Recognizing that past approaches were not getting the job done, Congress recently enacted a significant change to how we support our nation's schools by adopting the "No Child Left Behind" legislation.
An important element of this is the "Reading First" initiative.
I strongly support implementing the key principles of the "Reading First" program here in Tustin because they are correct principles, which we can apply to our schools today, without waiting for the federal government.
For years, educational theorists have hypothesized about how children come to read, what steps are required, and what is the best way to teach them.
Also for years, most college and graduate level schools of education have spent a lot of time in their teacher credential programs focused on "social issues" and "political correctness". These are more interesting to many of the professors who work there than is the careful teaching of instructional techniques to future teachers.
But over the past few decades, G. Reid Lyon and his associates working through the National Institute of Child Health & Development (NICHD) have cut through the uncertainties by providing clear, quantitative trustworthy large-scale research on what works and what does not work in teaching kids to read. They did this by comparing large groups of children exposed to different types of reading instruction, using control groups and other methods common to medical research.
The scientific work of Reid Lyon and others has strongly informed Congress in adopting the "No Child Left Behind" program.
When we have a medical problem, we expect our doctor to provide us with a therapy or medication that has been proven safe and effective in large scale scientifically based research studies with people like us.
But this has not been the tradition in education. When students have an educational problem, the experts hypothesized a solution based upon their untested theoretical constructs.
Thus, if a child was having trouble learning to read despite some incidental phonics instruction from time to time, it was assumed that phonics would not work for that child and some other method would work better.
But the scientific evidence now available says that the solution to a child who is struggling despite incidental phonics instruction is more intensive and structured phonics instruction – but only after practice in a little known pre-phonics skill called "phonemic awareness".
The other scientific findings of the NICHD, the National Reading Panel and others after examining trustworthy research based upon large-scale quantitative evaluations of various instructional strategies compared against control groups include the following:
- Children’s ability in a pre-phonics, pre-reading skill called "phonemic awareness" is the single best predictor of their reading success.
- Children can be tested in phonemic awareness as young as 5 ˝ and quite inexpensively.
- Children can make substantial gains in phonemic awareness with relatively low cost and high effectiveness if provided intensive systematic direct instruction at a young age.
- Systematic phonics programs utilizing direct instruction are more effective in teaching reading than programs that use phonics in non-systematic ways or with little direct instruction, and than programs which use no phonics at all.
- Not only do children read the words ("decode") better after systematic phonics instruction than with other methods, they also make more improvement in reading comprehension than others who were taught reading comprehension strategies with little phonics instruction.
- Phonics instruction is important through at least the sixth grade.
- Guided oral reading is more effective in improving reading fluency than programs of independent silent reading.
I believe that here in Tustin we owe it to our taxpayers and to our children to utilize these phonics-based instructional methods clearly demonstrated to be superior to other instructional strategies.
Achieving this will not happen just because of one or two policy votes by the Tustin School Board, but only by the active education and involvement of the entire Tustin educational community, including teachers, students, administrators and parents.
Accelerating the adoption of these methods is the single most important thing we can do to assure the future academic success of the children of our community.
Please join me in making a personal commitment to seeing this happen, despite the hard work it will take.
|