'Equity'

The Equity Task Force encourages the Board of Education to seek wide and extensive community input in reviewing this proposed Equity policy, systematically including key community stakeholder groups while reaching out to constituents potentially unlikely to participate in traditional feedback forums.

Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education (BOE) Equity Task Force (2005-2007), Final Report (March 28, 2007).

Equity at the highest level, not simply equity, is something that we should always strive for in education. Every student should have the best opportunities to learn in ways that will help them now and in the future.

George Couros, "Equity At the Highest Level," The Principal of Change blog (July 30, 2017).


Some definitions:

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 6, 1994:
"Equity is defined as providing each student with an equal educational opportunity to achieve the District's 100% success objectives." ....
"100% success objectives is defined as students who graduate, students who complete their individual academic program, students who enroll in a post-secondary educational program, or students who are self-sufficient in other endeavors."

MMSD BOE Equity Task Report Final Report, issued March 28, 2007:
"Equity assures full access to opportunities for each MMSD student to achieve educational excellence and social responsibility."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 2, 2008:
"Equity means the deliberate distribution of resources to provide full and meaningful access to comparable educational opportunity to assure that all MMSD students have the academic and interpersonal skills to be successful adults."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, draft revision for proposed adoption by BOE on July 31, 2017:
"A. 'Educational Equity' means an intentional distribution of DISTRICT resources amongst schools, students and staff based on what each needs to achieve universal goals.
B. 'Resources' means money; programs and curriculum; staff time, expertise, skills and experience; information; and, materials and services such as technology and transportation.
C. 'Targeted Universalism' an approach for achieving equity that sets universal goals for all students and identifies targeted means and processes for specific populations depending on how they are situated to opportunity. This approach recognizes that the DISTRICT must respond with necessary resources and multiple paths needed for different school communities and students to thrive.
D. 'Targeted' means the distribution of resources on top of or in addition to universally distributed resources to support a particular subgroup based on unique or specific qualities or established need, such as the provision of the allocation of an assistant principal to only the school whose student enrollment exceeds a specific number or the provision of supplementary math texts and workbooks to students who achieve within an established range on an assessment.
E. 'Universal,' when used in reference to resources, means the distribution of resources to everyone or everything in the established group regardless of any unique or specific qualities or identified needs, such as the allocation of one lead principal to each school building or the provision of a standard mathematics text book to each student. 'Universal,' when used in reference to goals, means published goals fostering all students’ acquisition of the skills and abilities to be successful in college, career and community."

Some reporting protocols:

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 6, 1994:
"This policy applies to situations that affect students within one school, or between or among several schools, and will be reviewed every three years."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 2, 2008:
"Administration will report on an annual basis to the Board of Education the extent of progress on specific measures in eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement. Administration will develop an annual report that will provide data on the distribution of staff, financial, and programmatic resources across all schools."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, draft revision for proposed adoption by BOE on July 31, 2017:
"The SUPERINTENDENT and his/her designee shall recommend and the BOARD shall adopt a tool and/or method by which the DISTRICT can assess alignment of recommendations with the principles in the Educational Equity Policy (Educational Equity Tool). The Educational Equity Tool shall be available on the DISTRICT's website once approved."....
"Beginning in the 2018-2019 school year, the SUPERINTENDENT or his/her designee and BOARD will adopt metrics that will provide data on the distribution of staff, financial, and programmatic resources across all schools, which shall be incorporated into the annually prepared budget documents and/or Human Resources report."

Some relevant resources for district information, past and present:

• U.S. Department of Education (USED) Civil Rights Data Collection: survey years 2013 (Educational Equity Report, including school-level data for download), 2011, and 2009; although the next biennial CRDC publication occurs in 2018, the district's data for survey year 2015 would have been compiled and submitted earlier this year.
• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI): various dashboards with district-only access (from which relevant current data can and should be made available to the public), including: Achievement Gap Dashboard, MAP Dashboards, PALS Dashboards, ACCESS Dashboards, and more.
• Teacher Equitable Access Plan for Wisconsin, submitted by DPI to and approved by USED in 2015, describing "the steps that the [State Educational Agency] will take to ensure that students from low-income families and students of color are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers, and the measures that the agency will use to evaluate and publicly report the progress of the agency with respect to such steps," and the MMSD DPI Final Equity Plan submitted in 2016 pursuant to the state plan (including planned quarterly and annual reviews of progress, and evaluation/monitoring metrics).
• USED Office for Civil Rights (OCR) December 29, 2016 letter to MMSD, with OCR's analysis of disparities in participation for the district's African-American and Hispanic students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels in Advanced Learner programming, including Advanced Placement course participation.

