Reading Comprehension: How Well Do Kids Understand What They Read?*

Teaching kids to read and write are two of the highest priorities of our schools. Since September of 2023, Nova Scotia has begun to tackle early literacy with the rollout of a structured literacy strategy based upon a framework known as the “Six Pillars of Effective Reading Instruction.” Sounding out words, we know from the science of reading, is essential to cracking the code and beginning to read.

Knowing something about a topic takes you to the next level.  Truly discovering the world of dinosaurs is enhanced by knowing about pre-historic times; grasping the meaning of fables requires some appreciation for the magic of myth and legend; and encountering a nursery rhyme may eventually help in appreciating a sonnet.

This fundamental truth was driven home in one of the best-selling books of 2019, The Knowledge Gap, written by American education journalist Natale Wexler. In it, the Washington DC-based writer claimed that the so-called “skills gap” in North American education was actually driven by, as the title states, a gap in knowledge.

Distilling it down to a simple axiom, “the more kids know, the better they read.” That’s the core message that Wexler will bring to Saint Mary’s University on November 4 in her keynote address to the upcoming Cross-Canada researchED “Closing the Learning Gap” conference. While there, she may be challenged by a few of the other baker’s dozen of presenters who remain to be convinced that “knowing stuff” is as central to teaching reading in our schools.

Elementary schools tend to send-off a positive vibe and Wexler raised a few hackles by identifying mostly unrecognized deficiencies in prevailing curriculum and teaching practices. Since elementary school instruction focused on teaching ‘reading strategies’ in ‘learning blocks’ rather than ‘reading to learn,’ she pointed out that knowing the background, or prior knowledge, was absolutely critical to comprehension and a matter of social justice, opening new doors to disadvantaged students.

Following-up in widely read articles for The Atlantic and Forbes magazine and more recently on her “Knowledge Matters” podcasts, Wexler brought her personal journey into the science of reading to a wider audience.  “Kids actually love to learn stuff. They love to feel like they’re experts. It does wonders for their self-esteem,” she says. “Once teachers try it and can see what can happen…they’re going to say ‘I’m never going back to what I was doing before.”

Here in Halifax Wexler’s keynote address will seek to connect the dots between reading comprehension and writing. Instead of doubling down on student assessment prep and practicing skills like “finding the main idea,” she will demonstrate that students often learn to read through exposure to sometimes unfamiliar texts in social studies and science classes.  The more successful schools, she notes in her pre-talk description, are “taking deeper dives into topics and calling upon students to write about their discoveries with promising results”

Nova Scotia’s curriculum lead for Six Pillars implementation Andrew Francis, who led a recent literacy transformation at New Glasgow Academy, is another key presenter.  Dr. Francis will be modelling a school-based approach to teaching foundational word reading skills. He plans to share lessons learned in leadership and in collaboration with teachers in revamping approaches to literacy instruction and assessment.

Reaching all students can be a formidable challenge in elementary classes, and particularly those from African-Nova Scotian communities. “Culturally-relevant pedagogy” (CRP) and engaging learning materials that resonate with Black children may provide a key to advancing early literacy in many schools.  St. Francis Xavier University education professor Dr Wendy Mackey’s presentation will demonstrate why “CRP” lessons cannot be purchased off-the-shelf and simply delivered to students.

Leading expert on teaching early reading, Jamie Metsala, Learning Disabilities Chair at Mount Saint Vincent University, can be expected to respond to Wexler’s message, offering a slightly different twist on improving reading comprehension. “Vocabulary and knowledge are important for understanding texts and for academic achievement,” Metsala says, and the two do belong together.  That’s confirmed in a recent study in Reading and Writing (December 2022) demonstrating that building “vocabulary knowledge” was critical, especially in supporting adolescent students struggling with low levels of achievement.

Dr. Metsala plans to share her latest research on what works in the classroom. Teaching Grade 1 and 2 students with “researcher-developed English Language Arts (ELA)-science units” provides a promising way of serving students with lower initial vocabulary-knowledge and for students learning English as an additional language. The teaching units themselves and teachers’ experiences will be presented as will the complexities and challenges of teaching elementary language arts.

Out west, in Vancouver, Dr. Kathryn Garforth anchors the Cross-Canada researchED program with a keynote address on “The Importance of Applying Research to Practice in Literacy Instruction.” Based upon her own Ph.D. research and best practice in aligning structured literacy into classroom instruction. We will see why Dr Garforth is the leading champion of the Right to Read Initiative in British Columbia.

So, what’s the answer to the fundamental question posed in this commentary?  Embracing the science of reading is critical, but so is being attuned to the complexities of teaching in today’s elementary classrooms, and seeing the value of “culturally-relevant” strategies and materials in reaching all of our students. Hopefully this has piqued your curiosity and you may be encouraged to join us for Cross-Canada researchED (Nov 4, 2023) at Saint Mary’s University or Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School in North Vancouver. Classroom teachers, literacy tutors, researchers and interested parents are particularly welcome and to view the sessions later on our researchED Canada News YouTube channel.

*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The Chronicle Herald/ Saltwire News, Oct. 27, 2023.

What is the key to building comprehension once students have mastered the fundamentals?  How important is knowing something about a topic?  Should early reading programs be better integrated into a braoder reading-intensive program integrated into social studies and science?  Do we need a much-enhanced core knowledge curriculum which opens doors and sparks curiosity about new and unfamiliar topics?    

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A Cross-Canada researchED Primer: What does Natalie Wexler think of Current Literacy Reform Initiatives?

Early literacy teachers and reformers are already buzzing in and around our schools.  Renowned American education commentator Natalie Wexler will be in Halifax on November 4, 2023 as keynote speaker at the Cross-Canada researchED conference, “Closing the Learning Gap: Reading, Writing and Learning,” hosted by researchEd Canada and Saint Mary’s University’s Faculty of Education.

Early literacy programs are now improving in many Canadian elementary schools. The adoption of the “Six Pillars of Effective Reading Instruction” framework in Nova Scotia in 2022 was one such breakthrough. It builds nicely upon earlier initiatives in provinces such as Ontario and New Brunswick, and parallels that of a new venture in Prince Edward Island. Implementation is now underway, but a few hurdles remain and there may well be a missing piece – how best to improve reading comprehension among today’s early elementary school children.

Changing reading strategies is crucial to clear away the vestiges of the so-called ‘balanced literacy’ approach focused mostly on reading the clues and guessing at words. Once that is accomplished, a bigger challenge awaits – expanding the scope to recognize the fundamental role of knowledge-building in enhancing reading comprehension.

Addressing this critical but overlooked element is what American education writer Natalie Wexler flagged in her 2019 best-seller, The Knowledge Gap, and, ever since, in a steady stream of Forbes Magazine “Mind the Gap” commentaries and her more recent “Knowledge Matters” podcasts.

Interviewed recently, Wexler made it clear that she supports the ‘science of reading’ (SoR) and the general thrust of Nova Scotia’s “Six Pillars’ approach identifying a half-dozen key elements – oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension.

All of this, she points out, is in line with the 2000 National Reading Panel (NRP) formulation and responds to the February 2022 Ontario Human Rights Commission “Right to Read” public inquiry report and its key recommendations. Fixing reading strategies and removing ineffective legacy programs such as Reading Recovery are the essential first step.

