Reading Results Raise Questions on NCLB

A new report from the Department of Education has raised questions about the Bush administration's learning initiatives under the landmark No Child Left Behind Act.

The Washington Post has the story:

Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law are not reading any better than those who don't participate, according to a U.S. government report.

The study released yesterday by the Department of Education's research arm found that students in schools that use Reading First, which provides grants to improve elementary school reading, scored about the same on comprehension tests as their peers who attended schools that did not receive program money.

The conclusion is likely to reignite the longstanding "reading wars." Critics say that Reading First places too much emphasis on explicit phonics instruction and doesn't do enough to foster understanding.

Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, the report also revived allegations of conflicts of interest and mismanagement. Federal investigators have found that some people who helped oversee the program had financial ties to publishers of Reading First materials.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) yesterday called Reading First a "failure." Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate education committee, said the administration "put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last."

Education Department officials said the study will help them better implement Reading First and said the program has the support of many educators across the country. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently likened the effort, aimed at improving instruction in schools with children from low-income families, to "the cure for cancer."

About 1.5 million children in about 5,200 schools, including more than 140 schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District, participate in Reading First.

Yesterday's report did not diminish the support of some local educators. Michele Goady, Maryland's director of Reading First, said she remains convinced that the effort is producing better readers. "We firmly believe we are having greater success with our beginning readers as a result of Reading First," she said.

The congressionally mandated study, completed by an independent contractor, focused on tens of thousands of first-, second- and third-grade students in 248 schools in 13 states. The children were tested, and researchers observed teachers in 1,400 classrooms.

Reading First was established as part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind law. It requires participating schools to use instructional techniques supported by scientific research.

Teachers in Reading First classrooms spent about 10 minutes more each day on instruction in the five areas emphasized by the program -- awareness of individual sounds, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension -- than colleagues in schools that didn't receive program grants, the study concluded. There was no difference when children were tested on how well they could read and understand material on a widely used exam.

"There was no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension scores in grades one, two or three," Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department's research arm, said in a briefing with reporters. He said students in both groups made gains.

"It's possible that, in implementing Reading First, there is a greater emphasis on decoding skills and not enough emphasis, or maybe not correctly structured emphasis, on reading comprehension," he said. "It's one possibility."

Whitehurst said there are other possible explanations. One, he said, is that the program "doesn't end up helping children read." He said the program's approach could be effective in helping students learn building-block skills yet not "take children far enough along to have a significant impact on comprehension."

My own take (non-statistically significant) is that the study's poor results on Reading First capture problems of learning outside of the classroom.

In-class activity is only a partial component of skills mastery. While the probe's population appears large, we'd likely see variations in improvement across social-demographic lines. But see Joanne Jacobs' analysis:

A preliminary study of Reading First finds no improvement in reading comprehension by third grade compared to schools that didn’t receive RF funds.

Jay Greene says it’s a well-designed study. The lack of effect may reflect weak implementation or the fact that some control-group schools used the same reading curriculum without federal funds.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli says the study didn’t look at a nationally representative sample of RF schools. Early adopters weren’t included in the study; neither were the lowest scoring schools that probably are the most likely to benefit. Instead the study compared schools that barely qualified for funds with those that barely missed qualifying. If RF makes a difference in very needy schools but not in borderline schools, that wouldn’t show up.

The Bush administration already has slashed RF funding; it would be a shame if one interim study causes it to vanish. Many principals and superintendents think it’s working in their schools.

I'll update on this if I see more information, because a desire and opportunity to read in the home is a powerful predictor of reading skills acquisition in the early grades (again, that's my common sense talk, but see Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life).