is another piece of this flatlining story that we must acknowledge. When NCLB was enacted in 2001, many schools reacted by cutting time devoted to science and social studies to increase time for the assessed areas of ELA and mathematics. Researcher Jennifer McMurrer (2007) notes there was a “47 percent reduction in class time devoted to subjects beyond math and reading” (as cited in Hirsch, 2018, p. 61). By increasing our efforts in the name of literacy, did we see any substantive changes in proficiency? No. And this reality should cause us to re-examine everything.
Continually stagnant rates of proficiency when many schools substantially increased time devoted to ELA clearly tell us that the way we are currently addressing literacy simply is not paying adequate dividends. Hirsch (2018) suggests that our current approach must be a “misconceived scheme,” as “the ‘accountability’ principles based on [it] have not induced real progress in higher-level reading competence” (p. 28).
This brings to mind the familiar definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein but actually written by novelist Rita Mae Brown (1983)—doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Since the 1960s, education communities have been acting insanely. The “reading wars” debate about the best way to teach reading (whole language versus phonics) did not help, nor did the billions of dollars in spending authorized through NCLB’s literacy program Reading First, nor did the major reallocation of our most precious resource, time. We desperately need some new insights and actions around literacy. As professor of education David Steiner (2017) asserts:
Stagnant student performance that leaves some 60 percent of high-school graduates unprepared for postsecondary training or schooling, the persistence of racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, and the seeming futility of reform efforts all suggest that American public education is badly in need of a new path forward. (p. 11)
Stagnant rates of literacy stifle schools’ ability to meet their modern mission. As assessment expert Rick Stiggins (2017) notes, schools could historically function as a mechanism for “sorting students into the various levels of our social and economic system” (p. 19). But that was the old mission. Today, schools are charged with “mak[ing] sure ‘every student succeeds’ at mastering fundamental reading, writing, mathematics, problem solving, and other proficiencies that they will need in this increasingly complex and fast-changing world” (Stiggins, 2017, p. 21). Schools cannot fulfill this mission with current approaches.
In a nutshell, the time has come for us to forthrightly address the prevailing literacy failure rate in our schools. Many school practitioners involved with aspects of reading and literacy across their curriculum probably know in their hearts that we have been nursing a failing mission. Administrators, principals, teachers, parents, and certainly the students themselves are aware of the predicament students are in when they can’t, don’t, or won’t read. Too many of our students find themselves in this situation. Yet the same inadequate literacy instruction prevails, year after year.
We talk about the problem of failed reading scores all the time, we think about it, and we try to accommodate it, but to positively address it requires a massive shift. No one has taken this disaster in hand by moving the multiple, necessary working parts from the community, district, school, and home. We can’t afford to be naïve about how radical the necessary changes are. We compare the shift to the children’s game Fruit Basket Upset; in the game when a player calls out the words of the game’s name, everyone must move to a different seat. We’re talking about changes that impact existing schedules, curriculum, instruction, and assessment structures throughout the schooling community. A credible revamping of the literacy conundrum will take a village. There are already pockets of success in literacy achievement that are often attributed to superintendents with the right goals for their students, principals who champion literacy goals, extraordinary reading directors leading with common sense, and naturally, dedicated teachers who live by Rick DuFour’s mantra, “Whatever it takes” (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Karhanek, 2004). Like them, we believe in a fail-proof school, a safe haven to nurture literate young people and ready them for the ever-changing, ever-challenging world that awaits them. We strive to create schools where everyone can read fast, write well, speak clearly, and listen attentively, a backpack they can then take along on their life journeys.
Researchers Jared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, and Robin McClellan (2019) conclude, “Alarm bells are ringing—as they should be—because we’ve gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read, yet those evidence-based reading practices appear to be missing from most classrooms.” How do we bring real change to an enormous, powerful, and deeply entrenched institution like K–12 education in the United States? This book presents the solution.
The Solution
While the broad K–12 education community is just truly beginning to acknowledge the reality of long-term flatlining reading performance, the research community has been waiting for educators to wake up. According to Myracle et al. (2019), “Literacy experts have been recommending the same research-based approaches since the 2000 National Reading Panel report, yet there still aren’t systemic mechanisms for ensuring this information reaches the educators who set instructional directions,” with “systemic failures having left educators overwhelmingly unaware of the research on how kids learn to read.” Education journalist and author Natalie Wexler (2018) claims that much of our current approach is based on assumptions about how students learn that research has disproven, such as the need to teach lists of vocabulary words. We will delve into research throughout this book. The education world, however, hasn’t yet paid much attention to these findings (Wexler, 2018).
The good news is that there is a substantial body of evidence, which we will share more fully throughout these pages, suggesting that we can address this phenomenon in knowledgeable ways. But it will require reframing our approach to literacy acquisition in terms of both policy and practice. Reading and writing success, as we will show, is fueled by the very performances we desire—that is, lots of reading and writing. But teachers must orchestrate reading and writing throughout the K–12 instructional day. This is no easy task. Our mission is big. Are we ready to finally end the reading wars, truly rely on evidence, and transition to ways of advancing literacy that actually pay dividends? If we are to have any chance of taking more students to a higher level of performance, substantive changes in our approach are required.
Source: © Mark Anderson, www.andertoons.com. Used with permission.
A Distillation of Reading Comprehension
We clearly want students to continue to grow in their ability to comprehend successively more difficult texts. Yet before we go further, let’s nail down exactly what reading comprehension is. For something so central to all academic success, remarkably, many of us, as educators, struggle to define it or explain it in any detail greater than saying, “It’s when you understand what you read.” How students learn to read may well be the most thoroughly researched area in education, yet our explanations of reading comprehension are tragically simplistic. In fact, at times, comprehension has been known as a phantom skill (Fogarty, 2007), meaning that we talk about it, reference it, write about it, and even test, retest, and score students on it, yet we seldom, if ever, define it succinctly. In short, comprehension is the ability to make sense of text by processing the code of language, understand its meaning, and integrate it with prior knowledge.
Nebulous definitions of comprehension hint at a fundamental problem that we must resolve if we are to ever have a highly literate populace. If we have a limited ability to describe reading comprehension, then it is highly unlikely that we will effectively guide students to master the ability to decipher meaning from coded language with consistency and precision.
