"Least influential of education's most influential information sources."
-- Education Week Research Center
"full of very lively short items and is always on top of the news...He gets extra points for skewering my high school rating system"
-- Jay Mathews, The Washington Post
"a daily dose of information from the education policy world, blended with a shot of attitude and a dash of humor"
-- Education Week
"unexpectedly entertaining"..."tackle[s] a potentially mindfogging subject with cutting clarity... they're reading those mushy, brain-numbing education stories so you don't have to!"
-- Mickey Kaus
"a very smart blog... this is the site to read"
-- Ryan Lizza
"everyone who's anyone reads Eduwonk"
-- Richard Colvin
"designed to cut through the fog and direct specialists and non-specialists alike to the center of the liveliest and most politically relevant debates on the future of our schools"
-- The New Dem Daily
"peppered with smart and witty comments on the education news of the day"
-- Education Gadfly
"don't hate Eduwonk cuz it's so good"
-- Alexander Russo, This Week In Education
"the morning's first stop for education bomb-throwers everywhere"
-- Mike Antonucci, Intercepts
"…the big dog on the ed policy blog-ck…"
-- Michele McLaughlin
"I check Eduwonk several times a day, especially since I cut back on caffeine"
-- Joe Williams
"...one of the few bloggers who isn't completely nuts"
-- Mike Petrilli, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
"I have just three 'go to' websites: The Texas Legislature, Texas Longhorn sports, and Eduwonk"
-- Sandy Kress
"penetrating analysis in a lively style on a wide range of issues"
-- Walt Gardner
"Fabulous"
-- Education Week's Alyson Klein
"thugs"
-- Susan Ohanian
Smart List: 60 People Shaping the Future of K-12 Education
Two things stand out about the MDRC report on Reading First: We still don’t know how well, if at all, Reading First really worked. And, even schools that implemented the “scientifically-based” reading practices may not have shown many gains.
To me, this points to a serious potential for error in our understanding of the science of reading.
I have watched young children learn (and not learn) to read in hundreds of classrooms all across the country. When teachers spend a lot of time (as suggested by Reading First) on decontextualized phonics and phonemic awareness activities, students tend to make slow and painful progress, if they progress at all.
However, when teachers concentrate on differentiation by teaching kids how to choose their own “just right” books, individual conferencing, and modeling of explicit comprehension strategies, kids really seem to take off. Furthermore, though our government tells us that fluency is vitally important (and it is) no one seems to have any lessons on how to teach it. (Other than the DIBELS “read it faster” approach, I’ve never seen a teacher give any explicit instruction in fluency to a class of children.) To correct this, our company developed such a set of instructional methods for fluency and expression and reading rate — all of which seem to work well for students at all grade and ability levels.
My problem with Reading First has always been two-fold: It never seemed to be worth the money we were spending and it didn’t identify the most effective approaches to teaching reading. I wish the MDRC brief, and other writings on Reading First, would address these issues directly — especially the issue of scientific research on reading. I believe we have made a serious mistake over the last decade in identifying areas of reading practice that are not the most effective. If Reading First has proven nothing else, I believe it has proven this.
Yet another perspective…
Perhaps the reason Reading First was not all that successful was because the government was not specific enough as to which actual teaching practices might yield the best results. The government advocated instruction in five areas but did not specify what that instruction should look like specifically.
In our company, we have developed specific practices for early readers that have made a huge difference in how quickly they learn to read. These practices include:
1. Teaching letters by sound rather than by name to improve the rate at which kids learn the Alphabetic Principle.
2. Teaching letters in small groups and making words out of them so that letters are not learned in isolation.
3. Teaching common spelling patterns.
4. Using writing, from day one, as the best possible phonemic awareness activity (along with a spelling correction procedure that keeps children from learning incorrect or invented spellings).
5. An explicit strategy for sounding out words (we use a little poem).
Etc.
This repertoire of specific practices makes a dramatic difference to teachers who use them. Along with a larger set of comprehension strategies, (again, modeled and explicitly taught), we see great gains in young readers.
The problem with most government policy (federal or state) is that it leaves implementation to people who, by definition, have not been successful implementers. This leads to bad choices about specific practices — or to no practices at all.
Too many teachers think they can have success by merely following a textbook or program. The government supports this notion by providing funding for the purchase of these materials. But programmed instruction simply has not been shown to be successful. And yet, there are simple practices readily available to teachers (free, in the case of practices that come from our company) that would make a significantly greater difference in student achievement.