+OK 12207 octets Received: from smtp00.nwnexus.com (smtp00.nwnexus.com [192.135.191.25]) by mail3.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA20381 for ; Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:32:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from minglewood.dundee.net (minglewood.dundee.net [206.249.104.16]) by smtp00.nwnexus.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA03567 for ; Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:32:05 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 17:36:39 -0400 To: "ClearingHouse" From: "J. E. Stone" Subject: [education-consumers] Critique of Reading Recovery article published in THE PURDUE ALUMNUS Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Reply-To: "J. E. Stone" Precedence: bulk Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail3.halcyon.com id PAA20381 Status: ===================================================================== Understand research from a consumer-friendly perspective: RESEARCH AND INNOVATION: LET THE BUYER BEWARE by Stone & Clements. Now available at the ClearingHouse Website ===================================================================== Purdue Alums: Be Wary of Reading Recovery by Patrick Groff Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University The cover of the July/August 1997 issue of The Purdue Alumnus magazine comments on an experimentally unverified, and therefore cost-ineffective remedial reading tutoring scheme, called Reading Recovery (RR). The cover statement rejects that evidence about RR, however, and proclaims it "A Program with High Book Value." The magazine’s head, Tim Newton, editorializes that RR purportedly "takes the lowest-achieving first-graders and brings them to literacy levels at or above their [grade-level] peers in 12 to 20 weeks." Newton is enthused by the Indiana legislature’s vote to allocate $8 million to fund RR in that state for the years 1998-1999. He wishes that there would be $20 million more spent on RR over a future five-year period. The editor’s eagerness to impress influential alums of Purdue University of the dire need to spend large amounts of money on RR is expressed beyond his editorial page. He took the unusual step of writing an eight-page follow-up article in the July/August 1997 issue of his journal to further praise RR’s supposed merits. "Indiana was one of the last states to offer Reading Recovery," he regretfully recalls. But "Purdue is now one of the 21 teacher leader training sites in the United States," he cheerfully notes. School districts in Indiana ante up for the expensive training of RR "teacher leaders" at Purdue, and for district training of RR tutors, out of what they otherwise persistently claim are financially-strapped budgets. Accordingly, each RR teacher leader trained at Purdue, or each RR tutor trained and employed in a school district, means children in Indiana first-grade classrooms are denied needed books and other learning supplies and equipment. At Purdue, RR "teacher leaders" are indoctrinated for a year in the prescribed techniques of the innovation. They then return to their respective school districts resolved to convert teachers there into users of the Whole Language-oriented practices that RR conducts. Each Purdue-trained RR leader also acts as a stern monitoring agent over the practices of his/her local converts, so as to "preserve the integrity of the [RR] program," as it is mandated in fine detail by its New Zealand creator, Marie Clay. Mishaps in this regard are reported faithfully to the National Data Evaluation Center for RR, located at Ohio State University. The vision of relentless disciplinary action being enforced by the Center, upon hapless RR tutors who fail to explicitly follow Clay’s dictums, thus is brought to life. That is an ironic picture, indeed, since experimental research has revealed that the less precisely RR tutors follow Clay’s edicts, the better that RR students learn to read. Nevertheless, Newton is correct in observing that RR "is a program that comes with a price." As noted, the fee in dollars (and the academic deprivation that this expenditure inflicts of students at large) that RR entails for school districts for its adoption is considerable. However, there is an even more impressive payment a school district must make, in order to adopt RR. This is the ideological leap in faith about reading instruction its teachers are required to accept that contradicts how experimental research indicates reading should be taught. That is to say, allegiance to RR demands that teachers must put unfettered trust in the unique principles of practices of the Whole Language (WL) approach to children’s reading development, that RR endorses. The governing principle of WL is that students best learn to read in the natural, informal way they previously learned to speak at home, as preschoolers. It therefore is clear that Newton was misled by the director of Purdue’s RR teacher leader program, Maribeth Schmitt, who informed him that RR tutoring is "structured." That word implies RR teaching is tightly organized, systematic, preplanned, direct, methodical, objective, standardized, routinized, highly explicit, intensive, unambiguous, comprehensive, etc. In fact, it greatly resembles WL teaching—which is indirect, unsystematic, incidental, extremely subjective, nonintensive, and fragmentary in nature. The only essential deviation by RR instruction, as dictated by Clay, from WL teaching is that RR includes a certain (inadequate) amount of direct (yet badly organized) phonics teaching. Neither are there structured tests concocted by Clay for deciding when children meet standards for entry into, and "discontinuation" from RR as reading at their grade-level. To the contrary, her assessments