Tag Archives: phonics-based reading

We are what we appear to value.  Reading Proficiency and Censorship.

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Simultaneously the Wisconsin legislature is considering a bill to improve reading instruction for all children and a bill to limit what schools can provide for children to read.  Two bills each with its own perspective on how the state should fulfill its commitment to educating children.  One bill attempts to apply the best practices of the science of reading to ensure all children can be proficient readers.  One bill tells schools to limit what they provide for children to read and see.  Each bill uses the power of the state to transform how schools impact children.  Each bill is an expression of what we value.

What do we know?

Our WI constitution says the state is responsible for establishing and supervising public education.  State statute 118.01(2) outlines the state’s educational goals.  These include instruction in 118.01(2)(a) the basic skills of reading, arithmetic, listening, writing, and speaking, analytical skills to think rationally and solve problems, a body of knowledge in literature, fine arts, and the natural sciences, skills and attitudes for lifelong intellectual activity, and knowledge in computer science including the social impact of computers.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/118

What is being proposed?

Representative Joel Kitchens is spearheading Assembly Bill 321 to improve child literacy by creating an Office of Literacy, focusing teacher prep programs on science-based reading instruction, establishing and funding literacy coaching, and standardizing early literacy screening through grade 3 assessments.  Equally important to the use of phonics-based reading is the ban on schools from using three cueing strategies in teaching children to read.  Every child in 4K-grade 3 will be taught how to decode words and encode sounds – to read and write independently.  Each child will be taught the mechanics of literacy and strategies for building vocabulary.  A child’s ability will no longer be determined by her school’s reading program preferences but by best practice. 

The bill institutes change in teacher education and professional development to ensure that teachers know how to teach phonics-based reading.  Today most teachers do not teach phonics as it was not part of their baccalaureate preparation or their school district’s PD.  Most teachers learned to teach whole language or blended reading strategies dominated reading instruction.  Teachers will learn to teach and be accountable for teaching all children to read using the science of reading concepts and skills.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/related/proposals/ab321

State Senators Andre Jacque, Romaine Quinn, and Cory Tomczyk presented a bill that would cause schools to remove books and material that are “deemed harmful or offensive to minors from public schools and libraries” and “enact policies that ensure minors do not view harmful materials on public computers”.

Under the guise of parent rights to supervise what their children learn, the bill requires schools to publish their curricular materials so that parents may object to what they deem harmful and/or remove their child from that class instruction. 

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/proposals/sb10

One bill supports our educational goals and the other subverts those goals.

I fully agree with Joel Kitchens when he says “Students will succeed by returning to the way most of us learned to read.  I truly consider this to be the most important thing that I ever worked on in the legislature”.  AB 321 advances the educational goals of our state by improving how we teach all children to read. 

Senate Bill 10 contradicts our educational goals to provide all children with opportunities to consider, think, and become intellectual problem solvers.  It ignores or does not trust the authority of school districts to supervise the materials they provide for children to read and see and experience in school.  Instead, this bill creates a new right for a parent to make that decision not just for that parent’s child but for all children.

SB10 is Wisconsin’s effort to keep up with other conservative-dominated state legislatures with book banning.  If successful, the bill ensures that schoolbooks and materials can be censored by a single parent or small group of parents.  It also places school boards in the bullseye of the issue to ban or not ban books.

https://www.wortfm.org/following-national-trend-wisconsin-lawmakers-introduce-book-ban/

Where is our educational high ground?

As a former school superintendent and school board president, I applaud Assembly Bill 321 and shun Senate Bill 10.  The high ground of public education is to teach children how to think and to resolve issues.  It is low ground to tell children what to think and to insulate them from issues they should, with appropriate instructional support, be able to consider. 

Our state constitution explains the educational goals of a public education in Chapter 118, section 118.01.  118.01(d) says “Each school board shall provide an instructional program designed to give pupils: (8) Knowledge of effective means by which pupils may recognize, avoid, prevent and halt physically or psychologically intrusive or abusive situations which may be harmful to pupils including child abuse and child enticement.  Instruction shall be designed to help pupils develop positive psychological, emotional, and problem-solving responses to such situations and avoid relying on negative, fearful, and solely reactive methods of dealing with such situations.  Instruction shall include information on available school and community prevention and intervention assistance or services and shall be provided to pupils in elementary schools.”

The high ground for our state is to implement the goals of its statutes.  Schools must constantly improve how we teach children while we constantly are vigilant regarding the educational materials we use for that education.  The state constitution gives schools the authority and responsibility to do these, and the role of legislation is to enhance not impede schools.  The constitution commends parents to work with local school boards to understand and advocate for the education of all children.