The rule of law versus the rule of rank

"I thought individual rights were natural rights," said Ben.

"That's the sort of fiction we call myth," said Hortense. "Useful symbolically. But as a practical matter, society confers or withholds rights. The medieval European Custom of Merchants let the genie of individual rights out of the bottle—or opened the Pandora's box of their nuisances and evils, as people who deplore individual rights would have it.

"The contractual law we inherited from those medieval merchants contained radical conceptions. Not only did it apply alike to all individuals, no matter who they were or what their social status might be, but it was available to individuals for no other reason than that they were individuals, making contracts. That second notion is so inseparable from our contractual law that we even have the fiction that a corporation is a person. That's so corporations, like individuals, can make contracts and carry on commercial life under protection of civil law. To realize how radical the Custom of Merchants was, we only need to think about some of the battles to extend the jurisdiction of contractual law.

"For instance, slaves lack rights as individuals. After slaves in the United States were freed, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution theoretically gave them access to all the rights of individuals available under contractual law. But by custom, hierarchical law, the rule of rank, still prevailed, so freedmen and their descendants seldom enjoyed the benefits of contractual law. Every time a black homeowner was driven from his legally purchased home in a white neighborhood he was being treated as if hierarchical law, derived from social status, prevailed. Every time effective barriers were thrown up against black-owned businesses, and they were, more often than not, or against employment of qualified blacks, or they were excluded from labor unions and apprenticeships controlled by unions, it was as if contractual law did not exist for African Americans. As someone has said, even buying a loaf of bread is a contract. So is being served a meal in a restaurant. A bus ticket is a contract, but if you have to stand instead of sit because of your color, that's the rule of rank, not contract. So many of what we call civil rights are actually rights to make contracts as equals." 

Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992).

A.O. Hirschman on arguments against fixing failure

According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy. The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent." Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).

Get the lead out [updated 10/30/19 for 2019 NAEP]

The Wisconsin Read to Lead Task Force has released its recommendations for improving reading, wrapping up its series of meetings from April through September 2011. Its progress and aftermath have been ably covered by the Wisconsin Reading Coalition. (My livetweets from the final Task Force meeting are appended for vestigial posterity at the end of this post, along with links to my previous posts on the Read to Lead Task Force.)

The Task Force's report calls for "improving teacher preparation and professional development; screening, assessment and intervention; early childhood; accountability; and parental involvement." The first three items on this list are no-brainers; of course, it would be good to identify kids who need help earlier rather than later, and to make sure that the teachers that help them are qualified and well-prepared. Wishfully expressed recommendations for "accountability," however, are bound to hit the hard cold wall of reality, if the experiences of some prominent Race to the Top winners who are having trouble overcoming political obstacles to their promises to improve accountability are any indication. As for "parental involvement," I would have liked to have seen parental involvement begin with the Task Force itself, which could have enriched its work by inviting direct testimony from parents who have lived through missed diagnoses and ineffective interventions, or better yet by bringing a parent voice to the table as a constituent member of the Task Force. This was a missed opportunity to recognize parents as a crucial stakeholder in educational decisions and to learn from what their children experience on the frontlines of educational decisions that continue to be made without families at the table.

