Misleading headlines and wrongheaded schemes

Teaching kids to read requires something quite simple - teaching

A recent hit-piece from EdSource leads with a sensational headline: California does little to ensure all kids read by third grade.

The article begins, “California fourth graders trail the nation in reading, and half of its third graders, including two-thirds of Black students and 61% of Latino students, do not read at grade level.” They leave out students with IEPs, who’s scores are even lower.

They continue, “Yet, California is not among the states — including Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia and New York City — that have adopted comprehensive literacy plans to ensure that all children can read by third grade. And California has not set a timeline or given any indication it intends to create such a plan.” The second paragraph is the set-up. Pay attention to what happens in the next paragraph.

“The problem is we’re still at the first stage of acknowledging there’s a problem,” said Todd Collins, a Palo Alto school board member and an organizer of the California Reading Coalition, a literacy advocacy group.” And there you have it. The supposed “report” is actually what’s known as a “native ad,” According to the Microsoft Advertising Blog, “Native ads are a form of advertisements that are more contextual than the traditional display and banner ads used in the space. In fact, native ads are information-rich sponsored content that blends into the form and function of the platform on which it appears. Essentially, native advertising allows brands to get their content in front of their target audience with a sophisticated flair.” Edsource then continues with their “report” without disclosing that you’re reading sponsored content.

Why is this bad?

Let’s pick apart the story. I can give you a “boots on the ground” view of the issue because I teach literacy skills to high schoolers in a Title 1 school in Los Angeles. I can verify that the numbers are about right and that California doesn’t have a plan as such. But, where they’re wrong is that local districts have all sorts of plans, coaches, and professional development sessions for teachers like me.

This native ad is essentially saying there is no plans in place, so work with the Coalition (editor’s note: they were founded a year ago). They’ll sell you on the proper plans and tools to get everyone up and reading in no time. The problem is, every year another company comes along with the same pitch. Every non-profit peddles the same “evidence-based” strategies and tools from the same big-ed producers. Every single one of them should be held accountable for the garbage they’ve peddled, but they aren’t.

The fact is, as I’ve been shouting for years, these so-called “evidence-based” strategies aren’t validated on student populations like we see in urban California. They’re often normed in places like suburban Wisconsin. You can often read statements in their limitations sections that indicate that students with IEPs weren’t included in the sample as they’re hard to work with.

The article continues to throw the term “science of reading” around. This appeal to authority falls flat. Teachers have been using the “science of reading,” but it’s not working. It’s not working because the “science of reading” ignores an element of the human experience that is quite important - emotion. California, a “sanctuary state” has an outsized population of migrants and refugees who are still processing the trauma of their travels. The traumatized brain does not learn in the same way as a brain that feels safe and secure. That’s why these “evidence-based” schemes are rarely validated in a Title 1 school.

This was the situation as I found it upon my entry into teaching in California. It was the focus of my master’s programme at Loyola Marymount University. There, I wondered in Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD), which works great for teaching writing skills to those with or at risk of emotional or behavioural disturbances (EBD), would work to improve reading comprehension. The short answer … it does. If you want to read my thesis, you can find it here.

Here’s some excerpts from the summary:

Pre-intervention data analysis revealed that the studied population of students were well below their grade level benchmark in reading and comprehension. According to their norm-referenced standardized test data, many were at least three grade levels below their peers. This continued to impact their ability to access the curriculum in meaningful ways. Additionally, many have behavioural challenges, including aggressive tendencies that interfere with interventions.

In the literature review, we demonstrated how the intertwined academic and behavior deficits of students with and at risk for EBDs often negatively impact learning and skill acquisition. Reading comprehension is one academic area where students with and at risk for EBDs display significant deficits. Through the intervention, we demonstrated that the SRSD instructional approach is a method that can account for students’ metacognitive skills and learning behaviors, making it an appropriate methodology for use with students with and at risk for EBDs.

SRSD, as an instructional approach, is designed to help students learn, use, and adopt the strategies used by skilled readers. It adds the element of emotional self-regulation to strategy instruction for reading and writing. It encourages students to monitor, evaluate, and revise their thinking about what they read, which in turn reinforces emotional self-regulation skills and independent learning.

The students involved in this study demonstrated that they could apply the lessons learned to not only overcome the emotions of test day, but to achieve significant growth from the test’s previous administration. Their ability to perform well on the test indicates that they are clearly learning and growing in class. With their newly gained skills and strategies, they are now better able to demonstrate that growth as reflected in their standardized norm-referenced test scores.

So, what’s the problem? Why aren’t more teachers taking this approach to reading comprehension instruction? First, there’s no product to sell. Second, teaching the strategy requires explicit instruction - you actually have to teach this. You must collect data. You must then use that data to inform the creation of lesson plans. And … therein lies the problem. Teachers aren’t paid to lesson plan, they’re paid to teach. Teachers are expected to lesson plan, but aren’t given enough time in their paid day to create data-informed lesson plans. So they don’t. They do their best to create a daily agenda. But, an agenda isn’t a lesson plan that is differentiated and scaffold to account for the individual data-informed needs of each student in the room … across multiple classes of students.

I was able to prove that explicitly teaching, using SRSD, could improve outcomes in a Title 1 setting. In spite of my small sample of students, I believe the results could be generalized to larger populations of students.

If you like to know more, or if you’d like to learn how to do what I’ve done here in Los Angeles, let me know in the comments below.