in these regards are neither reliable nor valid. Clay specifically prohibits the use of standardized reading test scores for this purpose. Nonetheless, the bottom 20 percent of all first-grade children are chosen, according to Clay’s unreliable and untrustworthy tests of their capacity to learn to read, for assignment to RR. This mode of selecting students means that ones from relatively affluent families placed in RR will have far greater readiness to learn to read than do students from low-income families. It is obvious that this RR practice ignores the principle that the most needful students should receive the most remedial help available. In RR, its tutors personally decide, in a subjective manner, which children under their care have been satisfactorily remediated of the reading disabilities that they supposedly possess at the time of entry into the program. Considering the facts that the standards for success in this remediation are subjectively determined by individual RR tutors, plus the likelihood that few RR tutors willingly admit failure in tutoring children, how much children actually learn in RR becomes an indeterminate matter. In this manner, as Newton inadvertently puts it, RR "has avoided the stigma of being a failure that is sometimes associated with intervention programs" in children’s reading development. With all of these disabling features of RR in mind, it is not surprising to learn that disinterested, nonpartisan follow-up studies of RR indicate that the initial gains in reading attributed to RR students quickly disappear. Although students discontinued from RR supposedly are cured of their reading backwardness, after about a year the gains they reputedly made in reading ability have vanished. Also, the criteria for discontinuance of students from RR prove to be so low that many of them who graduate from RR are such poor readers that they qualify for admission into schools’ traditional reading programs. Nonetheless, Newton blithely assures Purdue alumni that "of the children in Indiana who have completed the [RR] program, 86 percent have caught up with or surpassed their peers’ in reading ability. In other words, it is claimed that only 14 percent of these RR children are reading below the grade-level classroom norms as set by standardized reading tests. That is an incredible contention since standardized reading tests deliberately are devised so that 50 percent of students score below the grade-level norms that they set. Despite the visible shortcomings of RR, the associate dean of Purdue’s School of Education, Deborah Dillon, is convinced that all Purdue alumni should support the "goal to give every first-grader in the state of Indiana who needs access to this [RR] program the chance to have it." Pressure your state legislators into allocating tens of millions of additional dollars for RR, is her obvious advice. A critical analysis of the merit of RR suggests a different conclusion should be drawn about it by Purdue alumni. This alternative summary of RR suggests that it is a prime example of the historic vulnerability of public school educators to the lures of well-organized, charismatic, dedicated, and relentless purveyors of experimentally unproved teaching innovations. As has happened many times before, in RR’s case, fierce loyalty among educators to an experimentally invalid instructional scheme has been developed without serious consideration being given to its demonstrated cost-ineffectiveness. Thus, rather than rushing to accept the uncritical belief in RR that Dillon hopes to instill in Purdue alumni, these highly intellectual, scientific minded, financially astute graduates should first balance up the pros and cons of RR. In doing so, they will find that the latter significantly overwhelm the former. References Effective School Practices, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer, 1996. Entire issue. San Diego County Board of Education (1996). Reading Recovery Task Force Report. San Diego, CA: San Diego County Office of Education. Note: RR was rejected in 1998 by the Wake County, No. Carolina schools. Regarding RR elsewhere, the Investor’s Business Daily, in an April 1, 1999 editorial mentioned the following: "…The Columbus Ohio Board of Education recently "has turned to phonics instruction to make up for another failed product of modern education philosophy…" "Columbus isn’t the first city to turn to Sylvan to right modern educationist wrongs. Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis have all done the same." "An April 1998 study funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education declared "Reading Recovery ‘an ineffective intervention program…Fully 96% of children who completed the program were not ‘recovered’ and were about a year behind their fellow students." The cost? According to Wake County Public School System in North Carolina says it is "…about $9,211 a student…" [For a 12-20 week program, how much is that per minute?] ===================================================================== EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE networking and information for parents and taxpayers on the internet Subscriptions & Archives: http://education-consumers.com or You are currently subscribed to education-consumers as: arthurhu@halcyon.com TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send a blank email to leave-education-consumers-989462S@lists.dundee.net ===================================================================== For less mail, click on the following link and choose 1) a daily digest, 2) a daily list of subjects, or 3) no mail (read postings on Web) http://lists.dundee.net/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=education-consumers For more help & info: http://www.lyris.com/help or .