Home >  Local News

Monday, August 26, 2002

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Which reading program for kids works best?

At the Mt. Washington Branch of Carnegie Library, Evan Wilson, 3, of Knoxville, gets some help during the library's "Stories and Art" program for youngsters. When Evan reaches kindergarten, he will enter an ambitious city school program to ensure that he's reading by the third grade. (Joyce Mendelsohn, Post-Gazette)

It's not a rhetorical question anymore. There's no time to ponder, scratch heads and stroke beards.

Money is at stake.

The Bush administration is offering $900 million in federal funds this year so that school districts can establish "research-based" reading programs in every classroom in the country. Now, school officials must choose the program that works for their district -- and meets with the approval of the federal government.

What works best depends on the district, on the students, on the teachers, most educators say.

The Wilkinsburg School District uses a highly structured, scripted, phonics-based program, "Success for All."

Ditto for Clairton, a distressed school district which has begun "Direct Instruction," another scripted approach.

In the North Hills and Upper St. Clair school districts, there's a mix of programs and techniques, which balance phonics with literature-based instruction. That's also true with the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

But will the ambitious new "Reading First" grant program quash that diversity? Some educators are fearing that the initiative -- which will provide more than $28 million for Pennsylvania students this school year -- will favor a few large, commercial reading programs that emphasize heavily scripted phonics-based instruction at the expense of other approaches.

That's because Bush and his education experts have come down strongly on one side in a longtime battle over how best to teach children to read. It's a battle that pits phonics -- or the decoding of words by matching the sounds that build words with letters -- against "whole language," which emphasizes the meaning of the words through storytelling.

Bush officials, along with Reid Lyon, the man chosen to head the grant program, are strong supporters of phonics -- or what were described in a national panel dominated by phonics supporters as "evidence-based" instruction.

	The Series: Day One: A late bloomer learns to read Today: Word is out on how schools can get funding for reading Day Three: A kinder, gentler phys ed Day Four: Law allows businesses to rack up tax breaks through gifts to schools Day Five: Troubled schools struggle with new transfer law Day Six: When students go wireless, colleges lose money Day Seven: In 2003, students in danger can request school transfer

Opponents claim that the term "evidence" or "scientifically based instruction" has been co-opted by supporters of phonics and drill-and-skill teaching, who maintain there are many different ways to measure success, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

So when Lyon's agency, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, sent out materials to hundreds of thousands of educators publicly praising the efficiency of "evidence-based" programs, alarm bells went off in the education community.

So great, in fact, was the concern that the influential International Reading Association and other groups sent letters of protest to U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige -- and now, Bush officials appear to be backing from their earlier statements.

"You've got to remember that Republicans are committed to local control, so they're not going to try to mandate one or two programs across the country," said Kathy Roller, policy director of the International Reading Association.

She believes that, as long as the programs meet standards of good reading instruction -- which include phonics, fluency, text comprehension and vocabulary -- it's unlikely they'll be rejected.

Others are not so sure.

"In state after state after state, a particular approach to reading is being mandated," said Lucy Calkins, director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Scripted programs -- which include detailed instruction books that tell teachers what questions to ask and even when to schedule bathroom breaks -- deprive poor students of the chance to develop higher order thinking skills, some reading experts say.

"There's no place for teachers or children to make decisions or form opinions about what they're reading," said Calkins. "There's no problem-solving, no inquiry, no critical thinking" through exploration of a text's meaning.

The scripted programs, she said, "are perpetuating a division in society between rich and poor schools. The very worst schools get the scripted programs, while the richer districts won't touch them."

But supporters of scripted programs like Direct Instruction say they provide much-needed stability and predictability in schools where teacher turnover is high. In the financially distressed Clairton City School District, which has been taken over by the state, teachers "love Direct Instruction," said John Ogurchak, the district's assistant superintendent.

"They tell me, 'Oh my God, my kids are actually reading.' "

Ogurchak said that the approach taken by whole language and literature-based programs "are developed with the expectation that students are going to come to school with a whole set of experiences to bring to the table, but that wasn't happening in our classrooms," he added.

Rather than focusing on skill-building, a literature-based approach might involve a discussion about a book about a fisherman on the Chesapeake Bay, which might puzzle low-income students who may not have ever seen a map of the United States, much less the state of Maryland.

"It's not fair to expect that a child is going to be able to bring that kind of experience to the discussion."

Rather, he and other school officials, after a year's careful study, decided on Direct Instruction "because it has a proven track record."

But in Wilkinsburg, which uses "Success for All," a tightly paced program in which children work in small groups, often reciting back words to reinforce their sounds, teachers have complained about its rigidity.

"There are a number of teachers who feel the program should be more flexible," said school board president Jean Dexheimer. "And my sense is that program officials are allowing them to change some of the materials used and introduce other strategies."

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has handed out $100 million in grant money over the past four years to school districts participating in the "Read to Succeed" program. Allegheny County districts alone have received just more than $7 million through this school year, the last year of the program.

No particular reading program was proscribed by the state; the money could be used to develop new programs, improve existing programs, help train teachers, and even start all-day kindergarten programs.

State officials plan to conduct a study next year to determine whether "Read to Succeed" helped improve state reading test scores, said department spokesman Jeff McCloud.

Companies frequently cite surveys from teachers or individual "experiments" as proof that their techniques work, but that's debatable, said Roller. No one commercial program has ever been proven to work best for children. That's because no large-scale clinical studies have been conducted.

"It's just too expensive," she said.

Even studies of the two broader different approaches to teaching reading -- phonics, which is now widely referred to as "decoding," and whole language, which is now called "literature-based" instruction -- have been disputed. While research from the 1990s did find gains by children who were being taught decoding, others were inconclusive.

"The research I have seen pointed out doesn't say whole language is better than a decoding approach. They say kids learn as well," said Margaret McKeown, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who is working with noted reading expert Isabel Beck on Literacy Plus, a program for Pittsburgh public schools students.

City schools dropped their exclusive emphasis on whole language several years ago. In the end, a mix is best, McKeown said.

Last year, Pittsburgh schools incorporated a program published by Harcourt in the first, second and third grades that is not scripted, but which uses both phonics and collections of stories and literature. This year, students in kindergarten, fourth and fifth grades will also get it.

The "plus" in Literacy Plus is an ethics curriculum from the Pittsburgh-based Heartwood Institute that is also literature-based.

"After all, [Superintendent John] Thompson pointed out that there's no point in getting A's and B's in reading if you're rude and untrustworthy," said Denise Yates, the new head of the district's reading program.