Dyslexia: News from the US

Note from The Learning People: The UK Government heavily endorses phonic-based reading instruction for all learners, regardless of their thinking style. While phonic approaches work well for many learners, they tend to be ineffective for dyslexic thinkers.

The following report looks at the catastrophic failure of a US reading scheme, Reading First, that has received over $1billion of federal funds. Reading First places strong emphasis on phonic instruction.

The Beginning of the End of Reading First (Maybe…)

By Laura Zink de Diaz, Davis Facilitator in Bogotá, Colombia

 

For those of you who’ve always felt there was a disturbing odor of snake-oil in the unremitting use of the phrase “scientifically-based reading research” by supporters of the No Child Left Behind Act, you now have confirmation that your sense of smell is just fine.

 

In April of this year, the US Department of Education released a report on Reading First, the major ingredient in the NCLB recipe for ensuring that all children read at grade level by the end of the third grade. This comes almost a year after the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report (in May 2007) accusing several people central to the development of Reading First of conflict of interest.

 

In case you missed it, or have forgotten the details, the OIG’s report revealed that individuals with significant professional and or financial connections to some of the instructional materials favored by Reading First directors were involved in the grant approval process. For example, at least three individuals with ties to the Direct Instruction (DI) approach to reading pedagogy were named to the peer review panel, which evaluated state applications for Reading First funding. According to the OIG report, the individuals in question were involved in reviewing 23 state applications for Reading First grant money and served on seven of the 16 sub-panels that reviewed state applications. One of them led five of the panels.

 

To make a long and sordid story short, when the applications that states submitted included other approaches to reading instruction, they were often denied, in some cases repeatedly, until they were re-written to include use of Direct Instruction. This violates a federal prohibition against endorsement by the government of specific curricula. In addition, it’s alleged that the subversion of the panel’s work in this way made a LOT of money for those panel members with financial ties to DI and other reading programs favored by the directors of Reading First.

 

Moving ahead, this year’s report is titled Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report, and is available for download on-line. It’s 211 pages long, but its findings are succinctly expressed in the executive summary:

 

“On average, across the 18 participating sites, estimated impacts on student reading comprehension test scores were not statistically significant.”

 

This is the most damning of the findings. However, there’s more:

 

“On average Reading First increased instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension).”

 

So this stunning lack of impact was achieved not only by insisting that schools use only the programs the Reading First directors recommended, but also by increasing instructional time. Reading First schools devote an extra 100 minutes per day to reading, the equivalent of an extra six weeks each year. It is virtually inconceivable that an extra 100 minutes per day could be devoted to reading instruction without obtaining any significant impact, no matter what programs were in use! I suspect that school children could spend that same amount of time reading and re-reading Captain Underpants to better effect than slogging through the Direct Instruction drills imposed on them in most Reading First schools!

 

Another finding:

 

“Average impacts on reading comprehension and classroom instruction did not change systematically over time as sites gained experience with Reading First.”

 

So, practice did not make perfect. And:

 

“Study sites that received their Reading First grants later in the federal funding process (between January and August 2004) experienced positive and statistically significant impacts both on the time first and second grade teachers spent on the five essential components of reading instruction and on first and second grade reading comprehension.” (Executive summary, p. ix)

 

Essentially, the longer a school followed Reading First guidelines, the worse their students performed on tests of reading comprehension.

 

As I was putting together this column, more delicious news: June 21, 2008, Alyson Klein, reported at edweek.org that Reading First would be “eliminated under a fiscal 2009 spending measure approved unanimously …by a House Appropriations subcommittee.” Representative David R. Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, cited as the basis for this decision the results of the impact study and “mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and cronyism, as documented by the inspector general.”

 

The list of defects of Reading First would fill this entire issue. They start with the unproven assumption that phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension are the “five essential components of reading instruction.” This recipe for reading came from the National Reading Panel report of 2000, which concluded that phonics is the answer to the difficulties of all types of struggling readers. (The panel members came to this conclusion by – surprise! – excluding from their review any study that didn’t focus on phonics.) And then there’s the classic example of fuzzy math buried in the goal of the program: that all children should “read at grade level by the end of third grade.” Since grade level is defined as the average of the scores of all students in a particular grade, it is a Lake Woebegone-eque fantasy to expect all children to read “at grade level,” no matter what grade you look at.

