From Schools Matter
06.20.06

First of all, let me say that I am enthusiastic about science and for what it may yield to educators and policymakers regarding learning and schooling. I use the future tense deliberately here, for as yet science has yielded very little that can be translated from neurology, cognitive science, or even psychology into educational strategies that may be deemed scientific. Education, after all, is a marginal science, if one at all. It occupies a ragged borderland between the social sciences and the humanities, leaving many educationists with an even more pronounced physics envy than the one normally attributed to more respected social scientists.

The phonics phonies and the Crackpots of the Code, on the other hand, have pretended for years that their preferred dogma constitutes a science of reading that must be adhered to for a child to learn to read properly. Their crusade culminated in 2000 when Doug Carnine and Reid Lyon were able to stack the deck of the National Reading Panel to arrive at an ideological conclusion on reading strategy that was promoted as a scientifically-based conclusion. Scientific it was not, but the Panel did prove that when you toss out all the studies that do not support your preconceived conclusions, it is easy to come up with evidence to overwhelmingly support the conclusion you set out to prove in the first place. The NRP may be thought of as the Cheney Method for going to war against the whole language terrorists: manipulate and manufacture evidence to push your agenda, and suppress or marginalize evidence to the contrary.

The fact that legitimate scholars were not duped by Carnine and Lyon has set off a new round of thuggish efforts to force the adoption of the one way “science” of the phonics fundamentalists. This time the masterminds at ED are using Lyon’s fake science to try to bully education schools by threatening the accrediting organizations that determine who gets the stamp of federal approval. And seeing how NCATE has thus far only responded by saying how high when ED says jump, I suggest it is time for an organized response by reading and literacy scholars if the door is to kept open to more legitimate approaches to literacy instruction. If you doubt it, have a look the bottom line message of a report (Full pdf report) sponsored by NCTQ:

EDUCATION SCHOOLS THAT DO NOT TEACH THE SCIENCE OF READING SHOULD NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR ACCREDITATION. (p. 44)

So this is what they do at NCTQ with the millions they get handed by ED.

And, of course, a call in to Staples at the NY Times is all that is needed to get Brent bent about the evil racist government schools that refuse to embrace the new scientific ways of reading instruction. Would he be surprised that the claims of this new “scientific” phonics are the same ones made in the 1840s by the Latin Grammar School masters of Boston?

Is there anyone else who just doesn't understand Kevin Carey's blog entry at the end of last month? It included a reasonable caveat that current research on teacher effectiveness had low R-square figures and high residual variance (i.e., evidence that the model in question accounted for little of the existing variation in student achievement). Then Carey jumped from that to a nullification of research on teachers:

[Sanders' study is part of] the ongoing search for the characteristics of the effective teacher. A definitive list of such characteristics is the holy grail of teacher policy. If we only had that list, so the thinking goes, we could do all kinds of important and useful things. We could reshape education schools to impart those characteristics. We could set up certification systems to filter out teachers who don't have those characteristics. We could design compensation systems that pay teachers with those characteristics more money.... My strong suspicion is that this whole way of thinking will ultimately turn out to be profoundly wrong.... [W]e could double, triple, or magnify tenfold our efforts to refine and expand things like the NBPTS and still never get close to identifying the effective teacher, for the simple reason that she doesn't exist.

That reasoning conflates screening instruments with teacher education and professional development, and it fails to address the fundamental weakness of much of this research, the search for a general qualification of teachers based on a global credential (not usually immutable characteristics). Then Carey went into some weird stuff about Dell's reversal of the usual production-before-sales process. (Never mind that car customers who were willing to wait could custom-order cars years before.) I think it has something to do with being satisfied with identifying effective teachers and not worrying about helping teachers (and prospective teachers) get better. Maybe I'm misreading that entry, but it sure sounded like that.

And, if so, Carey is wrong. Suppose we could identify with 100% accuracy who the good math teachers are. (Incidentally, neither Bill Sanders nor I will ever claim this, regardless of our differences otherwise.) Do we then fire those who are weaker and pray that their replacements are better, on average? As far as I'm aware, there has never been a period of time when you had 100% perfect teachers, when a system didn't need to work with the teachers they had because, well, they were the teachers there at the moment. It makes no sense from a decency, fairness, civil rights, morale, or human resources standpoint to sit there and let an inexperienced, less-skilled, or overwhelmed teacher flounder just because the research on national certification or masters degrees isn't conclusively in favor of those as screening/pay increment policies.

In my own research on special education history, there are several points (including today) when administrators have griped about the lack of trained specialists. The expansion of special education meant that there has always been a shortage of specialists, and often regular teachers were pulled into special education. Lo and behold! these "retreads" (as one former Peabody College professor termed them) were pretty sharp folks and were able to learn new tricks just fine, thank you (again, to the pleasant surprise of my informant). To borrow from a certain Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young classic, if you can't have the ones you want, help the ones you have. They'll probably be just fine.