Literacy reformers like Wexler are quick to identify what’s wrong with most current English Language Learning programs. Teaching reading strategies within a daily “literacy block” is not sufficient nor are writing programs that assume kids possess only everyday common knowledge.

One of Wexler’s favourite examples, popular in American classrooms, is teaching kids in Kindergarten and Grade 1 to “write an opinion.” “Which is better – Skittles or M&Ms?” is typical of that approach. None of the easily accessible and widely used online exemplars require any prior knowledge whatsoever or attempt to expand the intellectual horizons of kids.

While Wexler is spot on with her critique, some of her recent commentaries have ruffled the feathers of early reading specialists. It’s largely because of her unsettling questions:  What’s the best way to teach children to comprehend what they read?  Does ‘reading comprehension strategy,’ delivered in ELA “reading blocks,” improve reading?  And, more pointedly, would it be greatly enhanced by embracing a broader approach?  Would, for example, greater gains be achieved through a knowledge-building curriculum infused throughout social studies as well as language classes?

Wexler’s widely-read commentaries unsettle everyone, including leading advocates of advancing structured literacy through improved reading strategies. One particular December 2022 piece, “Is It Time to Topple the ‘Five Pillars’ of Literacy?” provoked quite a backlash on social media.

Merely raising such concerns, SoR experts feared, might actually set back the whole cause. Critics of the latest evidence-based research, they claimed, might seize upon her articles in their efforts to reverse the hard-won progress.

Wexler’s critique stirred controversy by claiming that the ‘literacy pillars’ framework, now being introduced in Nova Scotia, while an improvement, may actually have unintended consequences.  The final pillar, “comprehension,” might encourage teachers to simply continue with existing “reading comprehension strategies.” Far more was involved, she pointed out, in enabling students to truly understand what they were reading, particularly from grade 3 upwards in elementary schools.

Her book and commentaries make it abundantly clear that she is no fan of current and proposed approaches to improve reading comprehension. “For decades, schools have attempted to “teach’ comprehension by “reducing it to practicing skills and strategies.” “Finding the main idea” and “making inferences,” two standbys, using random texts, she claims, do not significantly raise comprehension.

Far better, in Wexler’s view, is an approach featuring more advanced reading texts and “read alouds” to introduce more challenging words in broader, global and more sophisticated literary contexts. Much of that exposure, she points out, happens in classes beyond English and the Language Arts.

Wexler makes a very compelling case for broadening the focus and embracing knowledge-building curriculum. “Spending hours every week teaching comprehension skills and strategies, year after year,” she recently wrote, has not significantly improved reading levels. It may also be counterproductive if it eats into history and social studies time where, evidence shows, student do learn to read unfamiliar words and write about human experiences radically different than their own.

Nova Scotia’s new early reading reform is long-overdue, but Wexler is raising legitimate questions that need to be addressed over the long haul. Closing the ‘knowledge gap’ looks to be a significant missing piece in the current learn-to-read plan.

That’s just a preview of the core message Natalie Wexler is expected to give in her November 4 Cross-Canada researchED talk live and in-person at Saint Mary’s University. Join us in-person or online outside the Maritimes for what’s shaping up to be a key education research and reform event on the 2023-24 education calendar.

The key question: Is something missing in the current ‘instructional strategies’ reforms?  Can the focus be expanded to encompass a ‘knowledge-building curriculum’ to further enhance reading comprehension?

 

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Educational Malpractice: Will ‘Reading Failure’ Cases be Settled in the Courts?

The Right to Read movement achieved a real breakthrough in late February 2022 when the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Public Inquiry recognized the “right to read” and declared that the Ontario school system was failing in its responsibility to teach children to read. That report raised, once again, a fundamental question – if schools are failing to teach children the basic skills, does this strengthen the case for taking legal action on the grounds of educational malpractice?

Medical lawsuits have long been successfully litigated against medical and legal institutions and those professions, but few cases have been launched in the education sector.  In the case of education, malpractice has been defined as “an intentional or negligent act, which constitutes a breach of duty to properly educate or place a student, and which results in injury (physical or non-physical) to the student.” Successful cases have been brought before the courts for physical harms, but few, if any for, intellectual (non-physical) harms.

Although society places considerable value on educating the young, a review of North American education law provides an eye-opening discovery. There are relatively few reported cases of law suits being filed in the United States in consequence of receiving an inadequate education, and, up until 1989, no cases in all of Canada. Indeed, the number of law review articles far exceeded the number of cases. (Thornicroft 1989).

For a brief period from the 1970s to the early 1980s, in the United States, educational malpractice was publicly debated and litigated in the courts. While doctors, for example, had faced the spectre of tort liability for medical malpractice since the mid-1800s, the same negligence principle had never been applied to educators and educational bodies. The catalyst was a benchmark case, Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1975-76), involving an 18-year-old high school graduate who completed 12 years of school and was awarded passing grades while reading at the grade five level and unable to write.

The American movement drew its inspiration from widespread calls for public accountability in education in the early 1970s.  A pivotal event was the appearance of Charles Silberman’s stinging 1970 bestseller, Crisis in the Classroom, funded by the Carnegie Foundation.  For three and a half years, the New York Times commented, Silberman “sailed up the shallow creek of American education…surveyed the landscape, and pronounced it joyless, mindless, barren.”

Mounting concerns about the decline in American education contributed to a flurry of interest in malpractice issues. National test score averages, obtained from students who were exiting the nation’s secondary schools, were falling at a dramatic rate. The movement was fueled by popular critiques, such as Don Stewart’s 1971 book, Educational Malpractices, The Big Gamble in our Schools, which identified ten questionable practices and policies.

The highly-respected editor of Kappan, Stanley M. Elan, weighed in in March of 1974. He rang the alarm bell over declines in the average score of high school seniors who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test fell in 1973, to its lowest point ever. It had been continuous for 10 years (1963 to 1973), dropping from 478 to 443 in verbal competency, and from 502 to 481 in mathematical competency.

If there was a spark it was Gary Saretsky and James Mechlenburger’s 1972 article in the Saturday Review with a deliberately provocative title, See You in Court? It took seriously the whole notion that public school students might well be able to stake a claim against their school for failing to teach them basic skills.

Shortly thereafter, the first such “education malpractice” lawsuit, Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976) was filed in California Superior Court in 1975, and a similar case, Donohue v. Copiague Union Free School District was litigated in New York from 1977 to 1978.

Education reformers and education lawyers buzzed with excitement about the emergence of a new field for litigation. What had them excited was the prospect that schools might be held accountable to individual students and their parents for negligent instructional practices that resulted in deficient educational attainment. The attorney representing Peter claimed that the educational systems had “failed to provide the Peter [W.’s] of this country the kind of education to which they’re entitled.”

The hopes of American school reformers were dashed. California courts quickly rejected the contention that public schools could be held liable in tort law for educational malpractice, and New York courts soon followed in line.  Additional lawsuits were filed in other state courts in the ensuing years, but uniformly—with the exception of a unique Montana special education case (B.M. v. State of Montana 1982) — those suits met the same end.