Even if all the Task Force recommendations are implemented, we still need to ask: "and then what?" Is it enough for teachers to be trained well and for children to be screened early if the way in which children will be taught reading is ineffective? In making "consensus" the paramount priority, the Task Force report turns a blind eye toward the consequences of the choices that have been made in Wisconsin on how reading is taught, notwithstanding vigorous attempts both within the Task Force and outside the Task Force to have the Task Force confront those problems. If it wasn't realistic to expect that incompatible viewpoints on the Task Force could be reconciled, an effort should nonetheless have been made to reach agreement on the criteria and methodology by which schools, districts, CESAs and the state should systematically and rigorously examine, evaluate and discontinue reading programs that are demonstrated not to work. By failing to do so, the Task Force's work has in effect ratified "Balanced Literacy" as the past, present and future of reading instruction in Wisconsin.

So let's take another look at where we are with reading in Wisconsin. The charts below compare the reading assessment results for 4th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress at 2003 and [updated 4/11/18] 2017 by the percentages of economically disadvantaged students (i.e. those qualifying for the National Free and Reduced Lunch Program), disaggregated by ethnicity (White, Black and Hispanic here), who score below "Basic" under NAEP. Wisconsin is compared below to Massachusetts (as the best in the country in overall educational achievement), Florida (as the best in the country for raising the achievement of disadvantaged demographic groups), Minnesota (as the peer-next-door that Wisconsin may hope to measure up to, if not surpass), Texas (as the most entertaining recent example of the pitfalls of the compositional fallacy), and Mississippi (as a state all too frequently stereotyped as a backwards backwoods, which, as a one-quarter Mississippian—Friars Point, Coahoma County—I don't much cotton to, but as such may serve as an interesting benchmark for those who are inclined to regard it as the nadir of educational achievement). Examine the magnitude of students in Wisconsin who are failing to clear a very low bar; note which states have been able to reduce those numbers, and which are seeing those numbers increase:




If reading achievement in Wisconsin remains mediocre or deteriorates further, expect the perennial excuses of "poverty" and "parents" to bloom anew to explain away why things are so bad and why nothing can be done. But let's remember: "poverty" and "parents" didn't game NCLB requirements by setting "proficiency" on the Wisconsin standardized assessments below the "Basic" level of performance under NAEP (and so, even with some of the largest percentages of subperformance by disadvantaged demographic groups in the country, Wisconsin has the lowest percentage of schools that missed AYP for the 2010-11 school year). It's not "poverty" or "parents" who are refusing to participate in the National Council on Teacher Quality's research on the quality of the nation's education schools. And it's not "poverty" or "parents" who are fearfully incurious about what's not working with reading curriculum, pedagogy and intervention policies and practices in Wisconsin, why and how other states are doing so much better, and what needs to change to make improvement possible here.

You don't need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.—Seth Godin, December 30, 2011.

Appendix:

Previous posts on the Read to Lead Task Force:

"Need to Read" (April 25, 2011 meeting)
"Reader Leaders" (May 31, 2011 meeting)
"Follow the Leader" (July 29, 2011 meeting)

Follow the leader

Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" Task Force had its fourth meeting on July 29, 2011 at the Greater Milwaukee Foundation (a video of the meeting is available, thanks to coverage by WisconsinEye). The Wisconsin Reading Coalition has prepared a thorough and helpful synopsis of the meeting. And here are my brief notes on Twitter (beginning with a brain hiccup tweeting "August" instead of "July"):



The meeting showcased the remarkable progress of Florida students (especially those in low-achieving demographic groups) after reading reforms were instituted in 1999, in a presentation from guest speaker Patricia Levesque, executive director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Levesque credits much of that success to Florida's system of assigning "A through F" grades to schools and to its systematic and focused kindergarten-through-third-grade literacy program (including the requirement that students be able to read at grade level before being promoted to fourth grade). (For even more, see Levesque's presentation and extensive Q&A at the La Follette School of Public Affairs' "Building a New School Accountability System for Wisconsin" conference from the previous day, July 28, 2011, archived at Wisconsin Eye, and highly recommended.)

