Bear with me for a moment while I describe the state of reading at my school...
I teach at a very rural elementary school where over 90% of the students qualify for free lunch. This year we implemented a new reading curriculum: The Pearson Scott Foresman Reading Street curriculum. In the last couple of years we've increase our reading blocks to a standard 90 minutes and instituted a policy of "no interruptions" for reading blocks school wide. We DIBEL regularly and religiously in grades K-3 and track fluency and comprehension skills more-or-less weekly by other means in the higher grades.
We've put a response to intervention program based on the three-tiered model in place for all grades (well, not for preK) and we meet in collaborative planning groups (the classroom general education teacher, our reading specialists, our special ed staff, and the principal) to discuss the progress of students in intervention. In addition to the intervention program built into the Scott Foresman series, we have an Orton-Gillingham program available to use with students and a phonemic awareness intervention program for the early grades.
Professional Development in reading has been a major focus over the last year or so. Every teacher involve in reading instruction has been trained in using our new curriculum. Reading specialists, elementary level special education staff, kindergarten teachers, and (I think) first grade teachers were all given 35 or 40 hours of training in an Orton-Gillingham approach before the school year started. Reading specialists and other members of our staff attended workshops, book studies and conferences throughout the year.
Technical speaking, we are not a Reading First school. Just one of the elementary schools in my county has a Reading First award. And yet, we are implementing many aspects of the Reading First grant requirements district wide because someone decided that they constituted good instructional practice.
We are not alone. I quote Reid Lyon from a recent interview in EdNews:
The findings of no significant differences in reading comprehension outcomes presented in the Interim Report are difficult to interpret. This is because, as noted earlier, many non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs and professional development opportunities as the Reading First schools. This impact evaluation is not a true experiment which could have certainly been done given the tremendous financial resources allocated for the evaluation. As Tim Shanahan has pointed out, the comparisons made were not Reading First with non-Reading First schools, but Reading First with less-Reading First schools.
The most serious problem faced by any attempt to interpret the findings of the Reading First Impact Study is that the ideas and mandates found in Reading First have impacted all reading classrooms, not just the ones in schools where grant money has been directly spent. Reading First 's budget, according to Lyon, allowed for 20% of the billion dollars a year allocated for the program to be spent on professional development for any and all reading teachers. The result has been that instructional practice funded by Reading First awards have been implemented in non-Reading First schools (like mine). That has created an overlap in the practices of reading First and non-reading First schools, and made it hard to know what is really being compared by the impact study and how meaningful those comparisons are.
Lyon says this about the value of the report:
It does not appear that the current impact study specifically addressed this overlap in the evaluation, although the final report may present these data. In many cases, one would expect Reading First and non-Reading First schools to be more similar ... in their impact on reading outcomes.
Lyon feels that the schools in the study were poorly chosen and that the study itself fails to measure what Congress mandated to be measured. Many of the schools in the study show little increase in reading achievement, Lyon thinks, because they were doing fairly well when they got their Reading First money to start with. The poorer schools with greater needs started getting Reading First awards as part of the late award group of schools mentioned in my previous blog post. Those schools showed significant gains in reading.
One last quote from the Lyon interview that I'll leave with my readers:
It is hard not to be taken aback by the degree to which many in the reading community want to see Reading First fail, particularly when the programs, methods, and approaches advocated by this constituency or that constituency have never come close to any systematic impact evaluation of the scope implemented with Reading First.
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