The high ground for local school boards is to constantly supervise the materials and experiences used to educate its students.   When a challenge arises the board can engage in an appropriate conversation with the conviction that the district has and is meeting its responsibilities for the entirety of our state’s educational goals.  We teach all children to become proficient in basic skills and to consider, think, problem solve and make decisions regarding their school experiences.  We do not teach them what to think or how to value their experiences.

Improving Reading is like “Trouble With The Curve” – Current Players Are Not Prepared To Do It

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Educators statewide should applaud parents, educators, and legislators in Wisconsin who are advancing AB 446.  The proposed legislation will strongly improve the state mandates for assessment of reading readiness and reading proficiency for all our youngest learners.  The current mandates are weak and ineffective; AB 446 is robust in its requirements.  Proponents of the legislation are impassioned for these changes.  As expected, there is opposition to doing what is right.  Legislators claim the bill to be an unfunded mandate ignoring the current state funding given to districts for this very purpose.  Political opposition for opposition’s sake.

Parallel to AB 446 we need the President of our University of Wisconsin System to acknowledge and remedy the companion problem causing children to fail as proficient readers.  Educator preparation programs in Wisconsin do not teach prospective teachers to teach reading.  I overuse the term “teach” on purpose.  Reading is not a natural skill set; it is learned.  Proficiency in reading is yet more difficult; it must be taught.  Teachers must be taught to teach children to be proficient readers. 

Take note:  A person who can read proficiently is not prepared to teach a child to be a proficient reader.  The set of reading skills we want all children to learn and use is complex and compound.  There is a clear and distinct science underlying proficient reading.  Many children obtain these complex and compound skills through a combination of untargeted instruction and the opportunity to read.  However, more than 50% of children in Wisconsin do not.  Data support this statement.  A majority of children in Wisconsin are not proficient readers and are not prepared to be critical readers for the decades of their future lives.

Why is this?

For lovers of the “the game”, Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With The Curve (2012) highlighted the difficulty of finding baseball players with requisite talent for playing in the big leagues.  A power hitter can feast on fastballs, but throw him a curve and he will walk slowly to the bench.  The game requires talented players who can hit the irregular pitch.

Children need teachers who are prepared to teach all children to be proficient readers because they are trained to hit the curves of children who present challenges in their mastery of reading skills.  Our current teacher preparation programs do not do this.  Our colleges of education must strengthen teacher preparation with requirements in –

  • Phonemic awareness
  • Decoding skills
  • Word sight recognition

combined with

  • Background knowledge
  • Vocabulary development
  • Knowledge and use of language structures
  • Skills of verbal reasoning
  • ELA literacy

Check the transcript of a graduate of a WI-system college of education and look for this preparation.  It is not there.

For AB 446 to be effective, it must be paired with improved teacher skills in the teaching of proficient reading.  As with the legislation, this needed improvement bangs against the status quo and proponents of the status quo oppose changes in our teacher preparation programs.  Such institutional thinking and behavior is arcane and archaic.  This is why the action of the President of the UW-System is required.  He can mandate change. 

If we are to hit the curve of reading proficiency challenges and use the assessment data handed us by AB 446, we need players/teachers who are prepared and do not have trouble with the curve.

Reading Wars Redux – A Good Fight

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We are a contentious lot – people in general, that is.  It is not that people like to fight, I hope, but that they will rise to the occasion.  There are many arguments in the realm of public education and the pandemic fueled these and bred even more.  I write this morning about one that has history, many bouts, and still rages. It is a good and worthy engagement in public education measured by the distance between the opposing forces and the significant differences in outcomes should one side prevail.  This is the Reading Wars Saga Redux.

A reader may snub this this post believing that the Reading Wars are old news, a story that is put to rest.  But, it is not.  Three key points make the Reading Wars more than relevant today.  They are:

  • In the absence of daily in-person reading instruction during the pandemic, we need the most effective and efficient reading strategy to cause all children to be proficient readers.  This is more that compensatory, because children in K-3 who missed 30 months of direct reading instruction are in danger of a lifetime of ineffective language acquisition skills and reading behavior.
  • Public education sermonizes the need for all children to be well-educated, yet categorizes a percentage of children as learning challenged.  The achievement gap between non-categorized and categorized children is clearly demonstrated in their reading proficiency.  A strategy that will cause categorized children to acquire language and read and write with equivalency to non-categorized children compels us to consider that strategy for all children.
  • The status quo in the Reading Wars is not based upon the merits of an argument but upon the politics of state legislation.  Once again, money plus lobbying causes legislation and policy decisions not the righteousness of an argument.

