The first week after becoming president, George W. Bush sent Congress an
              educational reform "blueprint" that included a reading initiative mirroring policies
              that supposedly produced a Texas educational "miracle" when Bush was
              governor. 

              Bush promised to eliminate the nation's "reading deficit" by "ensuring that every
              child can read by the third grade." To do so, he proposed applying "the findings
              of years of scientific research on reading" to "all schools in America." Bush
              stressed that these research findings were "now available," especially in the
              recently published report of the National Reading Panel (NRP), which
              reviewed "100,000 studies on how students learn to read" and provided a
              guide for "scientifically-based reading instruction." Bush said his legislation
              would provide funds for reading instruction — but only if the instruction were
              "scientifically based." 

              Never has this nation had a more scientifically-minded president. 

              Shortly after his reading proposal, Bush rejected a policy for reducing carbon
              dioxide emissions in power plants because, he said, the science is "still
              incomplete." He also terminated plans to reduce the amount of arsenic in
              drinking water because, he said, he wanted to determine if the proposed
              reductions were "supported by the best available science." He went on to
              withdraw the United States from the international agreement to reduce global
              warming because, he said, the "state of scientific knowledge of the causes of,
              and solutions to global climate change" was "incomplete." 

              Although many have questioned Bush's intellectual ability to do the job, these
              decisions demonstrate that we have a president who evidently has studied an
              array of scientific literature and has been able to formulate various policy
              judgments based on the empirical evidence. One might conclude that the
              reading research must indeed be sound for Bush to have given it his one
              empirical imprimatur. 

              BUSH AND 'THE BASICS'

              The reading education Bush has in mind can be gleaned from remarks made in
              1996 when he advised Texas teachers to get "back to the basics" — that is,
              return to traditional education that focuses on basic skills, basic facts, and a
              traditional curriculum, and reject all classroom reforms that include children's
              perspectives and thereby reduce the authority of the teacher. 

              "The building blocks of knowledge," Bush explained, "were the same yesterday
              and will be the same tomorrow. We do not need trendy new theories or fancy
              experiments or feel-good curriculums. The basics work. If drill gets the job
              done, then rote is right." 

              Although advocates of what is now being called "scientifically-based" reading
              instruction might take issue with the "rote" comment, Bush accurately described
              the essentials of this teaching. "Trendy" is code for whole language, cooperative
              learning, meaning-emphasis learning (reading instruction that stresses
              comprehension and teaches skills as part of students' reading for meaning), and
              critical literacy (reading instruction that examines and questions values,
              assumptions, and ideologies in written material) — that is, anything that is an
              alternative to the "basics." 

              "Basics," meanwhile, is code for beginning reading instruction that emphasizes
              exclusively the explicit, direct, and systematic instruction of skills and minimizes
              the need for meaning and comprehension until the skills are learned. Under such
              an approach, teachers follow preestablished reading programs that move
              children through a step-wise process from small parts of language to larger
              ones. While advocates of this instruction insist it is "balanced," that is, instruction
              balances reading for meaning with learning skills for reading, a close look
              reveals that the comprehension end of the seesaw remains close to the ground
              for a long time. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

              THE SCIENTIFIC ARISTOCRACY

              Demands for "scientifically based" reading education precede the current
              legislation. Since the mid-1990s, reading research funded by the National
              Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a branch of the
              National Institutes of Health, has been identified as the scientific gold standard
              justifying scripted skills-emphasis instruction (that is, instruction using a reading
              program that has prescribed, sequential lessons that teachers and students must
              follow). The "Chief" (actual title) of the reading research division, Reid Lyon,
              has been a persistent spokesman for scripted instruction in policy hearings
              across the country. Lyon and NICHD-supported research-ers have usually had
              an easy time doing so because alternative views at these hearings have been
              few, if any. Lyon has been a chief adviser to Bush and Secretary of Education
              Rod Paige, and could become, as the Baltimore Sun reported, "the
              administration's reading chief." In the Bush reading legislation, the reading
              division of NICHD is included in the processes for disseminating information
              about the reading legislation, for setting standards for "scientific" research, and
              for reviewing and judging applications. 

              Last year, NICHD arranged for Congress to "request" that it form a panel to
              report on the best scientific information on reading. Given NICHD's dominant
              role in selecting the panel and administrating its work, its conclusions were
              predictable. Representative of the media reports announcing the panel's findings
              was Education Week, whose headline read, "Reading Panel Urges Phonics For
              All in K-6." Although the report urged more than phonics, the headline was
              generally correct because the panel stressed the need for an early mastery of
              sound-symbol connections and similar skills through explicit, systematic, direct
              instruction. Implicit in the panel's report and explicit in most media reports was
              the rejection of a whole language approach to literacy
              (www.nationalreadingpanel.org). 

