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Sixty Years of Reading Research --
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A REPORTER calls to get some background for an article about staff development in language arts. Staff development? We are astonished and delighted that any media outlet -- even this modest local magazine -- actually wants to cover our neglected field. Since our work involves inservice workshops, classroom consulting, and whole-school renewal projects, we're thrilled to talk. We offer quotes, sources, and anecdotes about teacher development efforts around Chicago -- our own and others', modest and ambitious, successes and failures. Then, somewhere in the conversation, the term "whole language" comes up.
"Oh," says the young reporter, as if someone has made a rude noise. "That doesn't work." Her tone is flat and certain.
"What do you mean?" we ask.
"You know," she replies impatiently. "There are no scientific studies that show whole language works."
There's a brief pause while we silently bid farewell to cordiality. "Well, actually, there are lots of scientific studies supporting whole language. As a matter of fact, there are a bunch of them sitting right here on the bookshelf."
"But there aren't any studies. It's just opinions. There's no research to back it up."
Through gritted teeth: "Are you saying that these shelves are actually empty? That these studies weren't published? We'd be glad to start faxing you some summaries."
"No, no, no." Now she's annoyed. "That can't be real research. People have done scientific research and proved that phonics works, not whole language."
Within moments our conversation has foundered on the rocks of educational research. Both parties hang up, peeved and polarized.
If research could actually settle the "great debate" over teaching reading -- and over the broader character of education in America -- the shouting would have died down long ago. In spite of what our reporter friend thinks, the research overwhelmingly favors holistic, literature-centered approaches to reading. Indeed, the proof is massive and overwhelming.
For six decades, leading researchers and writers have steadily produced summaries and meta-analyses that reiterate the key findings of mainstream, long-term research. For example, Constance Weaver has published research summaries on many aspects of progressive, whole-language teaching, in both book and electronic forms.1 Margaret Moustafa has pulled together the findings about the role of phonics in teaching reading.2 For more than 20 years, David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Edythe Holubec have reviewed the hundreds of studies on the collaborative aspects of the progressive classroom.3 Michael Tunnell and James Jacobs surveyed the studies on literature-based reading instruction from 1968 to 1988.4 George Hillocks focused his massive meta-analysis on studies of the teaching of writing.5 And Richard Thompson looked at 40 studies dating back to 1937.6
The most recent volumes of the Annual Summary of Investigations Related to Reading include several studies showing statistically significant test score gains in whole-language classrooms and 15 additional studies validating particular strategies within whole language.7 In our own work, we have tried to connect the research base with the emerging national curriculum standards, as detailed in Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools; Methods That Matter: Six Structures for Best Practice Classrooms; and articles such as "Whole Language Works: Sixty Years of Research."8 Just this past year, Jeff McQuillan's book The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions has offered yet another powerful review of the research on reading instruction, debunking faddish phonics claims and pointing to the strong evidence favoring holistic approaches.9
Of course, we need to learn still more about the detailed mechanics of reading and other thinking processes. We can argue over the degree to which competent readers use letter/sound relationships as they read, as opposed to sampling larger chunks of information and fitting it into a context. No thoughtful progressive teacher would say that readers don't need phonics knowledge. And no thoughtful student of phonics can deny that a reader must consult the wider context of a passage to make meaning. But the large and clear outlines are there: whole language works.
Yet 60 years of research and thousands of studies that resoundingly validate progressive approaches to literacy learning still haven't produced the strong consensus we might expect. In fact, many schoolpeople -- even progressive teachers themselves -- act as though this information didn't exist at all or were somehow unreliable, inconclusive, or tainted. We witness this phenomenon every time the promoters of the latest "breakthrough study" seek to overturn decades of solid, workmanlike research with a faddish, mechanistic gimmick such as "decodable text." Curiously cowed by such dubious "evidence," many educators stand mute even as the preponderance of scientific proof shouts just the contrary. So what's up? Clearly, if a shortage of convincing research is not the main reason that progressive methods have failed to be widely acknowledged or supported, then some large and troubling questions are before us:
There are many ways in which research that confirms good practice comes to be misunderstood, ignored, or subverted. Let's start with some of the factors nearest the surface and work toward the deeper ones. First, there's the fact that the teachers who use these practices haven't spoken up very strongly about the research supporting them. One simple reason for this is that many educators simply don't know their own research heritage. When confronted by the authoritative-sounding claims of citation-spewing opponents, they lack ready access to the huge body of knowledge that supports their own practice. In fact, most teachers, whatever their philosophies, select their actions toward children based not on research but on what they see each day in the classroom and on the beliefs they've acquired through their own culture and education.
