I’m interested but rarely surprised whenever independent research shows strong evidence of curriculum effects. So this study of the efficacy of the Reading Recovery program by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education caught my eye. Recall that Reading Recovery, a short-term intervention program of one-to-one tutoring for low-achieving first graders, was one of the big winners of the Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up grants back in 2010. The feds allocated $45 million in federal dollars, plus $10 million more raised from the private sector, for the training of 3,675 teachers to offer the oddly named program (how do you “recover” a skill you don’t possess?) to more than 300,000 students.
Created forty years ago by a developmental psychologist and professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Reading Recovery is a series of daily, one-on-one lessons provided by specially trained teachers over a period of 12–20 weeks. Its entire point is to intervene early, before young students’ reading difficulties become too hard to address and reverse. Students who participated in Reading Recovery “significantly outperformed students in the control group on measures of overall reading, reading comprehension, and decoding,” the evaluation found. The effects were “similarly large for English language learners and students attending rural schools,” subgroups that were priority interests for the i3 scale-up program. CPRE’s four-year, multi-site, randomized control trial involved nearly seven thousand first graders in more than 1,200 schools. It found that effect sizes on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) Reading Total assessment and its Comprehension and Reading Words subscales at the end of the treatment period ranged between 0.30 and 0.48 standard deviations. Students who participated in Reading Recovery over an approximately five-month period gained 131 percent of the national average rate of progress for first-grade students.
Big study, big results. However it’s worth noting that the study’s control group received no consistent, validated intervention from trained teachers. As psychologist Steven Dykstra waggishly observed, it's like comparing a new cancer treatment to aromatherapy, then claiming the results prove that your treatment is valid. Is the secret sauce Reading Recovery? Or would any well-structured, intensive program of one-on-one intervention work equally well? Answering that would require a massive study that compares Reading Recovery not just to the dull hum of workaday literacy instruction in struggling schools, but to competing programs like Core Knowledge Language Arts, Success For All, Teacher’s College Reader’s Workshop, and any number of “big box” programs from commercial publishers. Once we can line those initiatives up and say, “good, better, best,” we’ll start to seriously arrest and address the desultory reading achievement that chronically plagues American children, particularly low-income black and brown children in underperforming schools.
For now, the reason to cheer is that we have another reason to believe that curriculum matters. Whether it’s the recent Center for American Progress report on “the hidden value of curriculum reform” or Thomas Kane’s report earlier this month for Brookings on textbook effects, our longstanding agnosticism on curriculum and lack of due diligence when weighing the educational materials we put in front of kids is beginning to crumble.
SOURCE: Henry May, Philip Sirinides, Abigail Gray, and Heather Goldsworthy, “Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of the Four-Year i3 Scale-Up,” CRPE (March 2016).