The court decision in Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976) set a significant precedent. The court concluded that the school district owed Peter W. no duty of care based on its weighing of various public policy considerations. It also established four benchmarks:

• Conflicting Pedagogical Theory – given the lack of consensus over a single proper way to educate a child, how could a court know whether a teacher had been negligent in his approach to educating a child in any particular instance?
• Establishing Proximate Causation –the achievement of literacy in the schools, or its failure, are influenced by a host of factors which affect the pupil subjectively, from outside the formal teaching process, and beyond the control of policy-makers and school officials. They may be physical, neurological, emotional, cultural, environmental; they may be present but not perceived, recognized but not identified.
• No Reasonable Evidence of Injury – inability to establish a duty of care because there was “no reasonable ‘degree of certainty that the plaintiff suffered injury.” Ability to read or write or acquire “basic academic skills” are nor recognized under law.
• Risk of Crushing Liability – opens the doors to a flood of cases alleging educational negligence. Exposing public schools to the tort claims—real or imagined—of disaffected students and parents in countless numbers” would, in turn, “burden [schools]—and society—beyond calculation.”

Education law in California and elsewhere did not, the U.S. courts ruled, establish or commit to any particular standard for public educational service. Those statutes were not “designed to protect against the risk” of the particular injury (including inability to read and write).  In the court’s eyes, the educational laws were not even designed as “safeguards against ‘injury’ of any kind,” and were instead merely “provisions directed to the attainment of optimum educational results.”

“Substantial educational authority” or broad “what the research says” claims provided the predictable backstop for the courts. “The achievement of literacy in the schools, or its failure,” a Virginia Law Review article neatly summarized, “are influenced by a host of factors which affect the pupil subjectively, from outside the formal teaching process, and beyond the control of its ministers. They may be physical, neurological, emotional, cultural, environmental; they may be present but not perceived, recognized but not identified. A child’s academic achievement was so dependent upon a multitude of factors that it would be “unwise to impose a duty of care on the schools.”

Today something is terribly wrong in reading instruction and the current rate of reading failure is raising fresh alarms. American investigative journalist Emily Hanford’s revelations in her Sold A Story podcast series demonstrate how flawed ‘balanced literacy’ methods have failed children and rendered millions of kids poor readers. The earth-shaking 2022 Ontario Right to Read report only adds to the accumulating evidence. It all amounts to what Thomas B Fordham Institute policy analyst Dale Chu has tagged as “the scourge of education malpractice” in our schools.

Do the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read Inquiry findings provide fodder for potential claims of educational malpractice?  Has the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms changed the Canadian legal landscape? Does the “substantive educational authority” opinion reflect the evidence generated by standardized student assessments or the latest research on the science of reading?  Do the common law legal precedents need to be challenged, in the light of the OHRC’s findings and ruling that children have a “right to read’? 

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Reading Failure and Learning Disabilities: What Did It Take to Overcome ‘Handy-Dandy Cop-Outs’?

The earth shook and moved under the Canadian school system in late February 2022 when the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) issued its landmark public inquiry report into the state of early reading in Ontario. It connected the dots and examined, at long last, the fundamental human rights issues that affect students with reading disabilities in the public education system of Ontario and far beyond.

The Right to Read public inquiry, which focused on early reading skills, found that Canada’s reputed ‘world class’ system was “systematically failing students with reading disabilities (such as dyslexia) and many others, by not using evidence-based approaches to teach them to read.”  That declaratory statement, believe it or not, echoes the claim made in a seminal April 1976 research report by the late Dr. Barbara D. Bateman (1934-2022) entitled “Teaching Reading to Learning Disabled Children: A Fourth Approach.”

“Learning disabled children,” Bateman claimed, “have certain characteristics which require very precise and careful teaching of coding if they are to achieve mastery of initial reading skills.”  Long before other researchers, she surveyed the “phenomenal growth” in the field of special education and was troubled by the imprecise definition of what constituted “learning disabilities.” Challenging the traditionalist view of reading and learning disabilities, Bateman claimed that the overriding assumption that “students who read poorly must themselves be deficient” needed to be re-examined and the possibility that “reading instruction was inadequate” given serious consideration.

Her meticulous review of the research concluded with a broad and powerful policy statement: “All our children need accountable schools committed to teaching them to read even if that commitment requires, as it does, the relinquishment of handy-dandy cop-outs and the acceptance of demonstrably effective reading programs and teaching techniques.”

Going back six decades and delving into the life’s work of Barbara Bateman, North America’s undisputed learning disabilities research pioneer, a critical question arises – what took so long? For sixty years, the tireless, tenacious and unstoppable force in Literacy and Special Education research based at the University of Oregon (Eugene) blazed the trail in two related fields – education and law.

While Dr. Bateman lived to see the Ontario Right to Read report appear, she died in her late eighties a few weeks later in April 2022.  A mere  ten years ago, Bateman won the 2013 Council for Exceptional Children’s Lifetime Achievement Award, but she passed away, very quietly, with little recognition except for an obituary in the local Eugene, Oregon newspaper, and a brief tribute by her former student John Willis Lloyd posted on his blog, Special Education Today.

What’s even more shocking is the discovery that her home state resisted her evidence-informed research advocacy on literacy to the end.  In late March 2023, Governor Tina Kotek was still pushing for a state proposal to spend upwards of $100 million in support of an “Early Literacy Success” bill to improve reading instruction. It embraced the “science of reading” pioneered, dacades ago, by Bateman and now following what the research says instead of perpetuating the still dominant ‘balanced literacy’ approach.

The Oregon literacy picture is a familiar one.  In the spring of 2022, only 39% of Oregon’s third-graders could read proficiently, including just 21% of Latino and Black students, on the most recent statewide test results. “We are going to make sure that the science of reading, the research, guides what districts do,” Kotek told The Oregonian.  We are expecting movement by districts in the upcoming school year.” When it comes to literacy reform, old habits die hard even when the School of Education research is piled up and gathering dust in local university libraries.

How quickly educators and the public forget. Bateman presented the first paper on learning disabilities in 1962, at the 40th Annual Council of Exceptional Children Convention. Her paper sparked an outpouring of research on learning disabilities and instructional methods, and resulted in the extension of special education services to millions of American and Canadian children.

Her ground-breaking 1962 article, co-authored with Samuel Kirk, “Diagnosis and Remediation of Learning Disabilities” appeared in Exceptional Children magazine. Fifty years later, it was recognized as one of the top 10 classic articles in the field of special education and continued to be referenced in literature reviews.

Bateman was well ahead of her time. As early as 1977, she began stressing the importance of identifying specific learning needs, designing appropriate instruction, and evaluating the effectiveness of instruction, rather than accepting student limitations and using discrepancy formulas. After completing a law degree in 1976, she began to confront the toughest legal issues emerging in her field, including the culpability of school authorities for high reading failure rates and the proliferation of “Empty IEPs.”

Serious research and teaching students about the fledgling ‘science of learning were essential components of Bateman’s teaching repertoire. She required students to use research and the law to inform practice during her tenure as an active UO professor from 1966 to 1994.