This is really no different from parents (no doubt including those who challenge the research on whole language), who don't usually make parenting decisions about bedtime or curfews by consulting academic research. Good teachers chose to teach because of their interest in children, not because they encountered some statistically significant experimental finding. The research is valuable in that it may confirm particular practices or call them into question, but culturally, research is a relative newcomer to the calculus of human decision making.
Further, many teachers, both progressive and traditional, look on social science research with broad and well-merited skepticism. They've seen claims and absolute "proofs" come and go over the years. They're wise to the often tortuous attempts of educational, psychological, and cognitive researchers to cloak themselves in the sometimes ill-fitting garb of "science." They worry that, if researchers don't understand the realities of the classroom, their experiments will not reflect those realities. And they know that, even in the best experimental studies, it's impossible to control all the variables associated with dozens or hundreds of human beings in multiple locations over any appreciable span of time. Instead, many thoughtful teachers have learned to pay more attention to qualitative studies that provide a "thicker," more detailed picture of the classroom. They recognize that there are multiple ways of measuring and evaluating a teaching strategy besides conducting statistical studies with large numbers of children that provide only a very sketchy picture of what any given child actually experienced.
With regard to teachers' lack of outspokenness, whether for good or ill teachers are not usually very political creatures. They focus on the intense and immediate needs of the students in their classrooms and on the concerns of the parents, and they have little time or energy left over to mount campaigns to inform a broader public. Attacks on progressive education, on the other hand, tend to come from policy gurus like William Bennett, Diane Ravitch, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., whose time is fully devoted to the public forum.
Some of these pundits work directly to discredit educational research, and "cultural literacy" guru Hirsch is perhaps the leading debunker. In his latest book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, Hirsch introduces himself as a middle-of-the-roader, a peacemaker, an old lion sadly creaking toward retirement in an era of regrettable polarization. He inveighs against the "selective use of research," decrying the "deplorable development" that "research is being cited as a rhetorical weapon to sustain a sectarian position." Then he goes on to describe progressive education as a cancer that has "metastasized" throughout the schools, a vast "conspiracy" to keep American children stupid and to spawn "chaos." Virtually all American educators, he explains, live in an evil "thoughtworld," where phony research undermines knowledge, repels facts, "quashes" debate, and prevents children from becoming literate. Hirsch repudiates the hundreds of studies cited in the reviews we listed earlier, including all the current national standards projects that were, of course, based on that research. He concludes: "No studies of children's learning in mainstream science support these generalizations. . . . The consensus in research is that [these] recommendations are worst practice, not 'best practice.' "10
In Hirsch's idiosyncratic thoughtworld, "mainstream research" is from outside the mainstream. The only acceptable studies are from outside education, specifically from the fields of neurophysiology, psychometrics, and cognitive psychology. (By Hirsch's logic, "mainstream medical research" would exclude all studies conducted by medical doctors.) Hirsch approvingly cites the research (and lots of opinions) from the interlocking directorate of the right-wing back-to-basics movement: John Saxon, Chester Finn, William Bennett, Diane Ravitch, Jeanne Chall, Charles Sykes. He spends hundreds of pages denigrating "tragic," "harmful," "time-wasting" teaching methods, such as collaborative learning, thematic units, and assessment portfolios, but offers little alternative. Hirsch's own recommended pedagogy is surprisingly thin: "The class period can be formed into a little drama," he suggests, "with a beginning, middle and an end. . . ."11
Hirsch is not the dispassionate, grandfatherly observer of education that he claims, but an aggressive vendor, who sells millions of dollars' worth of books (A Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, What Every First-Grader Should Know, What Every Second-Grader Should Know, and so on) to the schools he vilifies and to the parents whom he encourages to distrust their children's teachers.
The news media are no help, either. Hand-wringing stories about falling test scores provide good headlines. So do politicians' and administrators' declarations that they're going to get tough, crack knuckles, and raise standards. A detailed story about the 20 ways a good teacher makes learning happen in a progressive classroom and how those methods have been statistically validated just might make the feature page -- but only if it includes a sensational twist, like the principal spending the day on the roof if all the kids get 100% on their spelling tests. David Berliner and Gerald Bracey have made a helpful if quixotic hobby out of identifying misinformation in news reports and then campaigning (with little success) to get errors corrected and to see more balanced reporting in the first place.12 When test scores go up, there's a mild ripple, a squib on page 12 with a tone of "Well, maybe, but there are still plenty of problems." When they go down, it's a front-page story.
Whatever the difficulty with delivery of the news, however, we must also reflect on why so many people are indisposed to hear anything positive about schools, and particularly about progressive classrooms. Again, let's start with the simplest cause. Progressive innovations usually change the classroom into something considerably different from what parents remember from their own school days. They worry: Is my child getting what she needs from this stuff? Will I be able to help with the homework? They think: I wasn't taught this way, and I turned out okay! It's not news that people resist change.