As Florida's success story becomes more prominent in the discussion of what's next for improving education in Wisconsin, there have been some who'd prefer to downplay the magnitude of that success, or to claim that Wisconsin is better-than/not-really-that-much-behind Florida—so where's the fire? Most often, average statewide scale scores on the NAEP reading assessments are cited in support of these conclusions, since the 2009 NAEP reading average scale score for Florida fourth graders was "only" 6 points higher than the average scale score for Wisconsin fourth graders, and the average scale score for Florida eighth graders was actually 2 points lower than the average scale score for Wisconsin eighth graders. However, there are significant differences in the demographic composition of Wisconsin and Florida's students:



(Source: National Center for Education Statistics)

Because of these differences, comparing students on a statewide basis, rather than by constituent subgroup to subgroup, can be misleading (this is "Simpson's paradox," elaborately defined here, and entertainingly illustrated here). Here's how it plays out in comparing Wisconsin and Florida (bearing in mind that a 10-point scale score difference is approximately equivalent to one grade level):





We're shown that dramatic progress is achievable when we look at Florida's gains from 1998 (the year before Florida's reading reforms began) to 2009 (data for 2003 is included in place of 1998 where numbers for 1998 weren't available):



I hope that an objective understanding of where our students stand and an appreciation that progress is possible for them can overcome the conventional wisdom of "we're doing just fine" and "those kids can't learn anyway." I also hope that the task force will begin in earnest to address the whale in the wading pool: the methods and content of reading instruction.

Reader leaders

Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" Task Force convened for its second meeting last month to address teacher training and reading interventions. Here's an excellent debrief (via School Information System) from Wisconsin Reading Coalition on the discussion. And here are my notes from the gallery:

 

 

This meaty agenda was well-suited for a substantive discussion informed by the expertise and depth of experience of the panel and the meeting's invited guests. (And allowing the meeting to run somewhat over its allotted time, and agreeing to continue the agenda topic of reading interventions onto the next meeting rather than giving it short shrift, were good on-the-spot calls.)

 

While it can't reasonably be expected that a problem as complex and (if judged by prior efforts) insoluble as statewide reading achievement can be covered comprehensively through going-round-the-table soundbites in a limited timeframe, I think the process could benefit from more systematic fact-finding (and fact-checking), so that discussions can be grounded in a common baseline of background knowledge, and relevant information isn't omitted in the wending flow of discussion. It would have been informative, for example, to note the endeavors of the National Council for Teacher Quality's new initiative to review the quality of the nation's education schools, and the decisions of the UW system and the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (representing all public and private education schools in Wisconsin) not to participate in the NCTQ study; or to note the lack of compliance (as shown in a research study undertaken for a recent Marquette University dissertation) by a significant number of school districts with state statute 118.015, which requires each school district to employ a certified reading specialist to develop and coordinate a comprehensive K-12 reading curriculum; or to note that, although there is new momentum to promote RtI (Response to Intervention) on a statewide basis, Wisconsin remains one of only a handful of states that still uses the intelligence-achievement discrepancy model to identify specific learning disabilities, and that the full phase-in of RtI, to bring Wisconsin into alignment with federal rules, will not be completed until 2014.

 

I also hope that the panel won't be led into the temptation to portray consensus for the sake of appearance of consensus, or to paper over the many genuine areas of fundamental disagreement on the causes and effects of and cures for our problems with reading achievement.

 

At this writing, the third meeting of the Read to Lead Task Force will have taken place today in Onalaska. Although open to the public, the meeting was not broadcast by Wisconsin Eye, and it's a disappointment that other arrangements were not made to make the proceedings accessible to those unable to travel to the meeting site to observe the meeting in real space and real time. The complex task before the panel can only be helped by engaging as many stakeholders as possible to illuminate the scope and magnitude of the current state of reading instruction and achievement and to identify workable pathways to reverse the decline. In other words, we're all called upon to be leaders for our readers.

Updates (6/28/2011): 

• The 2011-2013 state budget, signed on June 26, 2011, includes a $1.2 million appropriation to implement the recommendations of the Read to Lead Task Force (section 9101(2)).
• Wisconsin Reading Coalition has prepared an excellent summary (with commentary) of the June 24,2011 meeting in Onalaska.

