Far
and away the best book on the National Reading curriculum
("No Child
Left Behind Act")
comes from one of the most distinguished voices in
the education community, a leading reading researcher
for 35 years, and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, Richard
L. Allington.
Judging
from the title of his book, Big Brother
and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence (Heinemann,
2002), one might jump to the conclusion that Allington is a card-carrying whole
language fanatic. Guess again. He's very much a traditionalist, co-author of
several basal reading series (none of which is regarded as whole language),
father of five, and author of more than a hundred reading research studies
(most funded by government agencies).
So
how did someone like Allington come to write and
edit this collection of essays that explore the gigantic
research flaws in the national reading curriculum?
That can be found in his Preface to the book
(found here at Preface).
In that space, Allington describes the circular nature
of educational reform in reading over the last 35 years,
how little is really new, and how consistently shallow
are the promises of the quick-fix people in all their
various "quick-fix"
guises.
In addition,
Allington's entire Introduction — "Troubling
Times: A Short Historical Perspective" — can
be read on line at www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/E00513/chapter1.pdf.
Here you'll find what happens when a basal series author
(Allington) discovers that the board of education in the
nation's largest state (Texas) has declared that 80 percent
of text submitted for textbook adoption must be decodable
(follow the exact rules of phonics — "Nan can
fan Dan"). Contrary to the board's assertion, the
author knew there was no research to substantiate this
mandate and he went public with his evidence. When the
reading series' publisher
realized
this might hurt sales or adoption, well . . . Check out
the results in Allington's own
words to see how money and politics wag the reading
dog. (See also decodable below.)
The
book contains 13 chapters from various reading scholars
(including Elaine
Garan and Stephen Krashen),
and addresses topics like:
ypical of
the book's strength is the chapter "The Politics of
Phonics" by Frances R. A. Paterson.
With a precise but nonpartisan eye, Paterson traces the
growth of phonics from classroom practice to religious
doctrine to political agenda, even noting the growth in
the number of legislative bills that involved phonics mandates.
She includes, without judgment, the religious tracts that
supposedly support, if not require, the use of phonics
instruction and prohibit the use of anything smacking of "whole
language."
It's a chapter that sometimes shakes one's faith in many
ways.
Many
of those state legislative bills noted by Paterson in her
chapter eventually included language like: "Research
strongly asserts that from the beginning of first grade
and in tandem with basic phonics instruction, the inappropriate
materials for independent reading are decodable texts;
and most new words in these texts should be wholly decodable
on the basis of the phonics that students have been taught."
Thus the politicians issued a call for classroom texts in
which the majority ("most") of words be "decodable," that
is, follow the basic phonics rules ("Nan can fan Dan."). Texas legislators
went so far as to declare that "80 percent" of the text for primary
grades by decodable. Such mandates were based on the "research" that
shows such texts are the most successful with beginning
readers.
So Allington and Haley Woodside-Jiron went to the original "research" citations
that were most often cited in these bills and state standards:
- Beck and Black (1979)
- Beck and Juel, 1992;
- Adams (1990) and Adams, Treiman, and Pressley (1998)
And what did
they find? Plenty of support for the importance of phonics
instruction but no
identification of the number or percentage of text pages
that must be decodable. Indeed, some of the cited
material warned of having too many such pages or words.
The Allington-Jiron chapter clearly demonstrates the shallowness
of much (though not all) of the national reading curriculum's "research" and
the grave danger in allowing amateur educators (legislators)
and their political/religious agenda to direct the instruction
and curriculum of schools.
If
you read only one book on the subject, make it Big
Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence.
And
it all began back in . . .
Much of the current
wave of education reform can be traced to a singular
event in 1983: the release of A
Nation at Risk. Twenty years
after its release, education researcher Gerald
W. Bracey took a look at the event, its
premises, promises, and problems. In light of the
current premise of No Child Left Behind,
his conclusions are sobering . Click on RISK for
an excerpt and online link to the article in Phi
Delta Kappan. |
| INDEX for
all NCLB, NRP, and Reading First essays and articles |
