The Learning People

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

 

Don't Tell Us to Concentrate!

Harnessing the power of dyslexic creativity and intention

   

by Richard Whitehead, The Learning People Director

   

There is a dirty word in the field of education which masks as a virtue.

   

The word is “concentrate!”

   

The assumption is, if a learner is failing, they just need to try harder. Yet generally speaking, nothing could be further from the truth.

   

I once delivered a workshop to a group of 34 teachers. To illustrate the damaging effect of concentration on learning, I invited the whole group to use maximum concentration to levitate their drinking glass off the table in front of them by sheer power of thought.

   

The concentration was so thick, you could have cut it with a knife. While the exercise was going on, I took off my jacket in full view of the whole group, turned it inside out and put it on again, lining side out.

   

I then told everyone to end the exercise and relax. Immediate mirth followed. Only 3 out of 34 participants had noticed what I had done to my jacket during the concentration exercise. The rest only noticed when they relaxed.

   

Concentration is the application of excessive mental effort to a learning process. It is as if we are mining our minds, narrowing our attention down to a small point, to the exclusion of everything else. When concentrating, we become stupid, overlooking obvious connections between things, and finding we cannot access our creativity when we need it.

   

Dyslexic thinkers are creative, imaginative thinkers who learn by exploring and by doing. Once out of school, they often excel in areas of life requiring lateral, visual-spatial ability such as architecture, engineering, practical professions and entrepreneurism.

   

Dyslexic learners are often told to “concentrate” because of their lack of success in reading and writing. When reading, they will sometimes stumble on seemingly easy little words such as “if”, “was”, “the” and “to” because their abstract nature doesn’t engage the dyslexic imagination.

   

Concentration often results in a dyslexic reader who by straining and tensing up can get to the end of a sentence. It frequently results in a dyslexic reader who will not have understood the sentence they have just read, necessitating multiple re-reads. And it rarely results in a dyslexic reader who derives pleasure from books and picks them up voluntarily.

   

Dyslexic thinkers need their imagination and creativity engaged in order to learn. Yet imagination and creativity are precisely what is shut down when we ask a person to concentrate.

   

In a culture of concentration, some very damaging principles apply:

• It is important you get everything right, or else I will be displeased;
• It is more important to do as I say than to understand why you are doing it;
• Learning is about hard work, not about having fun.

The effect of such a culture on a young dyslexic learner can be devastating. At worst, it can turn an imaginative young mind into a “learning automaton”, fulfilling one task after another with huge expenditure of effort, robbed of the ability to stop and think: Why am I doing this? What is its value to me? In fact, what do I want from a learning experience?

   

Concentration weakens intention. Many of us emerge into adulthood knowing how to work hard, without knowing what we really, truly want. Some of us get stuck in dead-end jobs, with little time to enjoy our families, look after our health, keep our figures or pursue hobbies.

   

As a dyslexia practitioner, I find that the hardest students to work with are those who have learnt to concentrate. It is as if their natural imagination, intelligence and intention have been shut down. Unless and until these crucial dyslexic learning tools have been rekindled, real learning will not take place.

   

So here are my “dyslexic principles” of real learning. Though particularly powerful for the dyslexic thinker, they are of value to all of us:

• Mistakes are an essential part of real learning. Make as wide a variety of mistakes as possible, never repeating the same one twice but always looking for opportunities to make new ones.
• Real learning is always an exploration. If you don’t know why something is true, it is of no value to you.
• Learning is your personal path to mastering the tools to get what you want from life. You have the right to find it exciting – always.

School is usually the place where dyslexic problems start.

Many bright, potentially dyslexic, toddlers, using their dyslexic thinking style to relate to the world around them, have ideas, language and opinions beyond their years.

Parents relax in the belief that everything is going to be plain sailing for these little ones. They are often eager to have them start school, believing that they are so ready; that they are wasting precious time at home when they could be making headway in the field of education.

For many, the child who comes home from school is almost a changeling: not making the progress expected, lagging behind in terms of reading and writing and, perhaps, arithmetic, possibly acting up in class: the ‘naughty’ one who disrupts the others, the class clown, frequently unhappy, disinterested or angry, changeable in mood.

Parental hopes and expectations are dashed; anxiety sets in.

The Learning People understands why this seemingly bright toddler is failing so much as a schoolchild. When you understand How Dyslexia Happens you can see why it is that all the phonic instruction in the world is unlikely to turn a dyslexic child into a fluent reader, who understands the text.

The aim of The Learning People is to give these children conscious control of the talent at the root of their thinking style; so that they need no longer be handicapped by the bias of the academic curriculum to tend to teach exclusively to the strengths of the left-brain thinker.

If you have anything more to say or any questions, comment on this post by clicking the "Comments" button below.