Reading guru Reid Lyon analyzes the limitations of the Reading First study, which found no improvement in reading scores for high-need students. The sample excluded the neediest schools, which presumably would be most affected. Lyon says:
. . . many non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs and professional development opportunities as the Reading First schools. This impact evaluation is not a true experiment which could have certainly been done given the tremendous financial resources allocated for the evaluation. As Tim Shanahan has pointed out, the comparisons made were not Reading First with non-Reading First schools, but Reading First with less-Reading First schools.
Lyon also points out that Reading First schools are spending less than an hour a day on reading instruction, much less than the program calls for, and are devoting more time to comprehension than to phonics.
D-Ed Reckoning has more thoughts.
This is all special pleading. They compared Reading First schools with similar schools that didn’t implement Reading First, and discovered that the Reading First schools didn’t get better reading results.
So then the apologists say, but the non-Reading First schools actually were doing Reading First anyway. Notice that the apologists don’t actually offer concrete evidence for this, but if it were true, then what is the point of Reading First, if schools are doing the same things anyway?
So then they try, well, Reading First isn’t actually better for the schools that were evaluated, but there are some other schools out there, some really bad schools, where Reading First would make a difference. Again, no evidence is offered, but it’s not hard to believe that any coherent reading program at all would be an improvement over what is offered at a terrible school. That’s not an endorsement of Reading First specifically.
And then they trot out the No True Scotsman Fallcay. Oh well, yeah, the apologists concede, Reading First didn’t make a difference, but it wasn’t real Reading First. Or it wasn’t a realphonics program. Or something. But if you were previously advocating for Reading First, as a lot of people were, you don’t now get to claim that Reading First isn’t a real phonics program.
RF basically permittd funding to go to mostly untested reading programs as long as they contained systematic and explicit instruction in the five essential components of reading instruction (within the bounds set by the scientifically based reading research). Of course, effective reading programs for “at-risk” kids require a lot more detail and structure than that (that’s also what the reading research shows) and it should not be surprising that many of these new programs wouldn’t get significantly better results than their predecessors. Especically when you consider that schools continued to do largely what they had been doing even when the new programs were adopted. Moreover, there isn’t a high probability that a study which evaluates all these differents programs as a whole is going to show positive results.
So, in other words, KDeRosa, Reading First as practiced isn’t any better than whatever it replaces.
Weren’t a lot of people defending its wonderfulness six months ago?
As a whole, apparently not, but that shouldn’t be surprising–this is education afterall. There are implementations and curricula that have gotten improved results–like the Gering school district.