After a stellar School of Education research career, Bateman then become one of the top U.S. experts in special education law, working with school districts, training teachers and hearing officers, advising families and serving as a consultant to attorneys. With a JD and affiliated with the Oregon School of Law, she served as a consultant to attorneys and/or as an expert witness in more than 50 special education cases across the United States, as well as a hearing officer in Oregon’s first IDEA hearings. In her later years, she produced four memorable books, most notably Why Johnny Doesn’t Behave (2003), Elements of Successful Teaching (2004), and Better IEPs (2007).

Working alongside the father of “Direct Instruction” Siegfried (Zig) Englemann at the University of Oregon, Dr. Bateman gave the small but mighty School of Education a one-two-punch.  “Her melding of diagnosis and instruction with law not only captures the arc of her career, but also explains her extraordinary contributions to the field of learning disabilities,” said Douglas Carnine, a fellow UO professor.

No one worked harder or longer in the struggle to nudge school systems in the direction of the ‘science of reading’ and slay the dragon of ineffective instructional practice. Paying tribute to Dr Bateman a decade ago, her protégé Dr. John W. Lloyd said it best. She was simply “an outstanding figure in special education” and a scholar with command of the sweep of our discipline.” She stood for something important: command of the research and “a capacity to inspire disciplined analysis, passionate defense of principles and clear communication.”

Today’s Right to Read initiatives, inspired by Emily Hanford’s powerful Sold A Story podcasts and the Ontario HRC report did not emerge out of nowhere. Advocates of SoR walk on the shoulders of largely forgotten giants. One of them was Dr. Barbara Bateman, the true pioneer in the field with bruises and scars to show for her decades of tireless and, in many ways, thankless advocacy.

What paved the way for the ascendancy of the “Science of Reading” (SoR) movement in North American education?  How much did Dr. Barbara Bateman contribute to exploding the myths associated with children labelled “learning disabled” in schools?  Why was Bateman brushed aside and written-out of the narrative?  Is it time to recognize her seminal role in connecting the dots?

 

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Learning Erosion, the Pandemic and the Long-Term Trajectory: How Representative is the Downward Spiral in Nova Scotia?

The worst kept educational secret is leaking out: most Canadian K-12 students in all provinces suffered setbacks during the Pandemic.  The latest province to report on the decline in student test scores is Nova Scotia, a middling Canadian province widely considered a bell weather for national trends. Right on forecast, that province’s students performed dismally on the latest 2021-22 battery of results.  Alarming student test score numbers in reading, writing and mathematics generated considerable media attention, but it remains to be seen whether they will light a fire under the gatekeepers of the provincial schoolhouse.

One in three Grade 3 students (32 per cent) cannot read with comprehension, and half of those students cannot write properly. It doesn’t get better by Grade 6 in reading or mathematics.  Two out of five in Grade 10 fail to meet acceptable standards in mathematics. This is not new at all, just worse because of school shutdowns, periodic interruptions, and absenteeism.

Signs of flagging student progress are everywhere in that province’s classrooms. Students are still guessing at words while reading in the early grades. Most elementary kids are rarely asked to write more than a sentence or two. Left on their own to master mathematics, students’ skills have eroded to an alarming degree. Getting kids to turn off their cellphones saps a lot of energy.

Confronting the hard data on the downward spiral, Education Minister Becky Druhan and the Department were quick to blame the pandemic.  Abysmal post-COVID student test scores were posted, the pandemic was offered up as the explanation, and –two days later — a reactive plan materialized out of thin air.

The “education crisis” escape plan was thrown-together in reaction mode. Provincial education officials must have been banking on no one bothering to look any deeper, track student data trends, or question why the department is still entrusted with evaluating its own effectiveness in teaching, learning and curriculum

Reading and writing skills have actually been in steady decline for a decade or more. Some 68 per cent of Grade 3 students in 2021-22 met minimum standards in Reading, down 8 points from 76 per cent in 2012-13. Student writing standards in Grade 3 have deteriorated significantly in all aspects of writing proficiency (Ideas – from 88% to 50%; Organization -from 80% to 38%; Language Use – from 83% to 43%; and Conventions – from 71% to 32%). Two out of three Grade 3s are familiar with Snapchat but exhibit little proficiency in  grammar or spelling and most can barely write a complete sentence.

Student proficiency by Grade 6 is critical because, as the recent October 2022 World Bank report on Pandemic Global Learning Loss claimed, students unable to read by 10 years-of-age are considered to be living in “learning poverty.” Until recently, that problem seemed far removed from the lives of Nova Scotian and Canadian children.

Six out of 10 kids in the world’s low-income and middle-income countries are now classified as “learning poor” putting their future in jeopardy and their lives at risk. In Canada, the World Bank estimates that from 4.3 to 8.3 per cent of 10 year olds in Canada qualify as “learning poor.” It’s much higher in Nova Scotia, where 29 per cent of our 10-year-olds (in Grade 6) lack basic proficiency in reading.

Math standards tend to fly below the radar in Nova Scotia, and the Education Department is culpable. Thirty per cent of Grade 3s lack proficiency in math skills, but it’s impossible to track past trends.  Shifting the tests from Grade 3 to Grade 4 and back again since 2011-12 deprived us of comparable data. It’s not as concealed in Grade 6 where student scores have dropped from 73 per cent (2012-13) to 64 per cent a year ago. One third of Grade 6s fall below provincial math standards.

Buried in the latest batch of published results are “disaggregated” student test results for two groups of students, those of African heritage and Indigenous ancestry.  That reflects the department’s recent focus on supporting students and improving results among those in racialized and marginalized communities.

While it’s been a major priority, the pandemic disruption has wiped out previous gains. Grade 3 Reading scores for African students held firm at 57 per cent meeting standards, some 12 per cent below the provincial average score. Writing remains a serious problem with fewer than half of the cohort of 695 students meeting expectations. A similar sized cohort of Mi’kmaw/Indigenous students in Grade 3 suffered similar setbacks during the pandemic.  In high school, African and Indigenous students at Grade 10 level performed far better in Reading than in Mathematics, where both cohorts of students have lost significant ground in comparison with their peers.

So far, Druhan and her Department have fumbled the ball during the pandemic disruption.  Cancelling school for 22 weeks between March 2020 and June 2021 put students and teachers in a much-weakened position. Since then, provincial authorities have been essentially asleep, waiting – it now appears – for hard evidence that students, at every grade level, are far behind in their progress and poorly prepared to progress to the next level.

Nowhere is the Education department’s ‘muddle-through’ mentality better exemplified than in in its slow-footed, ad hoc response to the deepening literacy crisis. After ignoring the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read report upon its release, Druhan and her officials finally – six months later– produced a “Six Pillars” framework for discussion in June of last school year. The document endorsing ‘structured literacy’ was issued, but implementation was voluntary and earmarked for a number of “pilot schools.”

Provincial literacy experts were taken-aback when the “Six Pillars” framework surfaced again, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous scores. Conventional reading and writing strategies, including “balanced or levelled literacy” and “Reading Recovery” remain in place, even though they were rejected months ago in Ontario and other provinces. The just-announced “new plan” for Grade 2 literacy is nothing of the sort. After keeping the “Six Pillars” under wraps, it’s just now being introduced to teachers, delaying implementation for another full year.