Two sides stand in opposition regarding the teaching of reading, the Reading Wars Saga redux in Wisconsin, and it is important for any person concerned with educating children to understand the battle line.  I use the singular battle line, because I find the arguments boil down to a single question.  Shall educators use the understandings and instructional strategies of the Science of Reading (SoR) to teach reading and language acquisition to children or not?  There is not an argument for other strategies for the teaching of reading.  Those strategies are an amalgamation of ideas and approaches for the teaching of reading, usually encompassed as whole language or blended reading.  No, the issue is whether we will use the phonics-based strategies of SoR.  It is the same argument of the 1980s and 1990s Reading Wars grown up, because we know much more about reading and language acquisition today than we knew in the last century. 

I point to the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE) for an example of SoR.  This document summarizes the approaches of SoR that are pertinent to the argument.  There are many others – I picked this.

What is the Science of Reading?

At the heart of SoR are a child’s abilities to encode sounds into words and decode words into sounds and from these abilities acquire vocabulary, learn to spell, learn to read complex and complicated text, and to write with fluency.  Children who cannot encode and decode reading and language are exiled to a life of frustration and low achievement in a world that requires literacy.

When I ask someone who opposes SoR why they do so, two statements invariably are heard.  Phonics-based instruction requires drilling in the sounds and spellings of phonemes and morphemes and some children are put off by this repetition.  They are bored.  And, some children can learn to read naturally – just let them read and guide their reading as it grows.  Schools have adopted complete reading programs based upon not boring children and the belief that with minimal foundational skills and maximal reading opportunities children will become successful readers.

Is that it?  Yep, that is the long and short of an argument.

On the other hand, SoR speaks of foundational encoding and decoding skills for all children, especially those who have learning challenges or whose early home life does not present much reading encouragement or whose natural abilities satisfy primary grade reading material but struggle with more complex vocabulary and language in the secondary grades. 

In simple terms, SoR teaches children phonemic awareness of sound-letter correlations, to use phonetic patterns to understand and use regular and irregular words, to read and pronounce words with fluency, to build complex and technical vocabulary based upon phonetic patterns, and the comprehend the meaning of words and word families.  This is a structured approach that is individualized to a child’s learning needs.

Therein lies a compelling difference in the argument about reading instruction.  Shall we leave success to each child’s native abilities and opportunities presented at home and school when then are young or shall we instruct every child with the skills to read and understand language for a lifetime? 

In the 1990s the forces in Wisconsin for blended and whole language moved the state legislature to adopt language favoring non-phonics-based reading instruction.  A simple phrase in the WI Stat 18.19 says that teacher preparation shall include phonics-based reading, but that a course is phonics-based reading is not required.  Over the past 30 years teachers in our state’s teacher prep programs have received such nominal instruction in phonics-based reading that when asked to describe encoding and decoding skills, phonemic awareness, and linguistics, most cannot.  Elementary teachers today are illiterate regarding the SoR.  Sadly, legislation and lobbying efforts against SoR stymy teacher education.

Educational data, especially data that is disaggregated, describes a flattening of reading achievement in Wisconsin over the past fifteen years.  Whole language and blended reading instruction cause some children to succeed as readers, but less than half of all children can achieve proficiency in reading or language assessments on state assessments.  And, children with learning disabilities invariably achieve at a basic or minimal level.  When we disaggregate the data, we find that children with dyslexia not only do not achieve, they decline in achievement over time and educationally “die” in frustration.  Our systems are not working for all children.

This is a good fight in the non-combative and non-life-threatening struggles of the public education Wisconsin provides to all enrolled children.  Shall all children learn to read?  All children not just those who can read without explicit instruction.  Shall state legislation and teacher preparation programs be reformed to endorse SoR or will they continue with a status quo of minimal and selective achievement?  It is fight for the future of our children.

“Just Go Do” Goes Nowhere

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Our common mythologies tell us that men will not ask for directions. Men would rather drive and get lost or fail at assembling a new purchase than display the unmanly plight of seeking help. “I can do this” is a real man’s mantra. However, to paraphrase Louis Pasteur, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Whether it is man, woman or child, understanding the directions and gaining the skills for how to get from here to there, literally or hypothetically, is the best preparation for success. Without preparation and direction, we tend to go nowhere. Note: the following is not a diatribe about men, but a story concerning all of us.