Need to read

The reading experts and government leaders on Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" task force are taking a close look at student reading achievement in Wisconsin schools. The meetings of the task force are open to the public; my "live tweeted" notes from the April 25, 2011 inaugural meeting are here:



A video archive of the first meeting can be viewed on WisconsinEye. The task force meets next on May 31, 2011, with teacher training and reading intervention on the agenda (via the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, whose founding member, Steve Dykstra, serves on the Read to Lead task force).

Although state and local reading scores are regularly reported as and when results are announced on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) and the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), what's often missing is the fuller context of how those scores compare with scores of other school districts and other states over time. Examine, for example, the percentages of Wisconsin 4th graders (disaggregated by selected demographic) that score "Below Basic" on the NAEP, compared with Massachusetts (currently "best of breed" among the states in student achievement on the NAEP) and Florida (which has made exemplary progress in improving achievement for low-income, Black and Hispanic students):











It's been telegraphed that Florida's reading reforms might serve as a model for recommendations to be considered by the task force, in particular ending automatic "social" promotion to the 4th grade for students who are not reading at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. (The recent Annie E. Casey Foundation study by Donald J. Hernandez linking poverty, low literacy by third grade, and failure to graduate, reinforces this concern.) The percentages of 3rd graders scoring below the WKCE "proficiency" level (bearing in mind that "Proficiency" on WKCE 4th grade reading maps to a level that is lower than "Basic" under NAEP [see page 17 at the link]), for the state's six urban school districts, disaggregated by selected demographic, are as follows:







The Read to Lead task force has done a creditable job of educating itself on the problem of reading achievement in our schools. I'd like to see that awareness spread to stakeholders and the public. While there seems to be a general, and somewhat uneasy, acknowledgment that things are not as they should be, all too often the discussion begins and ends with: 1. "It's just Milwaukee." and 2. "Poor/Black/Hispanic students can't learn." As we can see, the numbers show otherwise.

"We willl have to make an uncomfortable number of mistakes, and learn from them, rather than cover them up or deny they happened, even to ourselves. This is not the way we are used to getting things done." Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

"As a profession, we are strongly discouraged from speaking out against the system. But I believe the greatest betrayal of our children is our silence." Katharine Birbalsingh, To Miss with Love.

Key student performance measures (Madison School District)

The Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring Committee of the Madison school board met last Monday to review “key student performance measures” presented by district administration, centering primarily around reading and math scores from last fall’s WKCE (as published this past spring), reported for 4th graders and 8th graders, and compared to those for the preceding three years. The score data was presented and discussed on an “all-students” basis, but given the persistent achievement gaps in the district, taking a look at the data—disaggregated by the selected demographic subgroups compiled below—may help bring performance issues into sharper focus.



(Data source: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction WINSS.)

Measures for measures

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant. (Measure for Measure, II.ii.133)

So…as of this writing more than half the states have been persuaded to sign on to the Common Core Standards. (Those states in the running for federal Race to the Top Phase 2 awards were required to adopt the standards by August 2.) Although there are several non-finalists that have also signed on to the standards, it’s clear that the driving force for adoption was the U.S. Department of Education push, which in turn has revived concerns about the top-down, central-planning role of the feds in school reform. These qualms aren’t likely to have been allayed by the insistence that the Common Core standards be adopted even by states (Massachusetts, California) that already had established standards regarded as superior to the new Common Core.

Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep. (II.ii.117)

Is ED an 800-pound gorilla? Is this a problem? Your mileage may vary depending on your core beliefs about what, why and how big problems best get solved. The manner in which the Common Core standards have been imposed and the intended effect of national educational standards, whether or not seen as heavy-handed and intrusive, are of a piece with the governing philosophy evidenced in other recent reforms. Maybe there’s a measure of futility in attempting to resist the assumptions that propel these initiatives, but there’s value in taking this occasion to examine the question of who (across the spectrum from the hearth to the White House) should decide what should be fixed in education and how.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror. (II.i.1)

One may wonder about the sincerity of ‘buy-in’ procured by quid pro quo. Signing onto the new standards was the easy part; those states will now be called upon to follow through with real work in ensuring that their curriculum tracks the standards, that the curriculum is taught effectively, and that there’s a way to demonstrate—via trustworthy assessments—that standards have been met. It’s little comfort that many of the self-same states that have redefined “proficiency” in ways that evoke the classic response of Inigo Montoya will now be, in consortium, engineering a new assessment system for the new standards.

