It's not just that Leo Casey noticed that I lost a few pounds, or that Seattle's school leaders are prioritizing achievement over "diversity." Now Education Week has published a balanced article about Reading First. This is new, different, and exciting.
What's most interesting about the article is the backpedaling of Institute for Educational Sciences director Russ Whitehurst. Such backpedaling started a few weeks ago, though too late to find its way into the mainstream press reports about the study. (Before backpedaling, he backed the study wholeheartedly.) No longer:
"I would say you have to wait for the final report before it would be reasonable for people to draw conclusions about the Reading First study," said Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education that commissioned the congressionally mandated study. One difficulty in doing the study, he said, is that the treatment is not clearly defined, and implementation of the program varies from site to site.
"The 'it' [what is being measured] is more ambiguous than it might be in certain other impact studies," he added. "There's not a manual that you can get on the Web and order that is Reading First."
And here's the kicker:
The findings, Mr. Whitehurst said, do not support the arguments made by some critics that the Reading First principles, or the research-based approach to instruction overall, are ineffective.
"Scientifically based reading instruction has to work, because by definition it is based on practices that have been shown to work," he said. "So this almost gleeful conclusion that because of this report we can ignore cumulative evidence on effective reading instruction is simply inappropriate."
Well said, Mr. Whitehurst. It almost makes me gleeful.
