U.K. National Literacy Strategy: "Appalling"

January 14, 2004

It looks like the U.S. isn't the only place where folks are struggling against the evil empire of Progressive Education. Brian Micklethwait reports on some message board traffic in the U.K. by folks disturbed at a proposed National Literacy Strategy:

The programme is absolutely appalling. To anyone who knows about synthetic phonics teaching it is absolutely flawed from beginning to end.

Synthetic Phonics is what Americans call Explicit or Systematic Phonics--in other words, a step-by-step plan for the teaching children the sight-sound correspondence of the language. Which happens to be extremely effective in teaching kids to read.

Of course, since effective, time-tested methods also tend to be old-fashioned, that just will not do.

Thus legions of educational experts have come up with wonderful, innovative methods which theoretically should do so much better than those stodgy old ones.

For example, here in the States, we have Whole Language, which holds that reading is just as natural as speaking, and the drive to lower class sizes, no matter what the cost. Merge them together and you get Reading Recovery, an intensive, fabulously expensive, one-on-one program to teach kids to read. (You can't get class sizes any smaller than one-on-one!)

There's just one small problem.

Reading Recovery is not terribly effective at teaching students to read!

Reading Recovery's own promotional materials claim it is 75%-85% effective, which means they acknowledge that up to a fourth of students fail to learn to read, even after being taught one-on-one! (See the National Right to Read Foundation's page on Reading Recovery.)

But don't let that stop you! If you go to Perdue University's site on Reading Recovery, they're all awash with good tidings. After informing the reader that the program was developed in New Zealand, they breathlessly say, "The results can be remarkable."

A 3-year study conducted in New Zealand drew these "remarkable" conclusions:

"One year after completing the programme, the Reading Recovery children in the study were performing at one year below age-appropriate levels," says Professor Chapman. "They held more negative perceptions of ability in reading and spelling, and in general academic self-concept. Teachers of the Reading Recovery children also rated them as having more classroom behaviour problems. A year later, their self esteem was still declining, apparently as a result of their failure to achieve on the programme."

Sign us up.