When vice makes mercy, mercy's so extended
That for the fault's love is the offender friended. (III.ii.266)

Shakespeare has the “bed trick” and the “head trick”; think of faux “proficiency” as the “ed trick.” Perhaps the best sign of good faith and intentions to tell the truth to students (and their parents and their community) about whether or not they are keeping pace educationally would be for states who have been hiding the ball on proficiency standards to follow the lead of New York and just ‘fess up. This won’t be encouraged by gloating, derision or “I told you so”s targeted at the one state that’s (however unhappily) gone public. For now, the silence of other states with similar issues is unsettling, and may not bode well for the integrity of how new nationwide assessments will be established and implemented.

Our doubts are traitors
And makes us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt. (I.iv.85)

I’m not worried about the new standards resulting in classrooms across the country marching in fantastically coordinated, rigid lockstep through the narrow straits of the new Common Core.  The relative vagueness of the standards and the unsettled nature of the curriculum that will be needed to embody the standards are far more likely to result in bureaucratic busywork from those states who already roll that way as their modus operandi, while the states that do a good job will find a way to continue to do so. Oddly enough, the common currency of national standards may provide an opportunity for educational settings outside conventional public schooling (e.g. homeschooling) to demonstrate that they meet these new officially sanctioned benchmarks, and I can also envision an opportunity for private sector development of disinterested assessments based on the new Common Core standards for parents who want to know where their students really stand.

(Thanks for the idea, and apologies for its execution, are due to this post by Steve Peha, and to The Bard.)

Race to the Top snapshots

In anticipation of the first-round Race to the Top finalists being announced this week, here's an assortment of data points which may be of interest (without being too much like the blind men patting down random regions of the elephant, I hope), as rough indicators of how much RttT help is needed (achievement gap), how well the RttT applications are targeted (students in poverty), how much "buy-in" was received (MOU signoffs), and who may have (or not) an inside track via a Gates Foundation boost.



Italicized states did not submit a Race to the Top application in Phase 1.

Scale scores: 2007 NAEP Reading Grade 4:
(better) = significantly better than national gap

(worse) = significantly worse than national gap

Source: U.S. Department of Education Report NCES 2009-455, "Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress / Statistical Analysis Report," July 2009.

MOU participation percentages: from states' Race to the Top applications, as posted by U.S. Department of Education.

Gates Foundation Technical Assistance (from Foundation announcement and EdWeek Politics K-12 blog):
Pre-selected 1st 15: among the 15 states pre-selected for technical assistance

Selected in 2nd round: selected for technical assistance after applications opened to remaining states

Not selected: unsuccessful application for technical assistance

Did not apply: did not apply for technical assistance

Updated 3/4/2010: the 16 first-round finalists as announced by the US Department of Education are highlighted in yellow above.


Further updated 3/29/2010: the first-round winners (Delaware and Tennessee) are highlighted in blue above; final scores and rankings also added.

Further updated 7/28/2010: Phase 2 finalists are highlighted in green above (light green for first-time finalists, dark green for states that were also finalists in Phase 1). Column noting status of states' adoption of common standards also added.

Reading Recovery, parents and experts

Debate has been joined (after a fashion) over Reading Recovery on the Learning & Reading Disabilities blog and the Wrightslaw site. In two recent posts ("Should I Stop My Child's School from Using Reading Recovery to Teach Him to Read" and "What Mistake Do Parents of Children At-Risk for Reading Disabilities Make About Reading Recovery"), L&RD defends Reading Recovery against criticisms in the Wrightslaw article "Reading Recovery: What Do School Districts Get for Their Money?" by Melissa Farrall, Ph.D. Farrall says scientific evidence doesn't support the effectiveness of Reading Recovery; it doesn't help enough kids (because a meaningful percentage of kids don't complete the program successfully) and it doesn't help kids enough (because the threshold for "success" in the program can be set too low); and it's too expensive. L&RD says Reading Recovery has been validated by scientific evidence (including a meta-analysis of multiple studies published in 2004, not cited by Farrall) and by the What Works Clearinghouse, and that Reading Recovery may not be "perfect" (as no program is), but that parents should see if Reading Recovery works for their child first before rejecting it untried.

