Dr. Mark Draper
Vice Provost
Grantham University
Dr. Robert Sweet Jr.
Co-author, Reading First, Professional Staff
U.S. House of Representatives (Retired)

Is there a meaningful distinction to be made between the research methodology for education and medical research? The answer to that question was answered clearly by the National Research Council: "Ultimately, we failed to convince ourselves that a meaningful distinction could be made among social, physical, and life science research and scientific research in education." Scientific Research in Education, 2002.

For some reason, most of those who conduct "education research" refuse to apply the scientific method to their study of reading practices. Consequently, education is besieged with fads, unproven theories and the unreliable "findings" of qualitative research. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has funded decades of carefully structured quantitative research at some of the nation's most prestigious universities and proven beyond any doubt how a child can be taught to read. Why, then do we continue to wallow in uncertainty about something so basic? Below are some of the factors we believe are important to consider.

• The failure of "due diligence" by today's educators is all too evident.
• 30 years and a half trillion dollars have been invested in researching how to teach reading, including clinical trials with over 40,000 children.
• The federal Reading First program merely provided "specifications" for reading programs; it did not identify or require specific products. The decisions for products were left to the "states and to the people."
• After 15,000 hours of K-12 instruction, nearly a million students still graduate from high school each year unable to read.
• The primary lobbyists for additional school funding from the federal government are the teachers unions.
• The idea, as some suggest, that public schools would voluntarily give up the annual $75-billion in federal education funding is laughable on its face.
• "Teacher power" is the problem, not the solution.
• Scripting in teaching reading is only necessary when the teachers are ignorant of the specific reading skills to be taught and how to teach them.

We believe it IS appropriate to compare education with the medical profession. In the field of medicine, physicians are not allowed to devise and use "creative and imaginative" theories in their profession. Their profession requires clinical trials to insure the safety and effectiveness of each medical procedure, and the scrutiny and approval of the FDA for every prescription drug. That is why America continues to have the best health care system in the world.

In contrast, if educators were held to the same "do no harm" pledge as physicians, every school system and provider of malpractice insurance in the nation would be bankrupt. Too often, those in the colleges of education suggest that we be humble about the possibilities of success. Certainly, today's teachers have a great deal to be humble about. Judged by its outcomes, our educational enterprise seems to be about crippling children, destroying their self confidence and blighting their future. It ought to be about teaching the skills and knowledge necessary to give our children a hope and a future even better than that of their parents.

The most poignant fact of all is that these actions are being taken by people who mean well. Teachers are not evil, only dreadfully misguided and ignorant of their own ignorance. No one is purposefully pulling down the pillars of the temple. They are simply colluding unawares with the forces of chaos. They are graduating from college without the knowledge of the current findings of research in how children learn to read. Too often new teachers enter the classroom woefully unprepared to teach a child to read.

The findings of education research were carefully considered and included in law when the U.S. Congress unanimously passed and the President signed the Reading First bill, as part of NCLB, on January 8, 2002. Fearing that children may be harmed by the requirements of the Reading First law is to misunderstand the language and intent of that law. The specifications in the Reading First law require the "best materials, curricula and teaching strategies" as scientifically established through research, but there are still those who claim their use will stifle the "teacher's discretionary intelligence and creativity."

But, we must ask, what is the collective teacher's intelligence and creativity producing now? If nearly one third of our children are not learning to read proficiently, isn't it fair to assume that the instruction being given in today's classrooms isn't working? Fewer than five percent of high school graduates are prepared for college work, and thus are required to take "bone head" English classes to even attempt the rigors of university study. Is there not a clear cause and effect here? Why are 20 percent of Americans now functionally illiterate, and why are a majority of adults unable to identify the main idea in an ordinary newspaper article? Are they not products of the education industry?

To imply that our reliance on scientific data to shape the reading curriculum is potentially harmful is unfortunately symptomatic of the plague of mental inadequacy that afflicts professors of education. If you doubt this, ask your child's elementary school teacher how many sounds make up the English language. Not one in fifty will know the answer. (Just for the record, it is 43 or 44, depending on linguistic interpretation.) One would think that this knowledge would be included in "Reading 101".

The fundamental failure of our nation's schools is in failing to teach the most fundamental intellectual skill of all, how to read. For centuries before now, children were taught to read by housewives or teachers who had at most a high school education. They used simple tools like a Horn Book, or the New England Speller, or Noah Webster's Blue Backed Speller. The result was a high order of literacy. The man in the street could read, understand, and discuss intelligently newspaper articles like The Federalist Papers -- complexly argued text impenetrable by most of today's high school graduates. Immigrants to America used to leave their native languages behind and chose to learn the language of their new homeland, English. We truly became the great melting pot and the most powerful nation on earth because we all could speak -- and read -- the same language.

A student cannot be taught to "think" without first being taught to read. Teaching critical thinking cannot be done on the fly. The thought must be captured in writing, and then analyzed like a butterfly specimen impaled on a pin. If a child cannot read, how can they think critically about something they cannot comprehend?

The unfortunate truth is this. Teachers turned out by our colleges of education are being brainwashed with unproven and --for the most part-- disproven theories of progressive education and all its mindless derivatives. The idea that children will learn to read "naturally" is akin to believing that if children dance in the sunny meadow among the butterflies, they will osmotically absorb a full and multi-dimensional understanding of the entire order of Lepidoptera.

Our teachers cannot teach a child to read, because they have never been taught the basic skills necessary to do so themselves, and even worse, they have been mis-taught how to do it. They are inadvertently doing harm to the most vulnerable and valuable of our society, our children. The cruel irony is that we know with unquestionable scientific certainty precisely what is needed to teach children to read. Mountains of scientific research have accumulated over the past 35 years that document it. No honest scholar can credibly dispute those findings.

Civilization can endure only if each generation is fit to sustain it. The great and glorious intellectual treasures of Western civilization are in dire jeopardy. All that we have achieved in centuries of inspired scholarship is, thanks to the cancerous influence of today's schools of education, gravely at risk.

Sad to say, the colleges of education are the problem, not the solution to good schooling. Accountability should begin with them. The medical model of research should apply to our schools of education first.

No child should be subjected to instructional practices in reading, or any other subject for that matter, that has not been evaluated under the most rigorous, objective criteria available. Harm is being done now, and we should all turn our attention and our collective efforts in finding a way to stop it.

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