Of course, the issues go deeper. Recently, a New York Times editorial writer argued that education has become an ideological battleground because we've lost the comfortable old arena of communism versus capitalism.13 People looking for something wrong need somewhere to duke it out. When politicians seek a "hot" issue, public education usually fits the bill. With education's implications for our children and our property values, most Americans can quickly go round the bend about the quality, or lack of it, of our schools.
Actually, the opposition between conservative and progressive views of education has existed for a long time. Conservatives see children as primarily in need of discipline, while progressives see them as creatures seeking opportunities for expression and initiative. Conservatives look to education mainly to supply basic skills for a competent labor force -- skills taught one at a time and tested by standardized, impersonal instruments -- while progressives want school mainly to nurture active citizens and creative individuals. Conservatives think of education as socializing students to the status quo, while progressives view it as an opportunity to teach students to critique and question the world they've inherited. Many conservatives doubt that public education is even an appropriate domain for government, while progressives see it as the seedbed of democracy.
While it's obvious which side we are on in this debate, we will not try to plumb all the depths or lay out our most cherished arguments here. Rather, we just want to remind people that, when research is touted or when one study is suddenly elevated over decades of previous inquiry, this old, ongoing debate is probably the subtext, and research is not really going to settle it. If people are talking about differing purposes -- and thus differing characteristics -- of education, then each side will find the other's research irrelevant.
The latest stir over tests comparing the performance of U.S. students in math and science with that of students from 20 other countries offers a perfect illustration. Conservative critics immediately cry out for tougher standards. Progressives ask why American technology remains so dominant if our schooling is so poor and propose that one reason is the freedom our students experience. Young people in the other countries are good at tests, Larry Cuban asserts, but it's the American scientists who excel in research and invention.14 Gerald Bracey shows that international comparisons are often not even valid, sometimes matching other countries' 22-year-olds against U.S. high-schoolers.15
Perhaps there's an even deeper reason that people don't want to hear good news about progressive classrooms. The late education writer James Moffett theorized that some parents are unconsciously terrified of their children's dawning independence, as symbolized by their learning to read and write.16 A strong phonics program appeals to these parents because it is the only approach to reading that takes meaning out of the bargain. As long as a child spends most of her time enunciating t's and d's and decoding only synthetic, denatured texts, she will never encounter troubling or dangerous ideas, or begin to think and read for herself. This parallels some parents' preference for grammar drills over writing workshops. If children only do exercises and never write original texts, then they can never utter dangerous ideas on paper. Though Moffett would never have said it so inelegantly, people who want to replace whole, balanced reading programs with phonics-only curricula may unconsciously be holding children back, stunting their growth, and keeping them ignorant.
Looked at through Moffett's lens, the "great debate" isn't a clash over phonics or educational research at all, but rather a symbolic skirmish in the broader culture wars between two opposing camps on matters of teaching and learning, of child development, and of human nature. In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self-actualization. If you believe that books -- especially religious scriptures -- have only one correct meaning that is inherent in the text, you are not going to be very friendly to schools that teach children to explore a wide range of books and ideas, to write and discuss their own responses, to make critical evaluations of what they read, and to develop strong and independent voices as authors.
People may say that this is an oversimplified picture, that each side in the debate actually values some of what the other side advocates, and that good teachers choose approaches to create a balance that works for them. All of this is true, of course. We acknowledge that most good teachers take a "balanced" approach, combining activities that give students voice and choice -- individually and in small and large groups -- with more information and direct instruction on valuable skills and strategies. In fact, many of the studies cited in the research reviews involved classrooms in which the teachers used progressive student-centered strategies along with more traditional teacher-centered instruction.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the debate is that whole language is mischaracterized as merely turning children loose to do their own thing, with no support or guidance from the teacher. In the good whole-language classrooms we've observed, nothing could be further from the truth. Whole language is, in fact, a balanced and mainstream approach to teaching and learning.
Good teachers who "balance" instruction know that one of the most important aspects of teaching is to be a good "kid watcher." Whether in an affluent suburb, a rural community, or the heart of the inner city, good teachers focus on the learner and what she brings to school. Sweeping statements about "the right way" to teach all beginning readers just don't make good sense. If children already have the ability to segment phonemes, why teach it? If, on the other hand, children are unable to hear sounds in words, it is urgent that we help them acquire this necessary skill. If we concentrated on learning, rather than just on teaching, and designed instruction to meet students' needs, we wouldn't be in the predicament that one downstate Illinois teacher reported to us. Her district has mandated direct instruction in "intensive phonics" in all primary grades. This third-grade teacher, under extreme duress, is forced to teach one full hour of phonics a day to children who already can and do read.
