Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a ... - NYC Hold

Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a Research-Based Pedagogy: Is Institutional Reform Possible?
Sandra Stotsky
Research Scholar
Northeastern University Prepared for the Courant Initiative for the Mathematical Sciences in
Education Forum:
"Delivery on the Promise of Mayoral Control" Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
October 2, 2005
Abstract: Reading instruction is one of the very few areas where it is not
the case that "more research is needed." Educational policy makers already
have the theory and the evidence supporting it to guide the implementation
of effective reading programs from K-12. In fact, they have had the theory
and the evidence for decades. The central problem they face in providing
effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum stems not from
an absence of a research base but from willful indifference to what the
research has consistently shown and to a theory that has been repeatedly
confirmed. Using Jeanne Chall's The Academic Achievement Challenge as a
point of departure, I suggest why our education schools, through their
influence on teachers, administrators, textbook publishers, and state and
national assessments of students and teachers, have come to be the major
obstacle to closing the "gap" in student achievement.
The repeatedly confirmed theory Because of its foundational role for formal education and its central role
in academic achievement at all educational levels, the nature, development,
and teaching of reading have been the object of neurological,
psychological, and educational research for over one hundred years.
Indeed, reading has the longest and richest history of all the curricular
areas researchers have studied. One of the classic works still examined by
graduate students is Edmund Burke Huey's study on eye movements during the
act of reading published in 1908 as The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading.
What is remarkable is not that almost all the major questions in reading
pedagogy have been resolved by a large body of credible and consistent
evidence from this huge volume of research, but that they have had to be
resolved repeatedly. And that is because the evidence has been willfully
ignored by schools of education and all those they influence, from
teachers, administrators, educational publishers, professional educational
organizations, and testing companies to policy makers. In The Academic Achievement Challenge, the last book she wrote before her
death at the age of 78 in 1999, Jeanne Chall makes this point over and over
again, with exasperation and sorrow. One of the world's experts on reading
research and instruction, Chall was a major contributor to this body of
research through her work on readability, her analysis of the research on
beginning reading instruction, and many other studies. Based on her own
research, her work with hundreds of graduate students in the course of
their dissertations or other research at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, and continuing contact with former students over the course of a
long professional life, she was in a position to have a comprehensive
inside understanding of the twists and turns in her field and in education
in general. In one of my last conversations with her in 1998, I asked her
what kind of reading research she thought was still necessary. Her answer
was quick and cutting. We don't need any more. It's clear what we should
do. It's been clear for decades. The problem is that we don't do what the
research evidence supports, and in fact often do just the opposite. Going beyond the confines of reading studies, her last work sets up a
dichotomy that in her view captured the larger picture. Most of the issues
in the curriculum could be seen, she suggested, as a reflection of the
tensions between a teacher-centered and a student-centered approach to
instruction and to education in general. Commentators on education over
the years have come up with different terms for the dichotomy in
approaches: traditional vs. progressive, direct vs. indirect, content vs.
process, product vs. process, structured vs. open, or skills vs. conceptual
understanding are just a few of them. But, they always reflected how one
viewed the learning process and the role of the teacher. From her examination of trends in national test scores and both
quantitative and qualitative studies in all areas of the school curriculum,
Chall concluded that teacher-centered approaches led to higher student
achievement in all areas of the curriculum including reading, especially in
the elementary grades and especially for low-income children. Yet,
ironically, for the past 50 years the conflicts were almost all about what
was best for these children. Which approach would do the most for these
children? The research evidence was clear, but it didn't seem to matter
to those who claimed that social justice for the children of the poor
demanded nothing but "best practices." Why wouldn't those who professed to
be their advocates draw on the studies that showed how they might best be
taught? As Chall noted, there have been two basic, competing theories about the
development of reading skill. In one theory, repeatedly confirmed, its
development takes place in a series of stages, with beginning reading
differing from skilled reading (see Table 1.2 in her book for a description
of the stages of reading development). Phonological factors play a major
role at the beginning because beginners must learn the various
relationships between spoken words and the written symbols for their sounds
in order to become skilled readers. In other words, they must learn the
alphabetical principle. This multi-stage theory predicts that a lack of
success in the early stages-in sounding out and identifying words in print
whose meanings they already know-retards success in later stages when they
must, among other things, learn the meanings of words they may be able to
sound out with ease but not understand. In the other theory, known as whole language, a sight word approach, or a
psycholinguistic guessing game, beginning reading does not differ as a
process from skilled reading. Reading skill, its proponents claim, develops
naturally as language and cognition develop, with language and cognition
maturing together independently of direct instruction. Proponents of this
one-stage theory analogize learning to read and write to the natural
process of learning to listen and speak, asserting that beginning readers
learn to read through their effort to derive meaning from written language
just as they have with oral language. Different pedagogical practices have been logically related to these two
theories. To implement the multi-stage theory, children must receive
systematic instruction in phonics for identifying printed words, regularly
read aloud to demonstrate fluency, practice enough to acquire decoding
skills to the point of automaticity, receive systematic instruction in
vocabulary through the grades to develop their knowledge of word meanings,
and use textbooks with vocabulary controlled by spelling patterns to
practice the phonics skills they are taught from lesson to lesson. On the other hand, to implement the one-stage theory, children must induce
on their own the alphabetical principle underlying the written code
(however idiosyncratic) in the same way they induce the syntactic
structures of their native language, rely on a word's context to identify a
word, acquire the meaning of difficult words naturally through multiple
exposures to them in varied contexts, read independently and silently to
concentrate on comprehension, and read only "authentic" literature from the
beginning. Proponents of the one-stage theory have drawn not only on the
tenets of natural language learning but also on the assumptions of
generative or transformational grammar, even though linguists themselves
never applied this theory to the acquisition of written language. Indeed,
they are on record in Massachusetts denouncing attempts by whole language
advocates to promote the "myth that learning to read resembles learning to
speak" and to claim that their view of reading somehow arises from research
in linguistics.[1] As is well-known, the evidence has consistently supported the multi-stage
theory and as implemented by a pedagogy emphasizing explicit instruction in
skills and mastery to the point of automaticity. The evidence has clearly
supported the superiority of highly structured teaching for children deemed
"at risk." Among other sources of evidence, Chall pointed out that teacher-
centered approaches have always been characteristic of Catholic schools,
whose urban students, though similar demographically to those in public
schools, do much better on the average.
Why the confirmed theory has been ignored Chall noted that "powerful forces" other than reason and common sense have
kept us doing the same research and answering the same questions over and
over again, with no end yet in sight. As she saw it, there has been a
steady movement towards student-centered approaches to curriculum and
instruction over the century despite the mounting evidence that its results
were inferior to teacher-centered approaches, especially for the most
vulnerable populations-low-income children and children with disabilities.
Chall traced the root of the problem to conflicting philosophical beliefs
about the child's inherent nature and the goal of education in a democracy.
One group of educators have viewed the child as someone whose intellectual
growth needed careful adult-determined direction within a clear pedagogical
structure, with the end result of informed citizenship. Their p