The Problems with “Show Me the Research” in Teaching Reading
I was born in 1961 and entered first grade in 1967, already able to read independently and play sophisticated card and board games.
My mother had taped index cards with words identifying objects all around our house. She had attended one year of junior college, but had no training in how to teach.
None the less, from the first day of school, I excelled in literacy, scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. My learning to read has two important elements; I was of the generation taught by the Dick and Jane basal readers (whole-word focus over discrete phonics), and my learning to read overlapped with one of the most aggressive reading crisis moments in the U.S., spurred by Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, first published in 1955.
To whom and what should we attribute my high-achieving literacy skills? How could research tease out any causal inferences about my reading achievement? I was certainly not a Johnny who couldn’t read even as I had almost no direct phonics instruction, and I am sure the basal readers and my teachers’ instructional methods had only minimal impact on my literacy development (other than that I loved Ms. Landford, my first grade teacher, and wanted desperately to please her).
Many years later, I was a high school English teacher in the rural high school I had attended. One year, a wonderful student whose mother was also an English teacher in the school scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT.
People throughout the school and town often congratulated me and praised my role in her perfect score. For many, that student’s success was proof I was CONTINUE READING: The Problems with “Show Me the Research” in Teaching Reading – radical eyes for equity