Since Reading Recovery and the "wars" over its effectiveness have been around a while, the fact that these battles continue to rage is an indication that neither side can dispositively claim victory. If Reading Recovery didn't work at all, that would have become clear enough by now, anecdotally and scientifically; if Reading Recovery were a silver-bullet solution to reading remediation, it's hard to imagine that educators, researchers and parents wouldn't all be united in getting it disseminated as widely as possible.There's no reason to doubt the sincerity and veracity of parents who report that Reading Recovery worked wonders for their child, or to dismiss the legitimacy of peer-reviewed studies that show that there are reading programs out there which have implemented Reading Recovery with good results.

But how much should parents defer to "the experts"? Parents are challenging the experts in Seattle, where parents have prevailed in litigation to prevent the adoption of "discovery" math, and in California and Connecticut, where parents want the right to pull the "parent trigger" to reform failing schools. I believe that parents who step in and take the reins from the professionals who've been entrusted with their children's education do so only as a last resort; parents would much rather trust that the interests, goals and judgments of experts are aligned with theirs. To earn and keep that trust, experts need to show their work and intelligibly demonstrate the reasoning behind their decisions.

I'm inclined to find that verified studies are useful for ruling out programs that have been proven ineffective, but it's not clear to me that the studies which demonstrate Reading Recovery's effectiveness speak to whether Reading Recovery success is readily replicable in the vastly different environments (school districts, schools, classrooms) in which it's implemented. It's not enough to learn that Reading Recovery works well for those for whom it works well. In evaluating the efficacy of a program, we should know more about the children who were supposed to be, but weren't, helped by the program, whether there were other interventions that could have worked for them during their year in the program, and how many other children could have been helped with other resources that could have been funded by the money spent on the ineffective intervention.

Our school district has used Reading Recovery since the 1989-90 school year, with declining success over time:

Last school year, 349 students in the district qualified for Reading Recovery; 262 students participated in Reading Recovery; of those students, 110 were successfully "discontinued" from the program. (This success rate of 42.3% is significantly lower than the 58.5% national success rate last reported by Reading Recovery.) Last year's Reading Recovery program cost the district approximately $1,271,200, or $4,852 per student enrolled in the program, or $11,556 per student successfully "discontinued" from the program.

Reading Recovery resources in the district are directed toward schools with higher poverty levels, and 83% of the students enrolled in Reading Recovery last year (approximately 217 of the 262 students) were low-income students. Despite this focus, reading proficiency levels for low-income students in our district, measured at the first state assessment opportunity following early-grade intervention, have been on the decline (the following information is from the DPI web site):

Because the district's Reading Recovery resources are allocated among higher-poverty schools, there are students who meet Reading Recovery criteria (i.e. in the lowest 20% of readers) who don't get enrolled if their school is not a "Reading Recovery school", and students who are "overqualified" for Reading Recovery  who do get enrolled in Reading Recovery to "fill out" the program group in their school's Reading Recovery program. (The latter phenomenon may not be a good thing: it's reported that text reading level gains of "overqualified" students in the program may end up not progressing on pace with their non-Reading Recovery peers.) It also appears that some students in the lowest 20% of readers have skill levels that are too low to allow them to complete Reading Recovery successfully. Also, although Reading Recovery is implemented in a series of three "rounds" throughout the school year, students in the first round have a much better chance of completing the program successfully than those who enroll in the second or third rounds.

It's been suggested that Reading Recovery resources be redistributed to reach more of the lowest 20% of readers, with the thought that success rates may improve if better targeted toward the types of students for whom the program was designed. However, program success doesn't seem to be correlated with participation levels:

The district produced two written reports evaluating Reading Recovery in 2004 and 2009 (much of the information in this post, and the information in the first and third charts in this post, are drawn from those reports):

From the 2004 report: "Reading Recovery clearly serves a population of needy students based on income and other demographic factors. Reading Recovery serves a population that has deficits in reading ability at the beginning of Grade 1. However, it is not clear that they constitute the lowest 20-25% of all first graders, a stated goal of the program developers."

