In this book excerpt, the author, a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, explains how a traditionalist researcher and author of numerous basal series came to write and edit a book so critical of the Bush administration's reading agenda.

Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum:

How Ideology Trumped Evidence

by Richard L. Allington © 2002

Reprinted by permission from Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence by Richard L. Allington. Published by Heinemann, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc., Portsmouth, NH. Copyright © 2002 by Richard L. Allington. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher.

PREFACE

ne of the mixed blessings with being one of the "graybeards" band of scholars is that you remember what education was like thirty-five or more years ago. You recall how the federal government was going to eradicate illiteracy through the application of scientific research — primarily applied research done at federally funded regional educational laboratories. You remember that the best minds in the nation were working to develop code-emphasis (phonics) reading curricula that were scientific and effective. You remember the Wisconsin Design for Reading, the skills-tracking package from the University of Wisconsin; the Sullivan Programmed Readers from Behavioral Research Labs; the Miami and Palo Alto linguistic readers with their "Nan can fan Dan" sentences; the International Teaching Alphabet; Words in Color; Direct Instructional System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR); plaid phonics; multisensory phonics; and so on. All of them were developed with federal funds. You also remember that we gave up on those research-based programs when they didn't pan out with improved reading achievement.

    I feel like Bill Murray's character in the movie "Groundhog Day" — I'm seeing the same things happen over and over again. I awake every day now and have to remind myself that it isn't 1972. It's just that the same old ideas that were so popular in 1972 have returned as the next "new, new thing" for reforming American education. Phonics is back. The vendors have dusted off all those 1970s materials, stuck new covers on them, gussied up the artwork a bit, and put them up for sale. That the two most heavily promoted reading curricula have barely changed since 1970 seems to bother almost no one.

    But it isn't just the recycled reading programs that make this feel like the early 1970s. It was the 1970s that brought us "performance contracting"— bidding out schools to for-profit vendors. Teachers were paid for student performance on tests. That didn't pan out. It was the 1970s that brought us large-scale minimum competency testing and the first accountability packages. It was, as Rowan (1990) notes, an era when "control" strategies were the education management fad of the day. We had pacing schedules to keep teachers on track to cover the materials. We had skills testing of every child, with scores turned into the central office for plotting. We even had a Right to Read movement that asserted that literacy was a civil right and promised literacy for all. But all those schemes didn't accomplish the Olympian goal of universal literacy.

    There are days when I could swear that some sort of social amnesia is running rampant. How is it that so many folks cannot see that the new, new educational reform plans are but recycled bad ideas? Ideas we have tried before. Ideas that had their chance. Ideas that fell flat on their faces thirty years ago.

    I did not plan to create this book. I planned to largely ignore the various policy promoters and entrepreneurs who are offering up these tired ideas as new solutions. I was just going to slide into retirement over the next few years.

    When the Preventing Reading Difficulties report (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) appeared, I read it and yawned. As Catherine Snow (2001) herself has argued, "Nothing said in the report about reading instruction, for example, could not have been formulated by an experienced, thoughtful, reflective first-grade teacher with a few weeks' free time" (p. 236).

    When the National Reading Panel (NRP) was formed I yawned again, if only because virtually all of the panel members were old (even older than me), and none were among the group of active reading researchers that most people in the profession would recognize. My dean joked that it was a cutting-edge panel— circa 1978. I testified to the panel that I thought their choice to focus only on experimental research was too narrow. And when the panel's 500-plus page report appeared, I read it and yawned.

    But when I read Elaine Garan's Phi Delta Kappan article, something set me off. Maybe I was just tinder for her sparks. Garan exposed the ideological distortions of what the research said and how these had affected the educational reforms being dumped on teachers. Maybe I wasn't ready to retire. I don't know why, but suddenly the need for this book loomed large in my mind. I had never considered myself a whole language kind of guy. In fact, I viewed the first edition of Classrooms That Work (Cunningham & Allington, 1994) as a cautionary tale about the exaggerations of research by whole language advocates. (The third edition opens with a cautionary tale about the exaggerations of the phonics advocates.) It wasn't until that book was branded a whole language manual (a nice oxymoronish twist) by California state representative Steven Baldwin and I was called a whole language conspirator by a member of the California state board of education that such thoughts even entered my head. Dick Allington a whole language guru?

hen I was invited to offer the keynote address at the Whole Language Umbrella (WLU) conference! The invitation was for me to talk about reading policy making in Texas and California. I recall wondering, "Me, at the Whole Language Umbrella?"

    Bess Altwerger introduced me to the WLU audience, relating that when my name was brought up she had asked, "Is Dick Allington whole language?" It hadn't occurred to her either. She went on to note that many U.S. states had once had guidelines for determining a person's ethnicity on the basis of the race of a single long-ago ancestor, the so-called one-drop rule. She said she had decided that, using similar criteria, Dick Allington was probably a whole language person. I began my talk that day by noting that I too was unsure about my classification, but agreed that if it only required a single drop of blood, I was in fact a whole language person.

    Of course I'm not really a whole language person. I disagree with Ken Goodman on at least as many things as I disagree with Marilyn Adams. But I do admire the spunk the whole language folks have demonstrated. When it comes to school reform, I know they are closer to the mark than the direct-instruction folks. The whole language folks understand the critical importance of teachers—expert, autonomous teachers—in the development of children's literacy. Dumbing down the curriculum and curricular materials through narrowly conceived accountability schemes and scripted materials didn't work in the 1970s and it won't work now. The whole language folks may miss the mark on occasion, but they're not nearly as off target as the direct-instruction gurus who are now trying to lead the reading mandate parade.

    This book is my attempt to demonstrate that it isn't just whole language advocates who are having problems with the NRP report and the new education laws. I've framed the articles written by others with my own chapters, both extending their arguments and developing an additional evidence-based argument for reconsidering the direction of educational reform. As a researcher by vocation, I decided I could not simply sit on the sidelines and allow the ideologically based distortions of what the research says go unchallenged. I hope this book will move you, too, to get off the sidelines and into the game.