A parent recently asked me, “Which of the reading programs being used in the county will best teach my daughter to read? As a retired superintendent and elementary school principal, you know what is good and bad about reading programs? Which school will do the best job of teaching my little girl to read?”
In the new era of parental choice, this young mother was doing exactly what school choice wants her to do. She was investigating the educational options available in order to choose the best school for her child. But, what should inform her choice?
To paraphrase Dickens, this was “the best of questions and the worst of questions.” Finding the best reading program has been public education’s never ending quest for more than a century. In many school districts, the search for “the” best reading program results in the adoption of the “next” best program every eight to ten years or whenever a drop in state or local reading achievement data causes politicians and pundits to ask “why Johnny can’t read.” Most schools and school districts change reading programs as often as they change high school football uniforms – programs and uniforms change frequently and each new design is meant to look like a reading program or a uniform that is successful somewhere else.
So, what question(s) should help to formulate an answer for this earnest parent? Is this a question about the quality of a school or the quality of a teacher or the quality of a reading curriculum? School, teacher and curriculum each are part of the answer.
Reading programs are complex because they have floating variables. There is the reading curriculum – the collection of reading materials, the embedded instruction of reading skills, and the sequencing of when students are challenged with reading materials and skills that cause individual student growth in reading. There are the teachers at each grade level and their various levels of instructional expertise. There is the degree of school focus on reading within the context of all of the school curricula. There is the support for reading that each child has at home – this can make a significant yet difficult to assess difference in annual reading growth.
Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel examined more than seventy reading programs used in early and upper elementary education. (Selecting a Basal Reading Program: Making the Right Choice, Douglas Barnard and Robert Hetzel, R & L Education, 1989.) Their study found three persistent elements that exist in effective reading programs. Although their study is not almost 25 years old, I find their results to be persistent. These are:
1. All of the beginning reading programs found to be effective or promising in qualifying experiments have a strong focus on teaching phonics and phonemic awareness. However, an emphasis on phonics did not guarantee positive effects. It clearly matters a great deal how reading is taught, and an emphasis on phonics may be necessary but it is not sufficient to ensure meaningful reading gains.
2. Successful programs almost always provide teachers with extensive professional development and follow-up focused on specific teaching methods.
3. The research supports the use of well-developed programs that integrate curriculum, pedagogy, and extensive professional development.
This helps. I want this inquiring parent to examine the amount of time the school dedicates to early reading instruction in grades 4K, kindergarten and first grade and in the primary years of second and third grade. She should look for at least 90 minutes dedicated every day to reading and 90 minutes dedicated to English/language arts instruction. The commitment of time is highly indicative of district commitment because instructional time in the school day is finite and highly competitive. If reading and literacy receive three hours every day, the school is committed to teaching students to read.
This parent should be able to see a commitment to phonics and phonemic awareness in the first three years of school. She may say, “but I don’t know what phonics is,” and I will tell her that she does. She should see and hear consistent and explicit instruction in how letters of the alphabet are linked to sounds or phonemes to cause the child to form letter-sound correspondence and spelling patterns and to apply this knowledge to reading. Phonics and phoneme awareness should be happening every day and across the grade levels.
Balanced with phonics, the parent should be able to see that each child has a wide variety of reading materials that are examined and used daily. And, that the teacher and children talk a lot about vocabulary and what words mean in the context of these different reading materials. The talk about language should include student-to-student talk as children work to create their understanding of what words can mean in the different ways they are used. Best programs in reading instruction include student collaborative activities.
Lastly, this parent should be able to observe that each teacher spends time frequently dedicated to the professional development of reading instruction. For too many decades, a teacher with ten years of teaching experience had as much continuing education in reading in her tenth year as a first-year teacher. School districts believed that undergraduate training in reading was good enough – it is not. If the school district is not investing continuously in professional development in reading instruction, it is not a school district for this inquiring parent.
In 1978, Shirley Jackson raised criterion-based questions about reading programs and her inquiries remain perfectly valid today. In “The Quest for Reading Programs That Work” (http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_197812_jackson.pdf) Ms. Jackson asked many questions, but the most significant question was “which program is most successful in causing all children to make annual growth in reading.” Some children enter school as readers and others are ready to read, but there also are children who have not received any preparation for reading. School data should indicate that all children, including children receiving special education and ELL instruction, those from impoverished homes, and those with other socio-economic distractors, achieve the school’s goals for annual growth in reading.
Having thought through these questions and examined what I knew about each school’s commitment of in-school time and to professional development to reading instruction and what I knew about school achievement data, I told my inquiring parent which school I would recommend for her daughter. I also told her why I would choose that school. Most importantly, I helped her to understand what to look for in subsequent years to assure that this school remained her choice. If reading instruction is her criteria for choosing a school, and there can be many valid reasons for choosing a school, then she should examine reading achievement in that school over time to assure that an informed choice remains an informed choice. This is what school choice should be about.