, they don't know how to say sounds without schwas, they don't know how to show children how to blend sounds into words, they don't know how to divide words into chunks that children can then read. And a few RF workshops could compensate for this lack. Typically, the level of state RF instruction never became this explicit.

3. Fidelity was low or lacking, especially in states where the state education bureaucracy personnel did not support Reading First. In all of our systematic and explicit phonics multi-tier programs, after a state visit from the RF "experts," teachers would run to us or email us to let us know what things we had trained them to do were unacceptable to the RF experts. In Illinois, it was not enough guided reading even thought the children had not yet developed alphabetic principle); in Georgia it was a distaste for large group (homogeneous) oral reading -- even with all of the differences, the "experts" couldn't see how our SAFER reading (conducted like DI large group reading) differed from the more ineffective Round Robin reading. Some of the experts wanted "small groups" at all times. Explanations about how in a typical class that meant that students would be sitting for long extended periods doing center activities and not receiving direct teacher instruction, fell on deaf ears.

4. Some states like Ohio, simply never implemented a phonics based approach in most RF schools-- they probably increased their use of phonics by a few minutes each week. I saw a lot of this in two large Michigan cities also. Whether it was Dayton or Columbus or Springfield, the district personnel would unabashedly tell you that "yes," they were using "Houghton Mifflin," but they were also continuing their use of 4 Block or Literacy Collaborative. Yes, they were still using the 3 cueing system, and yes, they focused on the guided reading books, and yes, they gave the DIBELS, but because results were so low, they still spend hours and hours away from instruction each semester giving the non valid DRA assessments that accompanied whatever guided reading approach they were using. They didn't like the DIBELS because it didn't show them the gains that their students were making, but the invalid DRA's did.

5. In Jacksonville and Michigan, I observed a number of RF classrooms where the only reading was either silent or whisper reading and I don't think that the phonics curricula ever came off of the shelves. In the Ohio as well as the Jacksonville classrooms, parents and community groups were tracking the DIBELS because they knew how poor the reading instruction was and they were disappointed that the sight word approaches were continuing in the schools after they were designated RF. Despite coming to their school administrators with that information, nothing changed. The administrators circled their wagons and continued on as before. In districts, typically the persons most responsible for sabotaging a move to systematic and explicit phonics is the district literacy coordinator. All of their graduate work has been in sight word based approaches making their resistance much higher. Back when we were one of the first 4 OSEP multi-tier programs, we were the only one that wasn't stopped in its track from establishing systematic and explicit phonics because of district literacy coordinators. It takes a combination of outwitting, orneriness, and going to higher administrative levels to defuse the influence these people have.

6. The wimpy Tier 3 instruction done in so many schools could not be expected to catch those students up to grade level. If there is anything I've learned these past 8 years, it's that Jerry Silbert is right on target when he talks about 90 minutes of intensive DI reading instruction being needed to catch students up to grade level. Look at Haskin Lab's brain research and recognize that the children whose brain function normalized as they acquired reading skills were receiving 2 hours a day of 1-1 systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Most Tier 3 programs are tutorial. The Big 3 phonics intensive intervention programs used in places like Dayton are worse than useless. Not only are they not systematic, they don't even coordinate with classroom instruction and thus wouldn't be effective even for Tier 2 instruction.

It's time to roll up sleeves and find the individual schools in districts where gains have occurred. My hypothesis would be that these are the schools that have embraced systematic and explicit phonics and abandoned more ineffective practices for their below grade level students, but a closer look is needed. Every RF school I've observed where there are no results has continued to do balanced literacy with the scale tipping way over to a sight word approach.

Reading First has been responsible for explicit, systematic phonics starting to re-emerge after 20 years. We have to remember and remind others that it's only the first step down a long path. How anyone can look at the brain research and continue to promote sight word methods seems like a decision out of the Dark Ages. To see how systematic and explicit phonics when taught with fidelity and intensity can actually change what happens in the brain when someone reads.....how a struggling reader with what the researchers term a "Dyslexic brain" not only will learn to read but will have profound changes in both hemispheres of the brain during reading tasks and to ignore this knowledge is simply unfathomable.

OK, I'm off.

I've got homework to do.


from the ice cream shop
control theory in a failing district
the phonics page


^{* I wonder if Wikipedia has anything to say about the concept of "crashing a book"...
** I have permission to post.}