Education Week - February 12, 2020 - 10

Push is made for
better alignment
to research
By Sarah Schwartz
Early-reading advocates in California have raised concerns about a
forthcoming state literacy plan, arguing that some of the instructional
approaches to be included aren't
sufficiently aligned to research and
won't lead to success for many students.
California was one of 13 states recently awarded a federal grant to develop a comprehensive literacy program for children from birth through
12th grade. As part of the grant, the
state is creating a literacy plan with
guidance and recommendations for
school districts.
For now, the plan is still in development. But some groups in the state
have taken issue with two instruction
and intervention approaches California called out in its application for the
grant: Reading Recovery and reading
and writing workshop.
In the reading "workshop" model,
teachers demonstrate a skill that
students then try out on their own,
through guided practice and with
books of their choice. Reading Recovery is a one-on-one intervention for
struggling 1st grade readers that targets word-level reading difficulties,
fluency, and comprehension. Reading researchers have critiqued both
of these approaches, saying that they
don't provide enough explicit, systematic instruction in foundational skills,
and that they teach reading strategies
that can confuse students who are just
learning to read words.
At the same time, other states
that have received this same grant
money have taken a different approach, focusing on explicit teaching of foundational skills. Arkansas,
for example, outlined plans in its
grant application to fund teacher
training in evidence-based practice
and teacher coaching around phonological awareness and oral-language acquisition.
"There's a real concern that there's
a drift away from systematic, explicit teaching of foundational skills
[in California]," said Bill Lucia, the
president of EdVoice, a nonprofit
that advocates for accountability
and school choice. "It feels almost
like Groundhog Day in going back to
these reading wars."
Listing Reading Recovery and
reading and writing workshop in
the grant application gives these
programs tacit approval, and sends
the wrong message, said Kareem J.
Weaver, a member of the Oakland
NAACP's education committee.
"Goals and parameters at the state
level guide the local level," Weaver
said. "People want the money.
They're going to do what they need
to do."

Barbara Murchison, the director of
the educator excellence and equity division at the California department of
education, said that the state doesn't
want to prescribe a "single approach."
While Reading Recovery and reading workshop will be included in the
state's literacy plan as examples of
best practices, they won't be the only
recommendations, she said.
Murchison also disagreed with critics who say that Reading Recovery
and reading workshop models aren't
evidence-based.
"I think there are a lot of ways that
you can support those foundational
skills," Murchison said. "When I
was teaching 1st grade for about 10
years, ... I had a variety of different
approaches, but one of those was
very much shared writing, shared
reading, writer's workshop, reader's
workshop."

A Mixed Legacy
California has historically been a
literacy trendsetter, though the state
has a mixed history when it comes to
evidence-based reading instruction.
In the 1980s and early '90s, California was one of the first states to
champion whole language, an approach that assumes reading is a
natural process that students will
learn through exposure to authentic
texts. California incorporated whole
language into its English/language
arts framework in 1987.
But after scores from the 1994 National Assessment of Educational
Progress and state tests showed lagging 4th grade achievement, state
lawmakers pushed for a change in
course. The legislature passed a series of bills that required schools to
use materials that taught phonics,
created new English/language arts
standards, and provided funding to
train teachers in phonics instruction.
These changes created one of the
first iterations of balanced literacy-
an approach that attempted to balance explicit instruction in foundational skills with guided practice and
exposure to text.
Reading Recovery and reading
workshop are aligned with the current state literacy framework, Murchison said, which is one reason why
were included in the list of evidencebased programs.
Reading workshop includes many
of the literacy skills required in K-3,
like explicit teaching of comprehension strategies, high-quality discussion of text meaning, and identification of text structure, she said.
While California doesn't mandate
one approach to reading instruction,
there are schools across the state
using the Units of Study for Teaching Reading-the most well-known
reading workshop program, developed by Lucy Calkins, a professor at
Teachers College, Columbia University. Across the country, the materials
are popular with many teachers, who
appreciate that the program encourages student choice and developing a

