by David Safier
I wrote earlier about the $6 billion dollars the Feds wasted on its phonics-based, drill-and-kill Reading First program. The Department of Ed’s own study concluded that students in classrooms using the Reading First materials showed no more reading improvement than those who learned reading without the benefit of the $6 billion boondoggle.
I just stumbled onto a blog by Donalyn Miller that is both wise and beautifully written, where she takes apart the entire Reading/Industrial Complex (That’s my term, not hers). She’s a 6th grade teacher in Texas. Her blog is called The Book Whisperer, a title that made me fall in love with her before I read the first word. Like a Horse Whisperer, a Book Whisperer gentles her students into wanting to read instead of climbing on their backs and breaking their spirits. Brilliant.
Her post on the topic is Reading First Puts Reading Last. It’s worth a read. It’s not long. Here are some passages.
The only groups served by current trends to produce more and more programs for teaching reading are the publishing and testing companies who make billions of dollars from their programs and tests.
[snip]
I believe that this corporate machinery of scripted programs, comprehension worksheets (reproducibles, handouts, printables, whatever you want to call them), computer-based incentive packages, and test practice curriculum facilitates a solid bottom-line for the companies that sell them, and give schools proof they can point to that they are using every available resource to teach reading, but these efforts are doomed to fail a large number of students because they leave out the most important factor. When you take a forklift and shovel off the programs, underneath it all is a child reading a book.
And it would take a forklift. Using a bathroom scale, I weighed the ancillary materials that came with our district-adopted literature book. The teacher’s edition, student workbooks, practice tests, lesson plan guides, CD-ROMs, and extension materials weighed twenty-seven pounds. Throwing on several hardcover editions just to even the odds, the forty books I require my students to read each year weigh about twenty-four pounds, and these books cost hundreds of dollars less than a textbook package. We don’t need another reading program; we need to go back to the first reading program—connecting children with books. This should always be our bottom line.
Miller has this crazy idea that students learn to read by reading, and they read when they’re given lots of books to choose from and lots of time to pore over those books. Her school day begins with every student reading a book chosen by that student. You can’t encourage the love of reading by putting students through reading drills, then giving them textbooks filled with pre-chosen reading selections and a few novels mandated by the state. Reading instruction is necessary, especially in the early grades. But you need to encourage students to read and to develop a love for reading. That means putting a wide selection of books at their fingertips, books they can see and touch and pick up and read.
Here’s a final quote from another of her blog posts.
When I am out talking to teachers about the need to provide their students with choices in reading material at an appropriate level, one of the first questions I am always asked is, “Where am I going to get the books?” Although many schools purchase expensive program kits for all of the reading teachers in the building, I find very few schools that will fund substantial classroom libraries. The teachers I know that have the best classroom libraries have purchased most of these books with their own money.