Saturday, July 12, 2008

Reading First Ineffective?

Originally published here on May 11, 2008.

The headline in USA Today was pithy: Study: Bush's Reading First program ineffective. It was also, I've come to believe, fairly mercenary. It did the job - peaked readers' interests and drew attention to the story. And the language of the headline, particularly the word ineffective, was picked up and has come to characterize discussion of the report.

Of course, few of the people who express some opinion about the report will ever actually read it. I did. The report, Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report, is available for download as a PDF document. But most people will rely on reporters like Greg Toppo to tell them what they should think about it.

The report is 211 page as a PDF file. Toppo, who left teaching after less than a decade in the classroom to become a reporter, boils it down to this:
Advocates of Reading First, an integral part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long maintained that its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction by teachers and regular, detailed analyses of children's skills, would raise reading achievement, especially among the low-income kids it targets. But the new study by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows that children in schools receiving Reading First funding had virtually no better reading skills than those in schools that didn't get the funding.

A mighty pithy summary of 211 pages. And while the report does point to problems with Reading First, I don't believe Toppo's analysis is entirely accurate. It plays to the crowd without really examining the contents of the study or discussing the validity of the study (which might have become a topic had the conclusion been that Reading First was the best thing since sliced bread). Toppo also ignores the fact that this is only part of a larger research project, with a final report yet to come.

I said that I read the study. I thought it seemed to say that Reading First sometimes makes a difference and sometimes doesn't. And I thought the report looked at when the program made a difference and when it didn't.

Toppo's article reminded me of why I enjoy telling people in my rural community that I worked as a reported once, but that then I found honest work...

In my next blog post I'll look at what others in the media have said about the Interm Report.

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