Here’s a line that deserves to be committed to memory by all who would seek to improve literacy outcomes for children. Maybe it should be tattooed onto our flesh:
“One striking fact is that the complex world of education—unlike defense, health care, or industrial production—does not rest on a strong research base. In no other field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on to make policy choices.”
That excellent observation, from a 1999 National Research Council paper, is quoted in this report from the Alliance for Excellent Education, The Next Chapter: Supporting Literacy Within ESEA. Author Mariana Haynes laments that literacy instruction in our schools “is not grounded in the science of reading development and learning.” Another “striking fact” is that the Alliance’s report itself overlooks a great, glaring chunk of that science itself in making an otherwise unimpeachable case for research-based reading instruction. Writing in the Core Knowledge Blog, Lisa Hansel rightly observed that the report ignores the need for building broad academic knowledge across the curriculum as a means of raising reading achievement. “Like almost all discussions of literacy, the focus is on literacy instruction and reading and writing skills,” Hansel lamented. “If only such skills were sufficient!”
Indeed. The Alliance’s report is essentially an extended call for the adoption of something called the Literacy Education for All, Results for a Nation (LEARN) Act, which encourages the use “research-based strategies” to teach reading and writing. “Under LEARN, schools would develop students’ reading and writing proficiency by providing high-quality classroom literacy instruction as well as a continuum of interventions and support for students with or at risk for reading failure,” Haynes writes. Elements of LEARN are included in the Senate version of the current reauthorization of ESEA, she adds.
The report notes that 60 percent of fourth and eighth graders struggle with reading in some manner, while nearly half of students of color and students from low-income families “enter fifth grade with skills below the basic level on NAEP.” I’ll leave it to others to tell whether LEARN is the right lever to pull to raise literacy rates, especially among low-SES kids. But any report or legislation that purports to promote practice rooted in science—not preference or ideology—is duty-bound to note the strong evidence from cognitive science that correlates broad background knowledge with reading achievement. The Alliance’s report does no favors by eliding the need for a curriculum rich in science, history, and the arts (not as a nice bonus, but a foundational component) to build language proficiency, or merely assuming it’s a given. The report’s focus on the “skill” of literacy misses the mark. Broadly speaking, reading comprehension is not a skill you teach, it’s a condition you create.
SOURCE: Mariana Haynes, “The Next Chapter: Supporting Literacy Within ESEA,” Alliance for Excellent Education (August 2015).