From the 2009 report: 

"Reading Recovery clearly serves a population of needy students based on income and other demographic factors."

"It is difficult to accurately define the students who are in the lowest 20% but this table [Table 1 of the 2009 report] indicates that there are probably significant numbers of students who need help with literacy but either do not have the opportunity to receive Reading Recovery (not available at their school) or Reading Recovery did not identify them or was unable to place them."

From the 2004 report: "When combining both successful RR students and the unsuccessful RR students over an entire school year of service delivery the overall program impact does not yield statistically significant achievement gains when comparing performance of participants to similar but non-participating students after controlling for intervening affects [sic] (e.g., poverty, special education status, parent education, etc.)."

From the 2009 report: "When combining all Reading Recovery students over an entire school year of service, the overall program impact does not yield statistically significant achievement gains when comparing the performance of participants to similar but non-participating students after controlling for intervening affects [sic] (e.g., poverty, special education status, parent education, etc.)." 

From the 2004 report: "There appears to be a need to develop a better method for identifying students who could be successful in this program. In 2003-04, more than half of all Reading Recovery students were not discontinued. Targeting services more efficiently to students who benefit most is strongly encouraged. The longitudinal data provided by the district’s Primary Language Arts Assessments (PAA) may be a useful resource in developing such predictive tools while simultaneously affording meaningful instructional and diagnostic information."

From the 2009 report: "It is recommended that Reading Recovery teachers utilize the access they have to the student information system to record enrollment as well as observation summary data on all students eligible for Reading Recovery and those who receive the intervention. This should also be tracked in the Student Intervention Monitoring System for reference by other staff involved with an individual student's literacy programming. This would allow the development of better predictive models that accurately identify students with a high likelihood of success in the Reading Recovery program." 

The 2009 report recommended that the Reading Recovery program continue, with efforts to achieve fuller implementation among the targeted population, and then be re-evaluated within two years. In light of the history and results of this program, I found this recommendation astonishing, but was thankful when the school board directed district staff to revisit and report back on the district's reading programs as a whole before proceeding further. I hope for the best in the discussions and decisions that ensue.

Euclid, Newton and Adam Smith

I missed the hubbub over the piece by Mark Slouka in Harper’s last fall (“Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school”), but came to it after reading a few mentions of it recently. Its title does a pretty good job of giving the gist of it, which (roughly restated) is that priorities of commerce have hijacked American education policy, shutting out the humanities, and unduly elevating math and science (or “mathandscience,” in Slouka’s formulation). It’s an interesting polemic, although its attention-seeking rhetorical feints (which you'll get the full flavor of if you read the whole thing) leave me outside the choir to which it preaches.

I worry about young people who can't find work. The unemployment numbers from last summer were discouraging; I expect this summer's numbers will be worse. The kids from demographic groups that are the least successfully served by our educational system fare worst in the job market. They won't have the social capital to draw on to get a foot in the door, to get helped onto the first rung of the ladder. Where will they be without employable skills?

Slouka's piece is profoundly wrongheaded not just because it treats as trivial the matter of how one puts bread on the table, but also in its claim that skills that are useful and knowledge that is valuable are mutually exclusive things. If we can get public education back to basics—to teach kids how to read and write, do math, and think critically, in a school that is safe—is there any reason why that education could not, and should not, teach its students the beauty of Euclid's Elements, the philosophical and theological origins of Newton's science, and how Adam Smith understood human nature and ethics in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon—or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (presented at Oxford University in 1947).

The student revolution has thus come full circle and joined those who were originally its worst enemies: those who willingly corrupt the present in any degree necessary to achieve an imagined future, those vicious establishment constructors of the rat-race who reduce the lives of students and workers to mere means.

Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974).

But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John's dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. John will discover this if his points burn out.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (1974).

The question of what a good job looks like—of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored—is more open now than it has been for a long time. […] The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, “Let me make myself useful.”

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2009).