National Reading Panel member: Federal school mandate based on flawed work

[Newsjock]

Headline slightly trimmed to fit length limit
http://missoulian.com/articles/2005/02/16/news/top/news01.txt

National Reading Panel member says federal school mandate based on flawed work
By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian

The scientific research backing federal reading education guidelines has little science and even less research behind it, according to an educator who served on the national panel assigned to find the best reading methods.

"The government right now is pushing a one-size-fits-all program, and if you're getting federal funds, you better do it," said Joanne Yatvin, who spent 20 years as a teacher, principal and superintendent of a small school district in Oregon. "But these programs that are being mandated are hurting our ability to teach children."

... "Once I got on the panel, I was appalled to see that the panel was stacked," Yatvin said. "They made a mistake choosing me. All the end products were predetermined."

... "And all this formed the 'scientific' basis for the Reading First section of the No Child Left Behind legislation," Yatvin said. In her view, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development for years had specialized in programs for children with learning disabilities. But little of that work had been applied to the larger community of regular students.

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[UL_Approved]

1. Pure fiction, like everything else

ALL of Bush's plans, ideals, and principles are a smoke screen for a grab at totalitarian desires. He wants to eliminate all education or social programs. He wants all money to go into the military. And he wants not scrutiny over it.

These articles can come out by the thousands and most people will not get up in arms about it.

This is the problem. We don't get in the streets and make a stand over this kind of stuff. We really need to come out by the millions. This is where we will get ahead on the world of politics.

[AndyTiedye]

2. He Wants Everyone To Have to Go to the Churches For Education & Help

Onward Xtian Soldiers

[rodeodance]

4. Bush wants to be involved in Education-he says he is the education

President--the problem is that he just wants certain kinds of schools and not others.

[iconoclastic cat]

3. HA! Hey, teachers: print and distribute!

Guess what I'm copying for my Area Reading Coordinator this morning!

[teach1st]

5. Posted!

Posted on my school's internal mail and on the unofficial district message board.

[rodeodance]

6. yes, I will copy and distribute--thanks for the post

[rodeodance]

7. She obviously does not agree with the "phonics" method of teaching

reading-but goes with the "whole" reading method.
Does anyone have some data on this?



......Yatvin said in the process, it ignored such things as parental involvement, books in the home and the connections between reading and writing. And while it came out in support of phonics and "decodable text" reading books, it failed to back up those claims with the research it was supposed to review.

"And all this formed the 'scientific' basis for the Reading First section of the No Child Left Behind legislation," Yatvin said. In her view, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development for years had specialized in programs for children with learning disabilities. But little of that work had been applied to the larger community of regular students.

"They were pushing their style, and didn't look at all the other topics more typical of normal children and normal families," Yatvin said. "But their research didn't have much outside review. This panel served that purpose."

And the payoff for pushing phonics programs, Yatvin said, goes to the publishers of expensive and disposable workbooks that underpin those programs. Where library books may last five years or more of heavy use, worksheet and memorization lessons must be replaced continually...........

[rodeodance]

8. payoff goes to disposable items--more use of natural resourses

And the payoff for pushing phonics programs, Yatvin said, goes to the publishers of expensive and disposable workbooks that underpin those programs. Where library books may last five years or more of heavy use, worksheet and memorization lessons must be replaced continually...........

[Beowulf]

9. It's complicated

The reading community does not agree on what counts as evidence of reading competency. One of the problems with the "phonics-first" argument is that the same companies that make the consumable workbooks also make the tests that are most commonly used in measuring reading. Those workbooks give kids lots of practice in dealing with questions like the ones they encounter on the tests, but there's little agreement that the tests actually measure reading.

The "whole" method or more commonly known as whole language received a bad rap largely because the kinds of reading children do in those classrooms don't match the kinds of reading children are asked to do on standardized tests (which are published by the same companies that make the workbooks). Whole language was also instituted wholesale in some places without really understanding what whole language teaching involved.

In short, whole language is based on linguistic research that suggests that readers use many different kinds of information to figure out what is on the page. There's visual information -- that would be the letters and words on the page, this would be the phonetic information readers use. There's syntactic information -- that would be the reader's understanding of language structure, words aren't just randomly put on the page, there's places where you can expect nouns to appear and not verbs, and vice versa. And then there's semantic information -- the stuff you are reading should make sense. The better readers understand this and use a variety of information to make their way through reading material. The problem with methods that emphasize phonics is that they overemphasize the visual information and de-emphasize the syntactic and semantic information, so you get readers who are inflexible.

But as Yatvin says, the NCLB and the National Reading Panel was never about research, that was just a fig leaf, it was about steering public money into the hands of long-time Bush family friends. Meanwhile the effects of this on public schools and even colleges of education have been devastating and demoralizing. Progressive educators from pre-schools to university graduate schools have been under attack, isolated, marginalized, and in some cases driven into early retirement or into other careers.

It's not pretty out there and the country's children are paying a heavy price.

[LWolf]

11. Excellent explanation.

Thanks!

:hi:

[rodeodance]

12. Thanks very much Beowulf. Your explanation is valuable to me as I

really do not --have not keep up much with the whole vs phonics contravsy (except here and there).
I also read a while back that it is Neil Bush has has a company
that profits from NCLB legislation.

[LWolf]

10. Actually, it says:

<snip>

Yatvin believes she was chosen because she had publicly criticized some proponents of the "whole language" style of reading instruction.

When something is used as political fodder, it becomes an "either/or" "All right or all wrong" scenario which is just not real. That's what you get with the phonics/whole language wars.

Phonics are an important piece to reading instruction. Just that; a piece, not the whole pie. Phonics advocates tend to want nothing else. And the materials that corporate publishing companies produce to make everyone so proud of drowning their kids in phonics are crap.

That's what I think she's saying here.

And she is absolutely correct about the absence of good research to back up the "scientific basis" of NCLB. Those of us who teach elementary kids, and try to keep up with the research, have known that from the beginning.

[proud2BlibKansan]

14. NORMAL children and NORMAL families???

This lady becomes less and less credible. Too bad. I agree that Reading First is not the cure all it is presented to be but her choice of vocabulary is pretty tacky.

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. I want to know

who makes money off this Reading First program. Anyone know?

An aside - as an LD teacher, I can assure you that programs that work for LD kids most definitely work for ALL kids. They aren't always practical in a large group regular ed setting, but I take exception to this remark. It's not a smart argument.

[Maestro]

15. In our district

we stress a balance between developing automaticity, prosody and overall fluency in reading while at the same time stressing that reading is only reading when comprehension is involved. NCLB's standardized test craze and its sound byte "return to basics" mantra destresses the importance of developing these critical thinking, analytical comprehension skills. It seems to be content that calling words with high fluency is enough.

I totally agree that NCLB distrusts those who know first hand what children really need, the teachers. It disgusts me.

For more on the whole language vs. phonics debate, check out what Dr. Stephen Krashen has to say about here. www.sdkrashen.com Debate.