Establishing a Nova Scotia Student Progress Assessment agency is now mission-critical in Primary to Grade 12 education. Learning erosion has worsened since January 2018 when Dr. Avis Glaze recommended creating such an agency reporting to the public, not the department. Delaying the release of student test data, resisting evidence-based policy making, and denying the pandemic’s impact may be the last straw. The department should not be entrusted with evaluating the success of its own policies, curriculum and practices. It’s high time for more public accountability and action plans informed by the best evidence gathered through student assessment.

Why are education authorities blaming the “learning erosion” on the Pandemic disruption and treating it as an aberration? How representative is Nova Scotia, where literacy and mathematics skills have been in decline for a decade or more?  What is the point of establishing ‘learning outcomes’ without implementing changes which might enable teachers to come closer to meeting those student achievement benchmarks? Is the irregular and uneven response to the Ontario Right to Read inquiry findings symptomatic of broader concerns?

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Early Reading Instruction Reform: Why was New Brunswick Canada’s first province out-of-the gate?*

Speaking at the  researchED National Conference on Saturday September 3 in London, UK, New Brunswick’s Minister of Education Dominic Cardy provided the scoop on how it happened. A full-year before the April 2022 release of the Ontario Right to Read Inquiry report his province got the jump on Ontario and pioneered in the adoption of the Science of Reading (SoR) and the shift to “structured literacy.” His presentation, “Literacy in New Brunswick: successes and lessons learned,” filled-in the blanks.

What was truly remarkable about Minister Cardy’s researchED talk was how candid he was about the “literacy crisis” and what he famously described as “the biggest scandal in education over the past fifty years.” While the Minister refrained from repeating his controversial ‘biggest scandal’ declaration, he left no doubt that he continues to hold that view. Challenging the prevailing orthodoxy in the form of “balanced literacy,” he acknowledged raised hackles and was not without its risks. 

            After being appointed Education Minister four years ago, Cardy realized that early reading was a serious and largely unacknowledged problem in the system.  “We didn’t have politicians asking the right questions,” he said. “They left it to the experts and assumed that they knew best how to teach kids to read.” When questions were asked, he found most were posed in relation to what other provinces were doing, and most notably Ontario.

            Digging deeper, Cardy reported that a clearer pattern emerged.  Virtually everyone in the N.B. system was enthralled with “balanced literacy” even though one-third to one-half of all students were unable to read properly by the end of grade 3. School districts were totally dependent upon one particular program, Fountas & Pinnell, for not only resources but assessment tools. While the ‘science of reading’ was gaining ground and being employed in private tutoring centres, evidence-based practices had not penetrated the system. “None of the province’s faculties of education,” he said, “recognized the problem either.” 

            Cardy did not come to this realization himself.  Julia Smith, an early reading specialist based in Fredericton had a major influence upon his thinking.  She joined him in the researchED presentation and tackled some of the technical questions related to the specific reforms.

            “Some 56 per cent of New Brunswickers are at the lowest literacy level,” Cardy stated, and “it starts in the schools.”  “We have public schools,” he added, “that have outsourced the problem to parents.” What that means is that those who are well-off either move their kids to private, alternative schools or enroll their children in after-school tutoring programs. 

            Simply surrounding kids with books may work for some children, but Cardy insists that “most do not magically learn to read.”  Drawing upon his own experience as a flying instructor, he finds it preposterous to think this way. “Few would train pilots by letting them teach themselves,” he told the audience.

After convincing the education department to take the plunge, Cardy turned to winning over the cabinet. He made good use of a few vignettes snapped up from real-life classrooms to illustrate how elementary kids were guessing what words meant and unable to read by sounding-out the words or reading with much comprehension.  Learning that students were routinely guessing “pony” for “horse” did the trick.  

            Cardy’s early literacy reforms were piloted in a small number of elementary schools last year. The initial results, according to Smith, were impressive in terms of improved reading fluency and comprehension. “Literacy rates in the pilot schools went up by 90 per cent,” Cardy reported, and success bred success. “The teachers tried it, it worked, and – much to our amazement – began sharing it amongst themselves.”

            All of this may explain the Minister’s rather peculiar response to the September 2022 release of the latest 2021-22 provincial student assessment results. While the results showed a drop in some English literacy and francophone math success rates, nothing was reported on mathematics so numeracy remains a question mark.

“I’m not horribly disappointed,” he told CBC News, “given that we were expecting pretty steep drops because of the huge interruptions in learning we’ve seen over the last couple of years with months of school cancelled and being online and back and forth.” What he didn’t say was that all was not lost for the early literacy reforms were still awaiting fuller implementation.

            Minister Cardy is truly unique in provincial politics and passionate in his defense of democracy anywhere in the world. His personal campaign to tackle early literacy is really an extension of that fierce commitment.  Right at the outset of his London talk, Cardy provided an insight into what drives him in his recent quest to improve early literacy. “Those who cannot read are at a lifetime disadvantage,” he stated. They are also, he claimed, more susceptible to “social media manipulation’ which, in his estimation, “can be damaging to democracy.”

*Adapted from an earlier version published in the Telegraph-Journal, 23 September 2022.

How did the Maritime province of New Brunswick get the jump on implementing evidence-based early literacy reform? How important is political will in a province/state and determined leadership in the system?  Why were provincial faculties of education so resistant to the Science of Reading (SoR)?  What will it take to successfully implement and embed the changes?

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Right to Read: What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Early Reading?

Three weeks ago, the earth shook in Ontario and sent reverberations across the Canadian system of education. The Ontario Human Rights Commission ruled that children had “the right to read” and were being denied it in that province’s schools. Most “learning disabilities” labels were actually the result of reading failures, the latest OHRC inquiry found. And most tellingly, students from disadvantaged communities were the most likely to bear the brunt of ineffective reading instruction in elementary schools.

Thousands of Ontario parents with children struggling to read have now broken the silence. Over the past two years, they came forward, sometimes with their kids, to provide heart-wrenching personal testimonies about how current early reading programs have failed them. On February 28, 2022, that Commission, headed by Chief Commissioner Patricia DeGuire and backed by the latest evidence-based research, simply demolished prevailing methodologies and programs which left far too many kids unable to read to a level of functional literacy.

An estimated nine out of ten children are capable of learning to read when provided with the proper instruction. That factoid, generated by International Dyslexia Association (IDA Ontario) research, was confirmed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The fundamental problem is that one-third of our youngest students, the vast majority enrolled in so-called “balanced literacy” programs, simply cannot read with the fluency needed in today’s world.

Starting in October 2019, the Right to Read inquiry looked at a representative cross-section of eight English language school boards, including Peel District School Board and Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, and all 13 English-language faculties of education and Ministry of Education sanctioned curriculum. In addition to listening to a multitude of concerned parents, the inquiry tapped into the research expertise of leading learning disabilities researchers, including Linda Seigel of the University of British Columbia and Jamie Metsala of Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University.

While Chief Commissioner DeGuire refrained from pointing fingers, it was clear that current early reading methods were not working and the commission got a “mixed response” from education faculties regarding the findings. That’s no surprise because most faculties provide little if any preparation informed by the science of reading and model curricula based upon the ‘balanced literacy’ dogma peddled by the dominant learning resource providers.

