October 3, 2024
A Brief History of Reading Instruction: Part 2 with Dr. Donna Johnson (2/8)
Transcript
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Intro
We thank you for joining us for this series with reading specialist and Mason educator Donna Johnson. Let’s listen to her experience and advice.
Becoming a Nation of Readers
Donna: In 1985, then, there was a government report, commission, Becoming a Nation of Readers, it’s called. One advantage over the latest one is that it's not 500 pages. It's about 120. And that came out and that's what was around when I went back to school. And there were only four writers, I think, for that one. And that synthesized 20 years of research.
That's what they always try to do. At this time, reading was taught, still probably using basal readers and student workbooks, but they did often include vocabulary, comprehension, and phonics. The purpose of this report was to identify the best way to teach reading, and phonics was a key emphasis.
My favorite quote in here applies to both parents and teachers: “The single most important activity for building knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.” That was quoted a lot after this came out.
“The single most important activity for building knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”
So then were the reading wars over? Because they said phonics was the best thing to do, in spite of the numerous claims by people in the field of reading, that whole language was not the way to go. There was still this deep division. And this whole language didn't disappear. It just got renamed. So now it's "balanced literacy," "guided reading," "three queuing." A lot of people don't like that. It just came out in a new form. It never totally disappeared. I can remember going to school board meetings, talking about those new standards and how they were being evaluated. It just didn't go away.
So we get to 1997. We now have the National Reading Panel that Congress established. And they, again, were to evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best way to teach children to read, which had already been done and was known a long time ago. And that panel was made up of 14 members from different backgrounds. There were administrators, some working, some teachers, maybe a parent or two, but I think the parents on it were also teachers, research scientists. There was no teacher from the lower elementary grades kindergarten through third grade that was on that panel. It started out with 15. And there was one administrator on it from a K-12 school. And somebody dropped off or quit, and she wanted them to put on a lower elementary teacher and they wouldn't do it.
So they specifically were asked to look at research. There were more than 100,000 studies available to them at that time and I can't remember how they - they have ways that they choose them depending on...
Danielle: They focused on meta studies, right? My understanding from reading it was that they were focused on meta studies as much as possible.
Donna: Right. That were based on other collections of studies. But I cannot remember how many they actually looked at it, but was in the hundreds, not the thousands. And they were looking at studies published since 1966. And another 10,000 before that time even is what I had written down. Oh, and then they selected several hundred to study for review and analysis.
So their conclusion, they came to a conclusion in April of 2000, submitted a final report of 450 pages. Their analysis made clear that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates the things we hear now: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, guided reading, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies. They also, I do believe, looked at some things about technology. All of those areas of reading they didn't study and they still came up with all those pages. There were a lot of people in the reading establishment, the National Council of Teachers, the NCTA, teachers of English, the International Reading Association, a lot of college professors, a lot of school administrators that did not react favorably to their final report. It didn't come out ever and use the phrase whole language or condemn it openly or obviously. And because of that it really paved the way for the new balanced literacy, which it then became called, which is today's whole language. And that started to flourish.
There were people that produced books, methods books for teachers, and a lot of curriculum. So it's not really surprising that they failed to reform anything. They didn't in any significant way. And they've never reconvened. I don't know if there was an intention that they would, but they never have. The main thing though, to realize why it didn't catch on, And it wasn't really big news to the American public or even most teachers. It's length and how boring sort of is. And news outlets didn't have reporters that wanted to look into it. Because the few experts that did were critical of it, it just kind of didn't get delved into.
No Child Left Behind
And what really put the end to it was when George W. Bush was elected and came up with his Reading First initiative. During his first term, it was time to update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And he did that or his administration did and they called it No Child Left Behind. And Congress passed the law updating those education acts in 2001 and that's what it was called. And part of that was a five year, five billion dollar Reading First initiative. And George Bush, from his experiences in Texas, really thought it was important to teach phonics in those lower elementary grades. But one thing that came out of that that has pros and cons is that in Texas, they also assessed kids with a state mandated test. Before that, we'd never had anything like that, where every kid in the whole state had to take the same test in reading, math, and in some grades science, like they do now.
But part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law mandated that every state had to come up with a state test. So, the National Reading Panel report would probably have gone the way of Becoming a Nation of Readers from 1975, except for one reporter, finally, Emily Hanford, that started looking into it. And I think it was 2018, I can't remember the name of her radio network, but she took the time to really look into what was happening in our country and that reading scores weren't improving, because they weren't.
And I thought I had a little section about that, that must still be coming up. She had, I guess you'd call a podcast now. And she started talking about why reading wasn't working. And she made an effort to actually examine how teaching strategies were being taught in American schools and how they contradicted existing neuroscience and cognitive psychology research about the best ways for kids learn to read. And she really helped launch the Science of Reading movement. She pointed out that research supporting the best way to teach reading has been available for decades. When they look back at all these studies, both of these groups, they go way back and we know what the best way is to teach reading. And now you can prove it because of functional MRIs. Researchers see what's actually happening in a person's brain - of a reader that's a good reader and a reader that struggles.
We know what the best way is to teach reading. And now you can prove it because of functional MRIs.
Where We Are Today
So really where we are now, even though in some ways this was ignored for a long time, this report, we have to realize that it's not going away. This is not a new fad. It's not a trend. It's not going to disappear. It's not a political agenda. It isn't one size fits all or here's your program that you can get or here's the curriculum has been published. It's also not one single component. It's not just phonics.
One other thing that happened since then - Mississippi is the first state that really bought into this. It's called the Mississippi Miracle. Their national scores - Mississippi and South Dakota are sometimes all at the bottom of educational things like teacher salaries, for instance, although they got a bump up here recently. But Mississippi adopted the science of reading along with if you couldn't read by third grade, you had to repeat. People were real critical of that and it really wasn't that drastic - if a child was having problems and it looked like they weren't going to make that cut off, they got a lot of help. Their parents got involved. They didn't want anybody to repeat third grade. They wanted them to be able to read by third grade. And so that made a difference. What happened there really showed that this worked.
Also, there was an emergence in the 2010s of grassroots networks of parents of children, especially with dyslexia. So there's a nationwide group, at least you can find it on Facebook, in most states called Decoding Dyslexia. That was one of the groups that was based on parents of these kids. Someone has to teach these kids to read. I know my kid is smart, just hasn't been taught the right way to read yet. So more parents, teachers, and lawmakers are coming to understand what really will work for all kids. And this time it's not going away because the science is there and it's been known for a long time and we've got brain scans to prove it. So the war isn't over yet because there's still people, college professors, book publishers, publishers that are denying what's really needed to teach kids to read: structured language. But they're not going to get away with it this time, I don't think. So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.
This is not a new fad. It's not a trend. It's not going to disappear. It's also not one single component. It's not just phonics.
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