Reading: Clarity First, May 20, 2008
Saturday, May 31, 2008

Clarity First

Clarity First

by Linda Perlstein
“Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law are not reading any better than those who don't participate, according to a U.S. government report.”
 “A $1 billion-a-year reading program that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education plan doesn't have much impact on the reading skills of the young students it's supposed to help, a long-awaited federal study shows.”
 Well, not exactly.
When a Department of Education study of Reading First was released this month, several stories led by asserting that children’s reading skills did not improve under the program. The ledes above, from two of the nation’s biggest papers, were representative.
 But not accurate. The study assessed only the reading comprehension skills of Reading First students (compared to children at schools, in the same districts, that did not receive Reading First money). Reading First funds are aimed at improving the five components of reading instruction laid out by the National Reading Panel: phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. While the study talks about instructional time devoted to various skills increasing, the only one it attempted to measure was comprehension.
 Granted, comprehension is the end goal of reading instruction. It is, however, not all that’s being taught in first through third grades, the targeted demographic of this study. In fact, as shown by Dibels tests, many states have shown improvement in their students’ phonemic awareness (phonics and phonemic awareness perhaps being easier to teach than comprehension).
Some, but not all, articles that failed to be clear up high about the report’s sole emphasis on comprehension did so later in the story. Some did not. Either way, the damage was done. When headline writers, opinion writers and joke writers took these stories—especially the ledes—and ran with them, the misleading assertions were multiplied.
 “No Child Left Behind reading program is failing,” one headline said. “Study: Bush administration's reading program hasn't helped,” said another. Even Jay Leno took a jab in one of his monologues. “Well, a federal study released today shows that President Bush’s $1 billion a year Reading First program has done nothing to increase the reading skills of young students,” he said. “However, his Oil Company First program—going like gangbusters.”
 I’m hardly a Bush administration apologist, and I think Reading First and the curricula it supports have plenty of problems. I don’t mean to understate the significance of the report’s findings, or the importance of reading comprehension. In fact, I have all sorts of theories and story ideas about why and how reading comprehension is lacking in schools—call or e-mail me if you want to hear them.
But that’s not the point here. It would have been easy to be precise about what this report said. Take the two ledes up top. They could have been improved by simple changes: “Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law are not understanding what they read any better than those who don't participate...” “A $1 billion-a-year reading program that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education plan doesn't have much impact on the reading comprehension skills of the young students it's supposed to help...”
A reference to the dry concept of “reading comprehension,” one reporter told me, would have sent readers right to the sports page. But I’ll take boringly precise over misleadingly sweeping any day.

Contact EWA public editor Linda Perlstein for help at lperlstein@ewa.org or 410-539-2464.