 

But these are topics for an entire volume on the history of education reform in the United States. For now, I’m content to see that the truth about the snake oil is finally coming to light.

 

References and Further Information:

 

Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report. Complete report available as downloadable PDF document at: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20084016/index.asp

 

Bracey, Gerald. “DIBELS Earns Bracey Rotten Apple Award” Available on-line at: http://susanohanian.org/anti-dibels/node/96

 

Garan, Elaine M. “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics.” Available on-line at: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0103gar.htm

 

Klein, Alyson. “House Panel Would Kill “Reading First” Funding.” Education Week. Available on-line at: http://tinyurl.com/3jekqq

 

Medige, Bernadette. “Nonsense Words that Sent Your Kid to Summer School” Buffalo News, August 11, 2007. Available on-line at: susanohanian.org/show_nclb_outrages.html?id=3051

 

Comments

[Fionna Pilgrim]

I approach this question of children and learning to read from several viewpoints.

I was an early reader myself; reading long before I started school (back in 1957) with no concerted effort on the part of anybody, except to follow my interest. My son (now 14) also came to reading early: by 2 years old; again with no outside input.

My brother did not read until he was 13 and his spelling was erratic until his 30s, when it improved, for no apparent reason, while he was completing his PhD thesis.

My daughter was a non-reader until she was 15, when she completed a Davis Programme. She had been exposed to several different phonic approaches, none of which had helped her.

I now home educate my son and, after reading many works by authors like Alice Millar, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Roland Meighan and Jan Fortune-Wood, ( and recognising the success of children educated in this way) we are completely autonomous in our approach.

As a Montessori teacher I have seen many children who were drawn to the language materials, and read easily using them, and others who were not drawn to them and for whom they made no sense, who were simply not ready to read.

When I discovered the book, The Gift of Dyslexia, I came to understand why my daughter could make no sense of phonics and why some of the children in my care within the Montessori Children's House were not drawn to the language materials. It seemed to make perfect sense to me that a child who did not think with the sound of words but with the meanings of those words would not be helped to understand what the words on the page said simply from knowing what different sounds went together to represent them.

Since my training as a Davis facilitator, I have gained a much deeper understanding of how a dyslexic person thinks and the way in which that is different from non-dyslexic thinking.

The constant theme that is clear to me, whichever perspective I view the situation from, is: "Trust the child" or: "Trust the individual". Our minds are not pitchers to be filled with whatever anyone wants to put in there; they have their own pattern to follow; they are flowers to be nurtured in all their diversity.

I agree with you that now, at this stage of our evolution, some children are hard-wired for reading. In my experience, there are many children who would learn to read with no instruction at all.

It is my radical personal opinion that we are all hard-wired for reading; but that, unlike the ability to speak, it is a skill that different individuals come to at different times. That, left to themselves, all would come to reading at the time that was right for them.

When learning to speak, the newborn has an inbuilt motor reflex that causes the muscles of the mouth make the movements required to make the sounds it sees and hears it’s mother making as she talks to it. The child who is not able to interact one-to-one in this way is unlikely to develop the ability to speak coherently.

Reading is a little different: it involves using mental ability to make sense of something. Many non-readers are easily able to do this in other areas—for example: the architect who interprets the draughtsman’s designs with ease, the electrician who can interpret wiring diagrams—and the physical abilities required: muscular control of eye movement, the accommodation of the iris and lens in the eye to light levels and optimum distance are developed while learning other skills. Eye-tracking may require some attention, but muscles that already have the ability to control movement can learn to track left to right through words and sentences.

For some, the need to interpret words comes early, for others, particularly the dyslexic thinker, the need to read comes later; they may have many other, possibly more efficient, ways of finding out about the world—listening and observing then creating concrete objects, asking questions, trying things out, experimenting. Their thought processes are very fast; reading requires them to engage in a relationship with the abstraction of letters and can be a distraction that may get in the way of doing...until a need for information cannot be satisfied quickly enough and leaves them motivated to a little patience with this medium.