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 12, 2020 | www.edweek.org

lifelong love of reading.
But some parents, teachers, and
advocates in California have said
that reading instruction is still failing students two decades later-especially students of color, students
from low-income families, students
with disabilities, and English-language learners. Meeting the needs
of these students, specifically, is a
special focus of the grant that California received.
Advocates have raised concerns
that Reading Recovery and reading
workshop won't achieve that goal.
"The programs referenced have
been used for years in California,
are not supported by the science of
reading, and have contributed to
the continued reading crisis in California," said Lori DePole, the strategic partner liaison at Decoding Dyslexia California, in a statement to
Education Week.
They don't follow the standards set
out in the California Dyslexia Guidelines, she said, which call for direct,
explicit, and structured instruction.
These programs may work for
some students, but they won't work
for all students, said Weaver of the
Oakland NAACP. "From the state
perspective, who are we tailoring
things for?" he asked.

Effective for All?
Reading Recovery and reading
workshop are two of the most common approaches to reading instruction and intervention in the country,
according to a recent survey from the
Education Week Research Center.
But researchers have suggested that
they are less effective for struggling
students.
The most popular reading workshop model in the U.S. is Calkins'
Units of Study for Teaching Reading.
(While Calkins is mentioned in California's grant application, the state is
including the method-rather than
the Units of Study specifically-as an
example of best practice, Murchison
said.)
Calkins' workshop model has recently come under fire from a group
of reading researchers, who reviewed
the materials in a report for the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners.
They determined that while the program would likely keep successful
readers on track, it didn't have the
explicit practice in foundational skills
or the opportunities to build knowledge that would support struggling
readers.
The Teachers College Reading and
Writing Project published a rebuttal
to the evaluation, arguing that the
review didn't consider critical information, including student achievement results, and claiming that the
researchers involved were skewed
against balanced literacy.
As for Reading Recovery, research
has shown that overall, students
make gains in this program. But
other researchers have found that
the lowest-performing students have
been excluded from some of these

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analyses. Reading Recovery lessons
do include phonics instruction, but
they also teach that students can figure out what words say by relying on
other "cues," like clues from pictures
or sentence structure.
Jeff Williams, a Reading Recovery
teacher in the Solon school district
in Ohio, said in an interview with
Education Week last year that having students predict, rather than
sound out, words in a text can be a
useful tool for orienting students
to how print works. "When it's in
isolation and we just say arbitrarily,
'This shape makes this sound,' that's
a little abstract for little kids," Williams said.
But DePole, of Decoding Dyslexia
California, worries that districts
may not be aware of how these programs' instruction could fail dyslexic students.
In developing the state literacy
plan, the California department of
education is conducting needs assessments with districts. The forms
ask school systems to rate their own
progress against literacy goals and
list the approaches that they use.
"It has been our experience that
many [local education agencies] are
unfamiliar with the California Dyslexia Guidelines and the sciencebased, structured literacy approach
that it recommends as best practices
for, not only students with dyslexia,
but all students," said DePole, in the
statement.
"DDCA is concerned about the
potential quality of data that will be
collected from these Needs Assessments if we are asking our state's
LEAs [i.e., local education agencies]
to self-rate themselves against the
California Dyslexia Guidelines."
Murchison said she hopes that the
state literacy team "grapples with"
the research base on reading as they
build out the state literacy plan.
"That said, I think California has
a really strong curricular framework
that really balances the importance
of foundations skills, reading comprehension, and effective expression," Murchison said. "I think that
will really be the basis for where
we're headed."

There's a real
concern that there's
a drift away from
systematic, explicit
teaching of
foundational skills
[in California].
It feels almost like
Groundhog Day
in going back to
these reading wars."
BILL LUCIA
President of EdVoice

Keith Bishop/Getty and Education Week

California Literacy Plan Piques Advocate Concerns

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - February 12, 2020

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