Education Week - March 6, 2019 - 18

COMMENTARY

Getty

The Problem With
Literacy Programs

By Mike Schmoker
cautionary tale: Not long
ago, I was assisting a
school district that had
adopted a prominently endorsed literacy program.
Our work began with a review of the program, which
had an unassailable conceptual base. Yet as several of us examined
it, we noticed some profound shortcomings: The
program abounded in minutiae, low-level worksheets, and excessive skills instruction, leaving
little time for reading, discussion, and writing.
Moreover, its highly scripted lessons were patently misconceived-the content and assessments were misaligned with the unfocused, haphazardly assembled array of (so-called) "learning
objectives." In other words, the lessons lacked
the most obvious elements of good teaching. For
all this, the program's visiting consultants had
recently doubled down on their insistence that
it had to be followed to the letter.
Here's where it gets interesting. Our concerns
led to conversations with the program's highestranking official and one of its prominent endorsers. Point by point, they conceded that our
perceptions were accurate, that the exigencies
of program development had led to significant
gaps between the program's initial conception
and its actual teaching materials. To their credit,
they urged us-contrary to the company's onsite consultants-to replace large portions of the
program with those elements it lacked. On our
own, they said, we should include more purposeful reading, high-quality books, discussion, and
explicit writing instruction.
This wasn't my first such experience. Over the
years, my colleagues and I have made similarly
damning discoveries about other nationally
prominent literacy and curricular products.
When pressed, many of their creators would
admit to the inadequacies. One highly respected
expert told me that not one of these literacy programs meets the criteria most essential to English/language arts and literacy curricula.
Given the supreme importance of literacy to
academic and life success, what should we learn
from this-and what should we do about it?
First, we must reckon with the fact that even
popular, highly praised commercial programs
often lack a robust evidence base. That's because
they are deficient in precisely those aspects
most critical to acquiring the ability to read,
write, and speak well. Instead, they abound in
busywork-worksheets, group activities, and
multiple-choice exercises. Until this changes, we
should build our own English/language arts and
literacy curricula-or demand that publishers
and philanthropy-backed programs meet the following parameters in key areas (most of which
apply across the curriculum):

18 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 6, 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Reading. For beginning readers, we need to

start with a solid, intensive phonics regimen.
That's indispensable. At the same time, we
need to remember that phonics instruction is
not, as Daniel Willingham recently wrote, a
"literacy program." I share his concern that
phonics can be overemphasized at the expense
of the "lifeblood" of literacy-abundant
amounts of reading, speaking, and writing in
all disciplines. Even before students fully
master phonics-based decoding, they should be
reading-and listening to-large amounts of
fiction and nonfiction.

Even before students fully
master phonics-based
decoding, they should be
reading-and listening to-
large amounts of fiction and
nonfiction."
As literacy expert Timothy Shanahan points
out, nothing consolidates fledgling decoding
skills like actual reading and reading along as
the teacher reads aloud. For experts like Shanahan and Richard Allington, students should be
reading for at least an hour a day, across subject
areas. We're not even close to such a target in
most schools. Without this, many students never
acquire the knowledge and vocabulary essential
to fluency and reading comprehension. Curriculum and program developers should conduct an
honest audit of how many quality books and
texts students are actually reading each week,
in every course. Such audits typically reveal a
startling paucity of these texts.

Discussion. Students should frequently engage

in whole-class, full-participation discussions,
debates, and seminars about what they read,
starting in the early grades. They need regular,
explicit instruction in how to speak clearly,
audibly, and with civility in every subject and
grade level. When I do demonstration lessons for
teachers, it is often apparent that students aren't
being taught these vital communication skills.

Writing. Students need to be writing about what
they read almost daily for mostly higher-order
purposes, for example, to analyze or compare

literary and historical figures, events, and
concepts; to explain, make arguments, and
justify interpretations. This daily written
work-which need not always be collected or
scored-should be the basis for longer, more
formal papers. And it's high time we built
specifications for the number and length of
major writing assignments into every subjectarea curriculum.

Explicit literacy instruction. All students must

be taught how to read increasing amounts of
grade-level text in each discipline. Teachers
should routinely provide scaffolding that
includes embedded vocabulary instruction and
background knowledge prior to every reading.
They should do step-by-step modeling of
purposeful, analytic reading (which varies
according to purpose and subject). Students
should practice analytic reading-by
underlining, annotating, or taking notes-
followed by "checks for understanding," as the
teacher monitors and adjusts instruction to
ensure that students are successfully
comprehending and analyzing text. Such efforts
raise students' ability to comprehend
challenging text by multiple grade levels.
Discussion and writing should be taught just as
explicitly and frequently.
In addition, many programs should shed
their prejudice against well-structured,
whole-class teaching. As recently reported in
Education Week, there has been a precipitous
rise in small-group instruction. Some amount
of this can be useful, but as Shanahan and
I have discussed, many small-group lessons
could be taught just as effectively to an entire
class, with an exponential increase in teacher
contact time. The encroachment of smallgroup instruction has meant that students
now spend disconcerting amounts of time at
independent learning "centers." The value of
these is greatly inflated: Their prevalence
helps account for Michael Ford and Michael
Opitz's finding that students spend record
amounts of time on "cut, color, and paste activities." They estimate that only about onethird of the elementary "literacy block" has
any academic value.
As commercial, philanthropic, or district entities gear up to develop or improve literacy
and curricular programs, we must demand
that they honor the above criteria. Because
if they do, make no mistake-swift, significant improvements will ensue in all academic
areas. n
MIKE SCHMOKER is an author, speaker, and consultant.
His books include FOCUS, 2nd Edition (ASCD, 2018) and
Leading with FOCUS (ASCD, 2016).

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