The Reading Wars are Over—Long Live the Reading Wars
Because I am a nerd, I’m reading the working draft of An Evidence Based Approach to School Finance Adequacy in Washington by Allan Odden and Lawrence O. Picus, prepared for the K-12 Committee of Washington Learns. It’s 171 pages, but it’s all about what I do, so I think it will be a fun read.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing quite a few posts looking at different parts of what the document says; if it is indeed used to guide the recommendations that come out of Washington Learns in September, this could be a nice early preview of where Washington schools might be going in the future.
That said, my first post needs to invoke the wagging finger of shame. This is from the introduction, on page 10:
For the maximum impact, our resources need to be used to deploy a more effective curriculum program, from too much whole language reading today to a balanced, research-based approach with more phonics and phonemic awareness in the early elementary years.
Here they’re clearly echoing what was called for in the Reading First Program, but there’s no way a statement like that can’t be perceived as a slam on what we’re doing in the elementary grades. If you’re going to trumpet your “evidence based” approach in the title of the report, shouldn’t you provide some evidence that whole language is getting as much airtime as you say it is? Given the gains that Washington kids have made in reading at 4th grade, isn’t it reasonable to assume that what we’re doing in reading grades K-3 is working well?
I know in my own room I spend a lot of time on BOTH phonics and what I guess is “whole language”, which I define to be high frequency words, oral read-alouds, and the like. It’s a settled issue that we need both—the National Reading Panel decided as much in 2002. Given that this is a draft document, hopefully they get that out of there before the final product comes out.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing quite a few posts looking at different parts of what the document says; if it is indeed used to guide the recommendations that come out of Washington Learns in September, this could be a nice early preview of where Washington schools might be going in the future.
That said, my first post needs to invoke the wagging finger of shame. This is from the introduction, on page 10:
For the maximum impact, our resources need to be used to deploy a more effective curriculum program, from too much whole language reading today to a balanced, research-based approach with more phonics and phonemic awareness in the early elementary years.
Here they’re clearly echoing what was called for in the Reading First Program, but there’s no way a statement like that can’t be perceived as a slam on what we’re doing in the elementary grades. If you’re going to trumpet your “evidence based” approach in the title of the report, shouldn’t you provide some evidence that whole language is getting as much airtime as you say it is? Given the gains that Washington kids have made in reading at 4th grade, isn’t it reasonable to assume that what we’re doing in reading grades K-3 is working well?
I know in my own room I spend a lot of time on BOTH phonics and what I guess is “whole language”, which I define to be high frequency words, oral read-alouds, and the like. It’s a settled issue that we need both—the National Reading Panel decided as much in 2002. Given that this is a draft document, hopefully they get that out of there before the final product comes out.
posted by Ryan at 1:04 PM
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