When one-out-of-three students graduate without reaching provincial or international standards, someone, somewhere, has to assume responsibility for the outcomes. Vulnerable students – those from impoverished and marginalized communities – were already struggling before the two-year-long pandemic school disruptions. OHRC’s legal counsel Reema Kawaja said it best: “No child should go to school for 14 years and not learn to read.”

Current reading instruction methods are deeply entrenched and their defenders have succeeded, for three decades, in sinking periodic assaults on that hegemony. Generations of elementary teachers have stayed the course, rebranding ‘whole language,’ applying the reading recovery band-aid, and fuzzing up the whole question with ‘balanced literacy’ providing continued cover for those same methods.

This transition has been facilitated and enabled by Canada’s faculties of education where teachers are introduced to literacy programs and inculcated in provincially-sanctioned texts and learning materials, exemplified by Fountas & Pinnell, North America’s largest purveyor of ‘balanced literacy’ learning resources, teacher training, and classroom assessment tools.

New Brunswick Education Minister Dominic Cardy was one of the first off-the-mark in reacting to the Right To Read findings. With news of the earth-shaking February 28 Ontario report breaking, he took to Twitter with another impossible-to-ignore and quotable declaration heard across the K-12 education world.

“Our approach to reading instruction was a disgrace,” Cardy tweeted. “We gave teachers a job and didn’t give them the tools to do it. For me, this is the biggest education scandal of the last fifty years.” Just in case you thought Minister Cardy was simply blowing-off steam, he repeated his claim for Brunswick News in much greater detail.

Minister Cardy and his Department were one of the first to wade into the latest iteration of the ‘reading wars.”  “It’s crazy,” he told Brunswick News. “[There are] two camps. One is based upon reality, and one is not. And for a long time, we followed the one that is not based upon reality.”  Like the thousands of Ontario parents, Cardy challenges the prevailing theory that “if you surround [children] with lots of books, they will learn how to read.”

The Right to Read inquiry report may well tip the balance and, it should be noted, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce was quick to endorse the report and its 157 recommendations for change The most critical of those is Recommendation 30 which fully embraces systematic reading strategies, including phonics, and rejects the still popular ‘three-cue’ guess-the-word methodology.

What is astounding is that the OHRC actually spelled-out in detail the key requirements to successfully teach and support all students:

“ Curriculum and instruction that reflects the scientific research on the best approaches to teach word reading. This includes explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics, which teaches grapheme to phoneme (letter-sound) relationships and using these to decode and spell words, and word-reading accuracy and fluency. It is critical to adequately prepare and support teachers to deliver this instruction.

Early screening of all students using common, standardized evidence-based screening assessments twice a year from kindergarten to Grade 2, to identify students at risk for reading difficulties for immediate, early, tiered interventions.

Reading interventions that are early, evidence-based, fully implemented and closely monitored and available to ALL students who need them, and ongoing interventions for all readers with word reading difficulties.

Accommodations (and modifications to curriculum expectations) should not be used as a substitute for teaching students to read. Accommodations should always be provided along with evidence-based curriculum and reading interventions. When students need accommodations (for example, assistive technology), they should be timely, consistent, effective and supported in the classroom.

Professional [Psycho-educational] assessments, should be timely and based on clear, transparent, written criteria that focus on the student’s response to intervention. Criteria and requirements for professional assessments should account for the risk of bias for students who are culturally or linguistically diverse, racialized, who identify as First Nations, Métis or Inuit, or come from less economically privileged backgrounds. Professional assessments should never be required for interventions or accommodations.”

The OHRC inquiry report provides plenty of sound research and detailed policy guidance for Ontario, New Brunswick, and other provinces . By the end of next year, 2022-23, the New Brunswick version will be in place in Kindergarten to Grade 2.  It’s already being implemented in a few Ontario pilot schools, including those in the York Region Catholic Distract School Board, north of Toronto, and the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board was the first to commit to acting on the OHRC recommendations.

Tackling the problem will not be easy because prevailing ‘balanced literacy’ approaches are deeply entrenched in most faculties of education.  One of the first to cast a stone was Shelley Stagg Peterson, professor of literacy at OISE/University of Toronto, and , since then, Brock University professor Diane Collier, who represents a group of literacy researchers from nine different education faculties Ontario.

“Reading English is not phonetical; it is visual,” Stagg Peterson wrote in an Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor. “If a child has a good visual memory, he or she will be able to read anything they can understand by the end of grade one.”  Then came a couple of astounding statements: “Poor readers can have wonderful careers in many fields. Phonics is a useful tool in learning to read but it is not a method.”

Education faculty literacy professors have rallied in defense of the dominant pedagogy and mandated resources.  “There is no one-size-fits-all for reading,” Professor Collier told CBC News. “A highly systematized, step-by-step approach is not necessarily accessible for all students who have all kinds of needs, so it could further marginalize readers.” Their counter-strategy is clear – paint the Right To Read findings as an endorsement of “phonics” and attack it as advocating a “narrow” approach, sidestepping the findings and the ineffectiveness of current methods.

The Ontario Right To Read inquiry report put existing literacy programs on notice but their defenders, ensconced in the education faculties, are not about to yield or give ground when learning resource alliances and training contracts are at stake. Reading reformers now know that it’s going to be a long siege and will require vigilance throughout the implementation process.

Will the Right to Reading Inquiry tip the balance in the ongoing “Reading Wars”?   What’s entirely different about this latest phase in the struggle to introduce the Science of Reading into classroom practice? What role do giant learning resource publishers and consultants play in perpetuating the status quo in the form of ‘balanced literacy’?  Will provincial learning consultants and education professors recover and succeed in gaining control of curriculum reform implementation?

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Child Literacy Rates: Is Over-Reliance on Assistive Technology Handicapping Struggling Readers?

Rising children’s reading scores in Ontario may well be an illusion.  Early literacy rates as measured on Ontario standardized test have, we now know, been inflated by the use of Assistive Technology (AT).  That was the biggest revelation contained in a ground-breaking September 2021 report, Lifting the Curtain on EQAO Scores, produced by the Ontario branch of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA/Ontario).

“There are so many students struggling to read whose experiences are being hidden right now,” says Alicia Smith, president of IDA Ontario. “Our goal in producing this report is to bring attention to the depth of the real issues. These are being swept under the carpet.”

Ontario’s provincial student assessment agency, the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), has produced some problematic data. Between 2005 and 2019, the EQAO reported a steady increase in reading scores for students in grades 3 and 6.  On the Grade 3 test, the proportion of students meeting the provincial standard reportedly jumped from 59 to 74 per cent, a 15-point gain in the prime indicator of literacy.

What the EQAO did not publicly disclose was that increasing numbers of students were being provided with ‘accommodations’ such as AT when writing the test, which most likely inflated the numbers. Nearly one in five students (18 per cent) utilized AT to complete the EQAO assessment in 2019, up from 3 per cent back in 2005.

Assistive technology is now commonplace in Canadian schools, widely used to diagnose reading difficulties and to provide computer-assisted help with reading. During provincial tests, students with diagnosed reading difficulties are now routinely allowed to either listen to an audio version of the text and comprehension questions.  In many cases, they are accommodated by having adults, either a teacher or a volunteer, who is permitted to write down the student’s verbal response.

