Relying on Science in Teaching Kids to Read

It sounds straightforward: President Bush's new "Reading First" plan provides $ 900 million annually to help children learn to read through programs using "scientifically based" research.

But his plan is based on a single report that many reading experts believe interprets such research far too narrowly -- discarding basic studies showing that reading a lot makes better readers and relying on a limited set of studies that supports, among other things, an intensive drilling in phonics.

Some school administrators and instructors fear that popular reading programs will lose federal funding under the Bush education plan signed into law last month. At the least, they say, valuable teaching methods could be discarded as Bush attempts to settle the long-running, highly politicized debate over how to teach reading. "The danger is the one-size-fits-all approach," said Joanne Yatvin, an educator and dissident voice on the National Reading Panel that produced the 2000 report on which Bush's plan is based. "I don't have any problem with scientifically based instruction. What I want is to look at it broadly."

Other educators say such fears are unwarranted. The focus on phonics and drills, they say, will simply force schools to emphasize basic skills desperately needed in classrooms where too many youngsters can't read.

And, they say the effort to hold reading instruction to the research standards typically reserved for medical trials is long overdue.

"There are highly emotional issues, and I think people really believe certain things work and certain things may not work," said Reid Lyon, a nationally known reading researcher at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. "That's why we have to do the kind of science we are trying to do. To find out."

When Bush signed the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, most of the headlines focused on his mandate for annual standardized testing. But reading experts seized on part of the law that will dispense $ 900 million a year over six years for reading instruction.

The simple language could have a seismic impact on reading instruction, which over decades has swung between two approaches.

One is skills-based instruction, in which children learn sounds and letter-blends that make up words through drills and corresponding readers before moving to literature and comprehension. The other is literature-based, known as the whole language approach, in which students are immersed in activities such as reading and writing stories and learn phonics skills within the context of that kind of work.

California recently adopted two skills-based programs for elementary grades -- "SRA Open Court" by McGraw-Hill and "A Legacy of Literacy" by Houghton Mifflin Co. -- that state education leaders hope will improve chronically low test scores after years of whole language instruction. Other educators, though, worry that the state's new direction, along with the federal legislation, presages another swing in reading instruction.

Congress sought to resolve the reading debate in the late 1990s when it mandated the creation of the National Reading Panel to sort through the multitude of research.

The Department of Education says on its Web site that the reading panel reviewed 100,000 studies on how students learn to read. Yet Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and head of the panel, said the group rejected at least 90 percent of all reading studies because they were not up to scientific standards. In the end, Langenberg said, about 100 studies were considered; critics say it was closer to 40.

Langenberg, a physicist, said the standard adopted by the panel was the same as for a pharmaceutical company testing a new drug. The studies must use strict controls and then be replicated. As an example, he said, studies that show reading a lot makes someone a better reader prove only a correlation, not cause and effect.

"In the field of education, this is a radical notion and to some people an undesirable notion," he said.

The final report, Langenberg said, does not exclusively side with phonics, but, he added, "any curriculum that does not include that comes close to being what in medicine is called malpractice." He said the report was a solid basis for legislation.

But some reading experts faulted the panel's methods. "To question that reading makes you into a good reader, well, it seems to me they have lost their marbles to say that is just correlational," said Lucy Calkins, founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University.

Educators said education research has never met the standards of medical trials. Thus, the panel's approach left out dozens of studies derived from observing students over time, including some showing that explicit phonics instruction after a certain age is nonproductive. Elaine Garan, an assistant professor of education at California State University at Fresno, noted that few reading experts were on the panel of 15.

Lyon, from NIH, said the reading panel's standards were appropriate, given the state of education research. Much of it, he said is of poor quality and has had little or no effect on educational practice.

"Ultimately, the big equalizer is how much the kids know [when they come to school] and how much we prepare the teachers," he said. "We know one thing won't work for everybody. We are in the scientific business of trying to put together different things for kids to see what really works."

Educators in some programs worry that the new law could end their federal funding. At Reading Recovery, which pulls low-achieving 6-year-olds out of the classroom for extra help, officials said the draft guidance language for the law appears restrictive.

For example, the language indicates that funds cannot be used for early interventions in anything other than a classroom setting, said Lucy Gettman, of the Reading Recovery Council of North America.

On the other hand, programs such as McGraw-Hill's Open Court -- with a healthy dose of phonics, a careful script for teachers and a claim to a research basis -- are poised to reap millions from the federal mandate.

In fact, some educators question whether the Bush plan pushes onto the nation's schools certain commercial programs he advanced while governor of Texas.

Garan, former University of Southern California professor Stephen Krashen and others have also questioned other connections between McGraw-Hill and the Bush administration, including the fact that some authors of Open Court were advisers on the president's Reading First plan.

Ironically, Langenberg said he doubted that Open Court and the other reading curriculum adopted by California were researched in a way that would have met the National Reading Panel's standards.

Robert E. Evanson, president of McGraw-Hill Education, acknowledged that he was not sure how to define "scientifically based research." "There isn't an accepted answer to that," he said. "I think if you talk to a Reid Lyon, who is the head of that for NIH, he would give you one definition, and I bet there is an equal definition on the other side."

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