This probably seems to stray a long way from the question of why phonic reading instruction is not helpful to dyslexic thinkers and your confusion with the concept of a dyslexic thinker.

If you explore our website and blog further I’m sure you will find much information about what we mean by a dyslexic thinker. Possibly the clearest explanation of the different thinking style can be found if you click on How Dyslexia Happens, by Ron Davis, under Information in the bar on the right of the page you are reading. As it explains the anatomy of a learning disability it also makes plain what the thinking style is.

I have looked at the web-articles you quote at the end of your comment and take on board the fact that much of the research was flawed by a wish not to exclude some children from the perceived benefits of Reading First, so that conclusions drawn both for and against may not be valid.

However, speaking from personal experience; as you say, for children who learn to read easily phonics are immaterial. For those who are dyslexic thinkers—denoted by the fact that they include their imagination in their thought process; that those thought processes are amazingly fast and that they think, largely, using images and feelings—who are not ready to read, a block is put in their way by the fact that their thinking style will make letters and symbols make less sense the harder they try, unless they can be introduced to those symbols in a manner that takes that thinking style into consideration.

Furthermore, the first hundred words we expect a child to be able to read are words which have no obvious image, e.g. the, and, but, because, if…; this causes further confusion for the dyslexic thinker, whose thinking style will not make sense of these words, even though helicopter, elephant and tyrannosaurus may cause no problem.

If you add to that the fact that most of these children do not hear the sounds of words in their heads and everyone around them is expecting them to make sense of these abstract sounds that make up the building blocks of how a word sounds, you can see that the way reading is frequently approached in school virtually sets them up to fail.

If you look on our website at the article, Brain Function, Spell Reading, and Sweep-Sweep-Spell by Abigail Marshal, which you will find under Finding out More/Further Articles, it explains very clearly why trying to decode using phonemes can cause a child to lose meaning.

At best, phonic instruction may allow a dyslexic thinker to become a fluent de-coder, at worst it draws them deeper and deeper into confusion over reading. It is unlikely to lead to a fluent reader with good comprehension.

Phonics can be a useful tool once a person is able to read—for those words we may never have met before but know when we can work out how they sound. But… though a phonic approach can be a useful tool for the auditory/verbal learner, it is the worst possible approach for visual/spatial learner. Most dyslexics are visual/spatial learners.

[Jeff]

Oh, and forgot this:

4. I don't know how "end of 3rd grade" reading levels are set, but I would think that they should measure what a normally progressing student should be able to do. As such, it should be possible for most students to meet this level given appropriate instruction. This doesn't have to be a "Lake Woebegone problem."

[Jeff]

Several things:

1. Some children have the good fortune to be "wired" to read. For these children, I'm not aware of research that shows that decoding-based instruction is ineffective, but more whole language approaches may also work just fine. For children who struggle, including those with dyslexia, decoding-based (phonics) approaches are found to be substantially more effective than whole language. I find the assertion at the beginning of the piece (and the phrase "dyslexic thinkers") to be curious: "While phonic approaches work well for many learners, they tend to be ineffective for dyslexic thinkers."

2. It's important to separate Reading First outcomes from improprieties. Regarding the latter, that's to the extent that there were any--I'm not qualified to say. I suspect, however, that there's a fair amount of partisanship with regard to this topic, and I say this from the left side of the aisle.

3. With respect to the Reading First Impact Study, my understanding that there are some valid concerns not just with Reading First, but with the Impact Study itself. While Reid Lyon clearly comes at this question with a stake in the game, that does not mean that his thoughts should be discarded. Here are two articles worth examining.

http://ednews.org/articles/27246/1/Response-by-Reid-Lyon-to-Use-of-phonics-overrated-as-way-to-learn-to-read/Page1.html

http://ednews.org/articles/25335/1/Interview-with-Reid-Lyon-Reading-First-is-the-largest-concerted-reading-intervention-program-in-the-history-of-the-civilized-world/Page1.html