In recent school discussions of student reading performances over the past five years, we realized that these outcomes were far below our students’ capacity to perform and our school’s expectations for all children. Disaggregation of statewide and local assessment scores showed about 15% of children performing at advanced levels of reading and 30% at proficient levels. These data matched state and national reading trends. Yet, we were chronically looking at the larger pool of 45% of children who were in the basic category reading performance. What kept these children from being proficient readers. We had a problem.

There were other indicators, such as poor spelling and confusion with the structures of grammar and syntax that consistently showed up in the daily work of our basic readers. We observed stumbling with reading fluency, especially with new, technical vocabulary. Our in-house screener showed these children making progress in their reading skills, however they did it make enough progress to become proficient on any assessments. Our assessments led us to questions and direct observation of children led us semi-conclusions. Too many of our children were weak in demonstrating phonological awareness, abilities to decode new words and had limited sight word recognition. Our advanced and proficient readers learned these skills, either from our instruction or parental assistance or through their own intuitive processes. But, for 55% of our children, we were at Point A, an unacceptable level of reading performance. We needed to get these children to Point B, student proficiency in reading built upon stronger student phonological and orthographic understanding and skills.

The Board’s Student Learning Committee, led by a Board member and comprised of teachers, parents, and administrators, began to study the nature of phonology. Parent members were vested in the issue; most were parents of children with reading challenges. Generally, the problem did not arise from a lack of reading interest at home or parental support of school. It did not arise from intellectual disorders. And, it did not arise from ambivalence. Parents and teachers and administrators were concerned with the stalled improvement in reading performance and wanted solutions.

Several of our children of interest displayed characteristics of dyslexia and their instruction was guided by an IEP. By looking at these children intensely, the committee began to understand that our teaching and learning model had several significant gaps. The committee met with representatives of Lindamood-Bell to understand that vendor’s approach to diagnostic and intense, clinical reading instruction. In addition, teachers trained in Orton-Gillingham and Wilson Reading explained how their preparation told them to address the needs of children with dyslexia and coding/decoding problems. A consultant from the International Dyslexia Association explained what reading is like for a child who can’t code and decode. She helped the committee to understand best practices in reading instruction for these children. The committee concluded that improvement in each student’s phonologic and orthographic skills was necessary to cause every student to be a proficient reader.

To get from Point A to Point B, we needed to change and improve our teaching-learning model. We could not say to our K-6 teachers, “just do it” – somehow make the necessary changes in your teaching to cause different results. Pasteur’s model told us that we needed to prepare for success if we wanted to be successful. Our starting point was to discern the current level of teacher preparation for phonics-based reading instruction. We found that our results were consistent with our preparation. Due to no fault of any teacher, most of our faculty had completed only a unit or two of instruction in phonics in a single course as part of their baccalaureate preparation. That was the extent of their academic preparation. Through self-designed continuing education, some had developed their own understanding of phonics-based reading and were achieving some success with some children. As a whole, we were not Pasteur-prepared for success.

It took half his life for Pasteur to be Pasteur. After six months of study, we still are not prepared, but we know how to be prepared. We know what our teaching-learning models lacks and we have a plan to provide each teacher with the directions and skills needed to move our children to Point A to Point B. We also know that our plan for success preparation takes time to achieve. This summer, each K-6 teacher, reading specialist and special education working with K-6 children will receive training in the Orton-Gillingham methodologies for intensive and sequential phonics-based instruction of word formation. These teachers will receive additional training the following summer. We will prepare each teacher to “go do”.

Our new designs says that all children will receive grade level instruction in our core reading program that is embedded with phonological and orthographic training AND each child who demonstrates phonological weakness will receive developmentally-appropriate OG instructional intervention. Our superintendent proposed a strategy of curriculum compacting that will provide more time each day for children needing deeper interventions of clinical and intensive instruction. Through district-provided preparation, all K-6 teachers will be able to teach a stronger phonics-based reading program, diagnose a child’s weaknesses in phonological understanding and skills, and give direct instruction to remediate the weakness. This approach to district-provided professional development is a change for our district. This PD is mandated and required for all current K-6, elementary special ed teachers and reading specialists. It is performance-based. We will be able to associate student achievement in phonics-based reading with a teacher(s) prepared for phonics-based reading instruction. It is prospective – all new-to-the-district K-6 teachers will receive OG training in future years.

Most importantly, this approach to professional development sets the stage for future analysis of student academic performances. When the district identifies a teaching-learning problem in the future and our educational outcomes are adjusted, an immediate question will be “How well are we prepared to ‘go do’?”. We will be Pasteur-like in our preparation for success.