We also see some powerful and disturbing crosscurrents as we move away from the simplified picture. Some educators working in troubled urban schools advocate a highly restrictive skill-and-drill approach because they believe that this is the only thing that will work for minority children or in a school culture that has been extremely resistant to change. Yet whole-language advocates observe again and again in strong and well-run whole-language classrooms that these approaches work wonderfully with inner-city students. These students, the whole-language teachers say, need more of what works in privileged, high-achieving schools, not less. Both groups say they want more of the population to enter the mainstream of American social and economic life, and yet they profoundly disagree about how to achieve this goal. It's a challenge to acknowledge cultural differences in social and learning styles and yet not pigeonhole or restrict children as we take account of those differences when we teach.
In spite of these complexities, however, there are clear distinctions between conservative and progressive approaches to education. A classroom in which children are working in small groups on various projects they've chosen looks and feels far different from one in which students are sitting in rows listening to a lecture or filling in worksheets. We've watched children from all backgrounds excel when given lots of opportunities to choose their own reading, writing, and inquiry topics and when classrooms are structured so that the teacher can provide lots of individual attention that's well-tuned to students' personal needs. Students at the Best Practice High School, a small Chicago public high school we helped found in 1996, prove to us every day that progressive ideas can be brought to life in the inner city. And on the other side of the equation, we've observed the failure of punitive approaches, of approaches that assume that young people bring to school no relevant knowledge or abilities of their own, and of lockstep scripts that prevent teachers from using their own judgment to provide what students need at a given moment.
In the latest chapter of the "great debate," the National Research Council brought together a panel of reading experts that included some of the most outspoken researchers and educators on both sides, plus some who occupy the middle ground. In their report, this diverse group not only appealed for an end to the squabbling but endorsed the value of teaching both letter/sound relationships and a range of whole-language strategies, including the extensive use of good literature, a focus on comprehension, and the use of developmental spelling for beginning writers. The real challenge, the panel asserts, is to provide much more training to increase prekindergarten and elementary teachers' knowledge of reading research and effective teaching strategies.
Nevertheless, as many of us try once again to get people to pay attention to and be guided by the research on progressive literacy education, let's remember that the debate is not likely to resolve itself anytime soon. Many of the differences do represent real disagreements about the nature of childhood, the human psyche, government, and society. And parents' anxieties about their children will find expression and, like air squeezed from one side of a balloon, will simply well up somewhere else nearby. Meanwhile, schools and teachers, always lacking the resources to push far enough in any direction, will continue to struggle, sometimes to react politically, and most often to do the best they can with the funds and the knowledge that they have.
2. Margaret Moustafa, Beyond Traditional Phonics: Research Discoveries and Reading Instruction (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996).
3. David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec, Cooperation in the Classroom (Edina, Minn.: Interaction Book Co., 1991).
4. Michael O. Tunnell and James S. Jacobs, "Using 'Real' Books: Research Findings on Literature-Based Reading Instruction," Reading Teacher, vol. 42, 1989, pp. 470-77.
5. George Hillocks, Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching (Urbana, Ill.: National Conference on Research in English and ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1986).
6. Richard A. Thompson, Summarizing Research Pertaining to Individualized Reading (Arlington, Va.: ERIC Document Reproducing Service, 1971).
7. Sam Weintraub, ed., Annual Summary of Investigations Related to Reading (Newark, Del.: International Reading Association, 1992-97).
8. Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde, Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools, 2nd ed. (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998); Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar, Methods That Matter: Six Structures for Best Practice Classrooms (York: Me.: Stenhouse, 1998); and Harvey Daniels, Steven Zemelman, and Marilyn Bizar, "Whole Language Works: Sixty Years of Research," Educational Leadership, in press.
9. Jeff McQuillan, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998).
10. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 173.
11. Ibid., p. 174.
12. David C. Berliner, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995); and periodic reports by Gerald W. Bracey, such as "A Nation of Learners: Nostalgia and Amnesia," Educational Leadership, February 1997, pp. 53-57.
13. Jacques Steinberg, "Clashing Over Education's One True Faith," New York Times, 14 December 1997, sec. 4, pp. 1, 14.
14. Larry Cuban, quoted in Ethan Bronner, "Freedom in Math Class May Outweigh Tests," New York Times, 2 March 1998, pp. A-1, A-14.
15. Bracey, op. cit.
16. James Moffett, Harmonic Learning: Keynoting School Reform (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1992).
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Last updated 23 March 1999
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kzem9903.htm
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