The Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, offers $5 billion over six years to states and school districts to support research-based reading instruction, but not everybody is happy about the strings attached to this funding. In a front-page story in Tuesday's Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss gives voice to critics of Reading First who try to paint the program as "promoting corporate control of the education of our children."
Detractors have two main gripes: that the Education Department will only provide funds for programs that explicitly teach phonics, and that the Department is strongly encouraging the use of certain commercial phonics-based programs that are highly structured or scripted. The first complaint flies in the face of solid evidence that explicit instruction in phonics is crucial for children struggling to read, and only a few holdouts at the International Reading Association (naively described by Strauss as apolitical) continue to claim otherwise.
The second complaint, that the Education Department is pushing specific phonics-based reading programs, is denied by officials there, who say that there is no magic list of approved reading programs. Any list of demonstrably effective reading programs, however, would by necessity include highly structured or scripted programs like Direct Instruction, since independent research has found them to be among the most successful at teaching children to read, and the Department of Education has, in fact, mentioned some of these programs as examples of effective reading programs. But instead of reviewing the evidence for the effectiveness of different reading programs being recommended by the Department, the Post article digresses into an exploration of the connections between the publishers of certain popular reading programs and the Bush administration, as if it were friendship and profit that drive the government's decisions and advice on reading instruction rather than programs' effectiveness in teaching youngsters to read.
The Post article portrays a battle between ed school professors who believe that teachers must be freed from highly-scripted reading instruction and publishing companies that sell materials based on principles of reading instruction that really work. It would be a shame if fear of the profit motive prevented us from making the best possible decisions for kids.
"Phonics pitch irks teachers," by Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, September 10, 2002.