The Emperor Has No Clothes

The emperor has no clothes, and finally there are villagers who are brave enough to come forward and tell him about it. The Department of Education was sold a complete suit to parade to all the state level education departments concerning scientifically based reading programs and assessment. True, Secretary Spellings now knows about Edward J. Kame’enui and his ties with one of the publishing companies that provided reading materials for public schools in the United States.

Then we find out that Joseph Torgesen, a professor at Florida State University as well as a frequently sought-out national expert on reading, is a consultant for the very same publishers that he is touting as fitting the specifications of scientifically based reading programs. And finally it seems that the very people who developed the DIBELS assessment were also used as consultants with Reading First, helping with its design and presented at the national Reading Leadership Academies.

I have to admit that, as a classroom teacher, I was excited when I was told that the school would be getting a reading program that had been proven get results. It would be systematic. It would help all the students. The assessments would be state of the art and would help me to differentiate and align my instruction to my students’ needs. I anticipated the opening of the new books as I would Christmas morning when I was 5. I went to school the first day that the new reading materials were available; I opened the box… and found a shiny new basal reader. Nothing was new. Correction, nothing was new for the students. The teachers got a section of the manual that tells them how the publishing company used research to write the program.

The teacher manual that used to come in two sections was now in six. There were more ancillary materials. Skills were tied to the state test. But there were no guarantees that this program would work any better than the last book. There was no magical sequence to the skills or stories in the book. In fact, if there is a child in the classroom that does not read on grade level, the reading program would automatically make them unsuccessful since all the stories have a readability level of being on grade level. This is true of all the elementary level reading series. Classroom teachers had been sold a bill of goods and we had no way to return them. In fact, our state statutes were changed so that the basal materials had to be purchased and used in the classrooms. The choice of using or not using the materials had been taken away from us at the classroom level.

So the reading materials were no different, maybe the assessments that were required would be different. Surely those in power would see that the school or district already had assessments in place that were adequate. Instead we were given DIBELS, a 3 minute assessment that would tell us all we needed to know about a child’s reading ability. This test came to be given in addition to all the other assessments that we give in the classroom. Can we get measures of fluency and rate of reading from other measures in our classroom? Certainly. But do these other assessments come from the advisors to Reading First? No. Wait. The same people who advise using DIBELS are the people who developed it.

There seems to be just a handful of people who are driving the direction of reading in the United States. We can see clearly from the classrooms that the “scientifically based” reading is just a repackaging of the basal reading programs with a section that shows that systematic teaching of phonics works. We can see from the classroom that too many different kinds of assessments are being handed down to us without a rationale or showing us how to fit these into our classrooms. We have seen the emperor naked, and seen it that way for a long time. No one seems to ask us, though. We are just classroom teachers.