Gains in Ontario early reading scores shriveled up almost entirely when the use of assistive technology was factored into presenting the actual results. Whereas 56 per cent of students met the standard without the use of assistive technology in 2005, the figure was only marginally higher at 62 per cent in 2019.

Reported pass rates for the Grade 10 Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) have also been flagged as a cause for concern. While the EQAO reports that the percent of successful ‘first time eligible’ students has hovered between 80 and 82 per cent, the non-participation rate has more than doubled, rising from 8.4 per cent in 2005 to 19 per cent in 2019. Little is known about students who do not write the OSSLT, but Toronto District School Board data reveals that two-thirds (65 per cent) of students who do not participate in the OSSLT do not end up applying for post-secondary education.

When provided with appropriate early instruction, an estimated 95 per cent of all students are cognitively capable of learning to read. In, Ontario and every other Canadian province, the IDA and many reading experts see a large gap between childrens’ human potential and current reading outcomes.

Experienced literacy experts and tutors have seen it all over the years.  “It’s a complete joke,” says Jo-Anne Gross, founder of Toronto-based Remediation Plus. “Most of the kids diagnosed and coded don’t have learning disabilities. They just don’t know how to read.”  Gross applauds IDA Ontario for exposing the hidden problem. “The authenticity of the reading scores is sadly lacking,” she claims, “and the public has a right to full disclosure.”

Ontario parent David Logan, a Kingston father of a Grade 5 son struggling with reading, told CBC News in October 2021 that assistive technology was little help to his son in mastering reading skills and his local public school had no plan to help him progress beyond needing the device. He’s fairly typical of many concerned parents who have come forward to testify at hearings of the ongoing Ontario Right to Read inquiry into human rights issues affecting students with reading disabilities.

While assistive technology can be very useful in helping educators to diagnose particular reading skills deficits, it is problematic when utilized to ‘read’ to students and produce scripts on standardized literacy tests. There are some unintended consequences.  It’s not just the technology, notes University of Toronto clinical psychologist Todd Cunningham, it’s more about the “accommodations” made in completing the test.  He explains what actually happens: “When there are teachers in the room, it’s natural for them to help out struggling kids.“

The recent Ontario revelations inflated EQAO literacy scores do give us some indication of what to expect when the much-anticipated Right to Read public inquiry report finally lands in the spring of 2022.

Why are so many younger students still struggling with reading?  Is there any substitute for effective instruction in early reading?  Should school systems implement end of grade 1 phonics checks as a matter of policy? What is an appropriate role for the use of Assistive Technology? Should AT be used by students completing provincial assessments? If so, does the public have a right to know the extent of its use and literacy rates unassisted by such technology?

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Early Reading Correction: Why is ‘Balanced Literacy’ “on the way out” in New Brunswick?*

‘Balanced Literacy’ enjoys a charmed life in Canadian elementary education. A whole generation of elementary teachers have not only been taught reading with ‘balanced literacy’ approaches and resources, but employ those same methods in teaching our youngest children to read.  The Canadian province of New Brunswick is typical of most North American educational jurisdictions in its adherence to the dominant approach embedded in its provincially-sanctioned text materials and leveled reading books. 

A “literacy crisis” has finally exposed the source of the problem and New Brunswick education authorities are beginning to connect the dots.  Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs, now campaigning for re-election,  described the “literacy rate” as “an embarrassment that we cannot put-up with any longer.”   Literacy was identified as a priority in Education Minister Dominic Cardy’s October 2018 Green Paper on Education, but the plan of action stopped short of committing to remedial changes.

It took a Twitter spat to flush out the province’s actual plans. On August 5, Minister Cardy took great exception to rumors circulating that New Brunswick was sticking with its conventional provincial literacy strategy, based largely upon the Fountas & Pinnell Literacy program.  “@FountasPinnell is ideological gobbledygook,” he tweeted, and then added “We are moving away from it as quickly as possible.” 

Abandoning the Fountas & Pinnell literacy program would constitute a sea change in the 2017 provincial literacy strategy inherited from the Brian Gallant Liberal government.  It would also mean breaking away from the pack because Fountas & Pinnell’s model of Literacy Level Intervention (LLI) and resources are firmly entrenched in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and other provinces.

Early literacy expert Erin Schryer was stunned by Cardy’s Twitter revelation.  With a Ph.D. in Early Literacy from University of New Brunswick, Dr. Schryer has experienced, first hand, the unintended harvest of the existing strategy and curriculum. As Executive Director of Elementary Literacy Inc., from 2014 to 2018, she embraced “structured literacy” and offered two supplementary volunteer-based reading achievement programs aimed at rescuing struggling readers in the early grades.  

“The science of reading is not new,” Schryer says, “and more and more teachers are questioning standard practice and awakening to the need for dramatic change,” in the form of a more systematic, structured approach where ‘phonics’ is not a bad word.  “Not all can read by osmosis, “she adds, “so we are excluding a large segment of the student population.”

Trying to fix students experiencing reading failure proved frustrating.  “I left Elementary Literacy Inc.,” Schryer explains, “because we were not moving the needle. We couldn’t extend what the schools were doing, so it wasn’t really working.”  Instead of banging her head against the wall, she’s taking matters into her own hands, as CEO since July 2018 of Origins Early Learning Childcare and Academy, serving over 400 children and families in Quispamsis and Saint John.

Challenging the dominance of what Cardy described as “ideological gobbledygook” will not be easy and the Minister can expect subterranean resistance.  ‘Balanced literacy’ is a term appropriated by Fountas & Pinnell as a means of preserving whole word reading pedagogy now under intense attack from educators, like Schryer, armed with evidence based-research demonstrating more conclusively how children learn to read and favouring a more structured approach to teaching early reading. 

Fountas & Pinnell has cornered the early literacy market with a patented a system of reading levels developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell and published by Heinemann to support the use of their Levelled Literacy Interventions (LLI) series of student readers and teacher resource products.  It’s also closely aligned with Reading Recovery, a short-term, one-on-one Grade 1 literacy intervention, exemplifying a similar approach.

The program comes with a Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) that is often used as the primary measure of student reading progress.  Despite Fountas & Pinnell’s 2007 cautionary note about using the reading levels as an evaluative measure, employing it for that purpose is commonplace.  Co-founder of the American Right to Read Project Margaret Goldberg found administering BAS to be a time-consuming exercise and a “poorly-constructed assessment” on students for whom it was not designed, using material that limits student choice, and constrains their access to more advanced grade-level content.  

The most popular reading programs in Canada and the United States, including Fountas & Pinnell, are not backed by science. A year ago, the U.S.-based Education Week Research Centre identified the most widely used reading programs and then subjected each of them to closer scrutiny. The Education Week evaluators found many instances in which Fountas & Pinnell and the others diverged from evidence-based practices. 

Today, it’s widely accepted by reading researchers that programs for young children need to include phonics – and Fountas & Pinnell purports to teach young pupils about sound-letter correspondence. In spite of such claims, the focus is on word identification and phonics instruction is so intermittent that students may not actually learn or be assessed on certain skills. Students are mostly taught to approach words in ways that undermine what can be gleaned from phonics.

