I’ve been holding off on commenting on last week’s NY Times’ frontpager that conflated controversies over the implementation of the federal Reading First law with attempts to stoke the flames of the mostly settled “reading wars.” But I’ve kept my powder dry long enough. Alexander Russo, who blogs at “This Week in Education” on the Education Week site, is thrilled that the story made it into the Times because he sees it as vindication that this is the “BIG STORY” he thought it was all along. Russo, who though he lives here in New York sees himself as an inside-the-beltway mover and shaker, got all het up about what he considered to be a big, hot, dripping scandal involving politicians and bureaucrats in a whirlwind of audits, investigations, hearings, and conflicts of interest. That is a story. It’s just not an education story. Whatever the outcome of all of that activity, the central issue is not what’s the science and pedagogy of early reading. The central issue is actually federalism and education and the limits of policy issued from Washington D.C. That’s a topic for a wonkapalooza at a fancy Washington, D.C. hotel or the American Enterprise Institute. And Mike Petrilli over at the Fordham Foundation entered into that discussion just yesterday with this post. But it’s not really something that most parents of children learning to read care too much about.

The New York Times story was set in Madison, Wisconsin, which has long been known in education circles as a redoubt for the true believers in whole language. Whole language emphasizes to students the value of context and intuition in learning to read. So, the story opens with a kid who encounters the word “pea” and reads it as "pumpkin."

The teacher could have responded by saying, “yes, the word pumpkin does start with the same letter and sound, ‘puh,’ but what is the second letter and what do you know about its sound?” That would have emphasized that the letters matter in words. Instead, the teacher in the story asks, “is the word long enough to be pumpkin?” Then the kid gets it. What has the kid learned? Short words that start with “p” and are likely to be a kind of food are probably the word “pea” and longer food words that start with “p” are probably pumpkin. Context is certainly one source of information in reading—we all use it, when we’re reading about a subject we don’t know very much about. But it’s a weaker source of information about words than the letters the word contains. Teaching kids that phonics—the letters and sounds of words—is the most important, though not the only, tool for learning new words is downplayed by the whole language crowd. The whole language folks also overestimate the value of guessing at words. Lots of research shows that guessing doesn't work too well. The language is simply too rich and varied for guessing to be very fruitful or efficient and if reading is not fluent and efficient it's very difficult to get the meaning. So, in a way, while believers in whole language stress the importance of comprehension, the relatively weak word identification skills they rely on undercuts comprehension.

Having said all that, the folks at the Teachers Applying Whole Language listserv complain, rightly, that the Times article doesn't say what the teacher featured in the lead of the Times' story did next. Had guessing not worked, she might have suggested he look at the letters.

The controversy over Reading First involves allegations that the feds favored certain publications or curricula, something that's not allowed. The whole language crowd complains, and the Times article falsely repeats, that the feds demanded that schools “drill” kids in phonics. (Drill is the weasel word journalists and anti-phonics folks use to denigrate phonics, even though there are many ways to build phonics knowledge that do not involve memory drills.) In fact, the Reading First law is based on the National Reading Panel report of 2000 and the even more influential in my mind, National Science Foundation “Preventing Reading Failure” report of 1998. Both reports are widely accepted among reading experts. Here's what the National Reading Panel found:

...the most effective way to teach children to read is through instruction that includes a combination of methods.The panel determined that effective reading instruction includes teaching children to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words (phonemic awareness), teaching them that these sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet which can then be blended together to form words (phonics), having them practice what they've learned by reading aloud with guidance and feedback (guided oral reading), and applying reading comprehension strategies to guide and improve reading comprehension.

I would have hoped that the New York Times’ author would have been familiar with those two critical documents and have read them. That way she could have been better equipped to consider the value of the teaching methods she saw in Madison and also put the views of critics and proponents into a more useful context. But I also thought the article fell short because it was mostly about politics. The Bush Administration is under fire from many quarters and rightly so. But for the sake of balance it would have been good to point out that the General Accounting Office and the Center on Education Policy (an independent group, headed by a Democrat, Jack Jennings, a former Capitol Hill education staffer) found the program to be effective in providing resources to help disadvantaged and low-income kids learn to read.

Lots more commentary and criticism of the article and its aftermath is at EdNews.org, D-Ed Reckoning, Eduwonk, and the listserv for Teachers Applying Whole Language.