              In Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children (Heinemann,
              2000), I reviewed the NICHD reading research and related studies and
              documented the shoddy research in this work and its failure to support
              skills-emphasis instruction. With the publication of the National Reading Panel
              report, nothing has been added that refutes my critique. Before providing a few
              illustrations of the report's deficiencies, I want to return to Bush's description of
              the report. 

              THE '100,000' STUDIES

              Bush's legislative proposal states that the panel reviewed 100,000 studies on
              reading, a number that has been repeated in the media. Unmentioned is the fact
              that the number does not remotely describe the actual number of studies used in
              the panel's analysis. 

              The panel did begin by looking at the research studies on reading and found
              that approximately 100,000 had been published since 1966. However, the
              panel used several criteria for extensive pruning of this number. For example,
              the studies had to deal with reading development from preschool through high
              school, and therefore excluded studies on many reading topics such as literacy
              skills in occupations or brain functioning and literacy activity. The studies also
              had to meet the Panel's definition of "scientific research," which was limited
              almost entirely — and narrowly — to quantitative, experimental studies. 

              Perhaps most important, the panel used only studies relating to the instructional
              topics which the panel majority had decided were key areas of good reading
              instruction. As Joanne Yatvin, an Oregon principal, wrote in her "Minority
              View" dissenting from the report's conclusions, "From the beginning, the Panel
              chose to conceptualize and review the field narrowly, in accordance with the
              philosophical orientation and research interests of the majority of its members." 

              This questionable procedure eliminated a variety of important instructional
              issues contained in the research literature, such as the relationship of writing and
              reading, meaning-emphasis instruction, the interconnection of emotions and
              literacy learning, or approaches for responding to children's individual literacy
              needs. This panel of experts had no qualms about exercising a priori its
              judgment on what is central to successful reading instruction, and ignoring
              contrary views of other leading reading researchers on what comprises the best
              way to learn to read. The panel knew best. 

              After pruning the "100,000" studies, the numbers that remained were: 52
              studies on phonemic awareness; 38 studies for phonics; 14 for fluency; and 203
              for 16 categories of comprehension instruction, that is about 12 or 13 studies
              on average in each category. Certainly these numbers are sufficient for drawing
              some reasonable conclusions. But they are far from the much-heralded
              "100,000 Studies" and, most importantly, not sufficient numbers for establishing
              restrictive national policy. There were members of Bush's education advisory
              committee who were familiar with the NRP report and knew the 100,000 figure
              was a misrepresentation. But given their interest in foisting their brand of
              teaching on the nation, it is not surprising that no one told the President that the
              figure would mislead the public and Congress. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

              APPRAISING THE RESEARCH

              The primary method of evaluating the research was a meta-analysis, a statistical
              method that pools a group of studies and estimates the average effect something
              has on something else, in this case, the effect of aspects of instruction on
              achievement. A meta-analysis can provide useful information, but it also can
              have substantial deficiencies, such as not uncovering the quality of and
              reasoning in the studies pooled. Although the panel's conclusions were derived
              from its meta-analysis, its appraisal of the quality of the research and its
              reasoning on behalf of its a priori decisions about instruction can be gleaned
              from the report's detailed descriptions and interpretations of a number of
              studies. Because of space limitations, I can only discuss two that appear at the
              beginning of the report's first section. I believe they are representative of the
              panel's entire appraisal of its studies. 

              CORRELATION AND CAUSE

              The panel concluded that "results of the experimental studies allow the Panel to
              infer that [phonological awareness] training was the cause of improvement in
              students'" reading. (Phonological awareness refers to the ability to separate and
              manipulate speech sounds mentally and orally, as when blending or separating
              phonemes in order to identify words.) The report states, for example, that one
              study1 showed that [phonological awareness] was the top predictor along with
              letter knowledge" (knowing the names of letters) of later reading achievement.
              The panel's description suggests that these two predictors are "causes." 

              However, the accuracy of this conclusion becomes questionable when one
              includes the third strongest predictor of reading achievement. The panel did not
              mention this predictor, possibly because it has no apparent relationship to
              written language. That predictor is the degree of success on a "finger
              localization" test, in which a child whose vision is blocked identifies which of her
              or his fingers an adult has touched. Despite its predictive correlation with future
              reading achievement, finger localization skill in itself could not be considered
              "causal" to learning to read, and no educator would suggest finger location
              training as a beginning reading method. 

              Zip codes are also good "predictors" of academic achievement. A student's zip
              code (an indication of family income and education, quality of schools in the
              area, a child's access to educational experiences, etc.) is strongly correlated
              with future school success. However, this correlation does not make zip codes
              a cause of academic achievement. Unfortunately, given the failure of some
              reading researchers to understand the difference between correlation and
              causation, it is possible that one of them might concoct an experiment to see if
              the reading achievement of children in a poor, urban area with terrible schools
              improves if they are given the zip code of children in an affluent, suburban area
              with excellent schools. 

