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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