Myth 2: The Right Program Will Solve All Reading Problems

I grew up in Southern California so my first experience with a hurricane was not until adulthood. Between absorbing the constant 24-hour news assault, fielding panicked phone calls from distant loved ones, and holding tense conversations with passing friends and neighbors I got the very clear message we needed to DO something about this impeding threat. Gather food, water, batteries. Make sure everything was charged. And, as I walked my Brooklyn neighborhood, I learned of another popular action - to tape your windows.

The giant Xs that started to show up all up and down the streets, on windows big and small, confused me. No newscaster mentioned it. And if I asked anyone doing it why, the answers were sort of vague and noncommittal. ‘If the glass blows out.’ Duct tape was sold out everywhere and the windows in our neighborhood soon seemed to play a very large version of tick tack toe.

Fast forward a few years and it’s fairly common knowledge now that not only is taping your windows a basically useless activity that will do nothing if the hurricane does end up shattering your glass, but in some cases, it can actually make broken windows more dangerous.

Different Storm – Different Strategy 

With all the 24-hour news cycles shifting focus to other topics, including the state of reading education in the United States, there is a push to do something to fend off the hurricane that we hear is swirling all around us. Other educators, writers and thinkers have addressed the issue as to whether there is a wide-spread reading crisis. I am not going to argue that one way or another here, except to say, as someone who has been both an educator of, and a parent to, students who found learning to read excruciatingly difficult until they got what they needed, we should always work toward making sure every student has reading instruction that matches their learning profile.

What intrigues me most about the named reading crisis is the level of busyness in legislative houses, op-ed pages, and social media campaigns. I like to believe that it comes from a well-meaning place, a desire to make sure every student has access to solid and successful literacy instruction.  So, I keep looking for the legislation and advocacy around systemic literacy access. If legislators and lobbyists were closely following the research, we would see things like increased budgets for personnel, resources for school libraries, recruiting and retaining of school-based reading specialists, literacy coaches and special educators or teacher-driven high quality professional development, focused on the deep learning of best practices.  Or perhaps lobbyists and legislators could consider a wide-scale systemic response to larger societal issues that have direct impact on academic success such as affordable housing, food access, economic poverty, and reliable transportation.  But, as more and more actions are taken and celebrated, what we are mostly seeing is the mandating of a handful of specific commercial programs and the banning of other programs, as well as children’s books.

Programs Have a Purpose … and Limits

Social media feeds, published reports, and school board meeting minutes are filled with this commercial program or that, held up as the answer to the very real need to make sure every student learns to read well. To be clear, I am not against commercial curricular materials. I have written some in my time. And as a classroom teacher, I found they can be invaluable in reducing workload, offering guidance, and making sure instruction is cohesive with colleagues up and down the grades. As someone who doesn’t have a classroom of my own now, but spends most of my days in schools with teachers and students, some of my favorite work has been with school communities adjusting, revising or fine tuning a range of chosen commercial curriculum to better match the students’ needs and teachers’ preferences. There is beautiful, and timesaving, work to be done when a learning community makes something their own.

 However, as both an author of curricular materials and a user of them, I am also a bit agnostic. I don’t believe any one program can do what so many people are hoping they can do – which is get all students to learn how to read well in the time frame suggested by the program, matched with the structures and needs of each individual school. I understand the impetus, something needs to be done. And adopting curriculum and unrolling it in every classroom is a definitive action. But we also know that there are so many other factors that lead to student learning besides the curriculum and what was named earlier: the class size and make-up, the access to books and other quality materials, students’ health and well-being, the experience and skill level of the teacher, the amount of time allotted for instruction, building safety… the list goes on and on.

Yet, as a society we continue to mandate one program or another and name it as ‘the’ solution, often after rushed adoption procedures, that people are hard-pressed to explain. It does not feel so very different than taping up the windows in a hurricane.

Matt Croger, of Child Mind Institute, said when asked to name the best intervention program, that the best ‘program’ is a skilled and knowledgeable teacher. I knew that to be true in my classroom, but it was only during the pandemic lock-downs, when I was on the living room floor with my own first grade child, trying to teach him to read with some high quality Orton Gillingham style phonics program, that I truly stewed in that realization.

The manual would tell me what to teach, in what order and how. And often the manual was spot-on. But sometimes it most definitely was not – at least for my kid. It would say, ‘Do this activity 3-4 times and then move on’. But, for my kid, it needed to be repeated at least 20, sometimes a lot more, times. The manual would suggest certain multistep activity directions be given only verbally and read from a carefully scripted paragraph. My kid needed those directions broken into steps and either written down or explained using gestures and repeated several times. And those are just a couple of the ways I needed to veer from the program.

I knew I was using high quality materials. But I also knew that just using the materials ‘with fidelity’ would not teach my kid. I had to rely on my own expertise as a literacy teacher as well as someone who knew my kid well, to adapt and sometimes completely revise, or change tack, from what was written. I knew that if he was in his regular first grade class with his teacher and a class of over 20 students using the same materials, the chances were not good the teacher would be able to provide the type of adaptations he needed while keeping up with the class pace and meeting the varying needs of other students. This high-quality program was certainly better than others, but without the right systems, supports and teacher agency in place, it would do about as much good for a chunk of kids in whole class instruction as taping up the windows in a hurricane.

So yes, we need high quality materials for teaching. But that doesn’t mean a mandated curriculum will ‘fix’ the reading crisis. Experienced and skillful teachers, with the resources they need, in addition to larger systemic changes on the school and community level, and easy access to books would go a long way toward making significant inroads to universal literacy.