              The NRP report also fails to mention that the researchers who did the study
              offered an explicit caveat about confusing correlation with causation. Yes, they
              did find that letter knowledge was a strong predictor of future reading, but they
              emphasized its predictive strength did not mean that beginning readers needed
              to know letter names in order to get off to a fast, secure start in reading. 

              Although "knowledge of letter names has been traditionally considered the
              single best predictor of reading achievement, there appears to be no evidence
              that letter-name knowledge facilitates reading acquisition," the researchers said
              in their report. 

              Letter-name knowledge is likely to be part of and represent experience with
              early written language that contributes to literacy attainment. That knowledge
              — like the knowledge of various skills, such as phonological awareness — can
              be considered to be a "marker" of these experiences and accomplishments.
              None of this complexity and these distinctions are captured in the report's
              simplistic summary that the study "showed that phonological awareness was the
              top predictor along with letter knowledge." 
 
 
 
 
 
 

              NO NEED FOR SKILLS TRAINING

              A striking example of congruence between the panel's interpretation of the
              research and its a priori conclusions about the best reading instruction is its
              description of a study supposedly showing that a phonological awareness
              "treatment group" was "compared to one no-treatment group" and the "effect
              size was impressive."2 This provides evidence, wrote the panel, that the training
              program being studied could be "used effectively in American classrooms." 

              This group comparison was correct as far as it went, but the report did not tell
              readers that there were two control groups, not one. Besides the one control
              the panel described, another control group learned phonological awareness in
              an informal, "as needed" way similar to the way skills are taught in a whole
              language approach. In other words, we have in this study an opportunity to
              compare children learning these phonological awareness skills either through an
              explicit skills training program or an implicit, as-needed, approach. Although
              this comparison would have allowed the panel to delve into the question of how
              these skills should be taught and learned, it did not do so. Therefore, we will. 

              At the end of the school year, the skills training group did significantly better on
              phonological tests, but the researchers found there were "no significant
              differences between the [skills training and implicit teaching] groups on the tests
              of word reading and spelling." (Interestingly, the NRP report neglected to
              mention this finding.) The researchers who did the study observed, moreover,
              that "the significantly superior scores achieved by the training group in this study
              on tasks of phonemic awareness suggest that this group should also achieve
              higher scores on the reading tasks, but this was not in fact the case." Again, the
              conclusions were not quoted in the NRP report. 

              The researchers went on to propose that the "writing experiences" of the
              informal learning group might have accounted for their reading success. On
              average, they "wrote longer stories than either" the training group or the
              "normal" kindergarten group. These conclusions too were omitted from the
              report. 

              In other words, the study showed that children can learn rhyme, syllable
              synthesis, word reading, and spelling without needing an explicit skills training
              program. Furthermore, extensive writing activities are likely to be effective for
              attaining the literacy knowledge for which the researchers tested. This study
              also lends some support to a holistic written language approach insofar as it
              indicates that phonological skills can be readily learned within a rich array of
              reading and writing activities. And it further demonstrates that there not only is
              no need for a step-wise approach to literacy learning, but that such an
              approach can reduce time spent on essential and productive literacy activities,
              such as "writing experiences." 

              THE 'SCIENTIFIC METHOD'

              Despite the lack of scientific evidence for a heavy emphasis on direct instruction
              of skills in beginning reading instruction, "scientifically-based" appears 31 times
              in the House version of Bush's reading bill and almost as many in the Senate
              version. To be sure that no one reading the bills is confused about the meaning
              of "reading," its "components" are enumerated in a list that starts with phonemic
              awareness and is followed by phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and, at the
              end of the list, reading comprehension. 

              For skills-first proponents, "comprehension" is always part of their definition of
              learning to read, but like this definition, the "components," are always designed
              to be learned in a sequential, stepwise, systematic, script-ed, managerial
              instructional program. The list never runs in the opposite direction, and the
              components never are described as interactive from the start of learning to
              read. 

              The judicial coup d' tat that brought us the president has many permutations,
              one of which is seizing the power to design and enforce the standards of literacy
              education that will coerce schools into using "scientifically-based" reading
              programs, especially if they hope to receive federal money. In pursuing and
              exercising this power, talk about "scientifically-based" instruction has been no
              more than a string of infomercials justifying the legitimacy of that power. In
              legislative hearings, critical voices are locked out. But such is the way of the
              "scientific method" in the back rooms of Washington these days. 

              Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who lives in Ithaca, N.Y.
              (gscoles@yahoo.com). He has a new book forthcoming from Heinemann, Great
              Unmentionables: What National Reading Reports and Reading Legislation Don't Tell You 

              END NOTES

              1. Share et al., 1984. "Sources of individual differences in reading acquisition,"
              Journal of Educational Psychology, 1309-1324. 

              2. Brennan & Ireson, 1997. "Training phonological awareness," Reading and
              Writing, 241-263.