The F &P system works on the assumption that students use multiple sources of information, or “cues,” to solve words. That may be true for some poor readers, but it flies in the face of evidence-based neuroscience research.  Effective readers, we now know, process all of the letters in words when they read them, and that they can read connected text very quickly. Early reading programs based upon the F &P system teach students to make better guesses, under the false assumption that it will make children better readers. The fundamental problem with that “three cue” approach is that it trains children to believe that they don’t always need to look at the letters that make up words in order to read them.

Many early years consultants and teachers do not recognize, or perhaps even know, that cuing strategies are not consistent with the science of reading. That’s not just the view of Dr. Schryer, but of many leading researchers, including University of British Columbia psychology professor Linda Siegel and Mount Saint Vincent University learning disabilities specialist Jamie Metsala. 

One of the reasons for the disconnect is that school system consultants not classroom teachers generally decide on what curriculum is authorized across a province or a school district. Two-thirds of the teachers surveyed in 2019 by Education Week reported that their school district selected the primary reading programs and materials, and the figure is likely higher in New Brunswick.

Back in December 2019, American Education Week reporter Sarah Schwartz made a telling comment about the state of teacher consultation and input when it comes to evaluating reading programs. “Even when teachers want to question their school or district’s approach,” she reported, “they may feel pressured to stay silent.”  Three teachers from different districts who spoke with Education Week requested that their names not be used in the story, for fear of repercussions from within the system.

What Minister Cardy has done, in criticizing the Fountas & Pinnell system, is to demonstrate that tinkering with the existing program is not the answer.  If F & P is on the way out, let’s hope the province leads the way in embracing a more soundly evidence-based approach recognizing the benefits of structured literacy.

*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in the Telegraph-Journal, Provincial Edition and all daily papers in New  Brunswick.  

What explains the continued dominance of ‘balanced literacy’ in the form of Literacy Level Interventions and supporting reading materials? What does the science of reading tell us about how most students succeed in mastering reading?  Where’s the evidence to support the effectiveness of balanced literacy applied in universal fashion?  Why are so many early elementary teachers so reluctant to speak up to effect change? 

 

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The Knowledge Gap: Who is Challenging the Sugary Elementary School Curriculum Consensus in Canada?

Every school year seems to herald the arrival of a new crop of education books seeking to “fix the education system.”  Some champion the latest educational panacea, others target the supposed causes of decline, and a select few identify a possible pathway for improving teaching and learning or making schools better. Despite significant investments in remedial programs and ‘learning supports,’ a yawning “achievement gap” persists between students from marginalized or low-income families and their more affluent counterparts and, with few exceptions, it has not closed much over the past fifty years.

Two new education reform books, Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap, and Michael Zwaagstra’s A Sage on the Stage, raise hope that the sources of the problem can be identified and actually addressed in the years ahead. Each of the two books, one American, the other Canadian, offer markedly similar diagnoses and urge policy-makers and educators alike to shore-up the rather emaciated content knowledge-based curriculum. 

Prominent American journalist Wexler demonstrates that elementary school teaching and learning, once considered a bright spot, is so undernourished that most teachers now teach as though it doesn’t matter what students are reading or learning, as long as they are acquiring skills of one kind or another.  Manitoba high school teacher Zwaagstra, in one commentary after another, shows how teaching content knowledge has been downgraded at all levels and overtaken by constructivist experiments embedded in the latest “foolish fads infecting public education.”

Forays into American elementary schools, during Wexler’s field research, produce some alarming lessons.  First graders in a Washington, DC, inner city school are observed, virtually lost, drawing clowns or struggling to fill-in worksheets in a class supposedly based upon a rather dense article about Brazil. Teachers jump wily-nily from topic to topic asking students to read about clouds one day, then zebras the next, completely out of context.  Few elementary teachers seem aware of the science of learning or the vital importance of prior knowledge in reading comprehension. Equally disturbing is the general finding that so many elementary teachers simply assume that children can acquire content knowledge later, after they have a modicum of skills. Such ‘progressive education’ assumptions prevail in most elementary schools, public, private and independent, almost without variation.

Zwaagstra’s book, composed of his best Canadian newspaper commentaries over the past decade, takes dead aim at the prevailing ideology fostered in faculties of education and perpetuated by provincial and school district armies of curriculum consultants and pedagogical coaches. Beginning teachers are trained to resist the temptation to be “a sage on the stage” and instead strive to be “a guide on the side.”  Zwaagstra completely rejects that approach on the grounds that it undermines teacher content knowledge and devalues the expertise of professionals in the classroom. He is, in this respect, speaking the same language as most secondary school teachers who have never really given up the notion that prior knowledge matters and that knowing your subject is critical to higher achievement in colleges and universities.

Zwaagstra speaks up for regular classroom teachers who focus on what works in the classroom and have learned, over the years, to be skeptical of the latest fads. Most regular teachers reading his stinging critiques of ‘discovery math,” whole-language-founded “balanced literacy,” and  incomprehensible “no zero” student evaluation policies will likely be nodding in approval. Not content simply to pick holes in existing theories and practices, he makes a common sense case for strategies that do work, especially in high schools —explicit instruction, knowledge-rich curriculum, and plenty of practice to achieve mastery.

Both Wexler and Zwaagstra go to considerable lengths to spare teachers from the blame for what has gone wrong in the school system. Prevailing pedagogical theories and education professors are identified as the purveyors of teaching approaches and practices floating on uncontested progressive education beliefs. When it comes to teaching reading comprehension, Wexler carefully explains why teachers continue to teach reading comprehension as a set of discrete skills instead of being founded on prior knowledge and expanded vocabulary. It is, in her analysis, “simply the water they’ve been swimming in, so universal and taken for granted they don’t question or even mention it.”  In Zwaagstra’s case, he’s very sympathetic to hard-working teachers in the trenches who cope by carrying-on with what works and developing ‘work-arounds’ when confronted by staunch ideologues or impossible mandates.

What’s really significant about these two education reformers is that both are strong advocates for, and supporters of, the international researchED movement out to challenge and dispel popular myths that have little or no basis in evidence-based research or cognitive science. Zwaagstra is a very popular presenter at researchED Canada conferences and Wexler is one of the headliners at the upcoming American researchED conference, November 16, 2019, in Philadelphia, PA. 

The two authors are very much part of the great awakening made possible by the flourishing of social media conversations, especially on EduTwitter, where independently-minded educators from around the world now go to debate education reform, share the latest research in cognitive science, and discuss ways of grappling with common problems in everyday teaching.

Slowly, but surely, the global edu-gurus are losing their single channel, uncontested platforms and facing more and more teachers equipped to call into question prevailing teaching approaches and fashionable education fads. Moving forward is now less about finding and embracing education evangelists or grabbing hold of,  and riding, the latest fad, and far more about interrogating accepted truths and trusting your teacher colleagues to work out what works in the classroom.

What’s significant about the two books — Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap and Michael Zwaagstra’s A Sage on the Stage?  Now that the call for content-knowledge curriculum is back in vogue in the United States, will Canadian policy-makers and educators  begin looking more critically at their policies and practices?  With more educators embracing a knowledge-rich curriculum, what would it take to successfully challenge the the sugary progressive education consensus in elementary schools?  

 

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