LCUSD Responds on Reading Instruction
"Move along. Nothing to see here."
As discussed in my last article — “Pseudoscience as a Basis for Reading Instruction” — La Cañada Unified School (LCUSD) uses balanced literacy for early literacy instruction and relies heavily on the products of Fountas & Pinnell (F&P) to evaluate student’s reading proficiency, identify students who require reading intervention, as well as assigns F&P’s leveled reader books to students as part of their early elementary English Language Arts (ELA) instruction.
After responding to questions asked as background for my last article, LCUSD’s Associate Superintendent Anaïs Wenn arranged a meeting for me with her, La Canada Elementary (LCE) Principal Emily Blaney and Paradise Canyon Elementary (PCY) Principal Carrie Hetzel on January 26th, 2023. Prior to the meeting, Wenn sent me links to two articles defending the district’s use of F&P and balanced literacy. This article summarizes the district’s response based on comments made at the Jan. 26th meeting and from one of the resources sent to me before the meeting.
“What Problem?”
In brief, the district believes its use of balanced literacy is both justified and appropriate. They have no concerns. During the Jan. 26th meeting, both principals staunchly defended their use of F&P’s Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) to assess students’ reading proficiency and said they plan to continue using it. When confronted with the concerns expressed in Hanford’s reporting and my last article about the reliability and validity of F&P assessments, both principals dismissed the concerns and said they have full confidence in BAS’s efficacy. Wenn and the principals, in defending the use of F&P assessments, said that it is not the only reading assessment tool they use to identify struggling readers. Apparently the use of follow-up assessments justifies the use of possibly unreliable primary assessments.
When asked if they had any concerns about balanced literacy, Wenn said they had none and remain confident in its continued use. When asked if the district planned to make any curriculum adjustments based on the information contained in my article or in Hanford’s reports, they said they had no intention of making any changes at this time, but when they take up their next ELA adoption in two to three years, they said the district at that time could decide to use a curriculum different than the current one — Journeys from Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt for grades 1 through 5 — based on a different approach.
When asked specifically to respond to the Sold a Story podcast, which all three administrators claimed to have listened to, they said they had no concerns. One of the principals said she was surprised that the teachers interviewed in the Sold a Story podcast series used just one assessment to measure student reading proficiency. As an aside, none of the six episodes in the Sold a Story podcast series contained interviews with teachers stating they solely used F&P BAS to measure student reading proficiency, nor was reliance on a single assessment a salient point made by Hanford in any of the six podcast episodes. As Hanford succinctly states in the introduction to her podcast series:
“There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.”
A Horse is Not a Pony
One of the resources sent by Wenn to defend the district’s use of F&P products is titled “Get the Facts: Responding to Misinformation About Fountas and Pinnell Literacy” published by the F&P folks themselves in October of 2022. In the article, F&P claim “misinformation has been shared about Fountas & Pinnell resources which grossly misrepresent our solutions and radically oversimplifies complex literacy issues to the detriment of teachers and students.” They offer “clarity” that “corrects the most egregious inaccuracies.” The web page is basically a summary of an earlier series of blog posts made by F&P in October of 2021, which itself was prompted in response to Hanford’s earlier reporting. F&P’s blog posts have been addressed previously by cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg (“Clarity about Fountas and Pinnell”), Emily Hanford (“Influential authors Fountas and Pinnell stand behind disproven reading theory”), and in a series of podcasts by reading specialist Anna Geiger (“Reacting to Fountas and Pinnell.”) A close examination of F&P’s claims in the resource sent to me by Wenn, some of which were reiterated by LCUSD staff in the Jan. 26th meeting, is warranted:
For clarity, Wenn has stated that LCUSD does not use F&P Classroom or F&P Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) for either reading instruction or reading intervention, but does use F&P’s Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) and leveled readers. That being said, it is disingenuous for F&P to claim they don’t include cueing in their reading instruction. As with most balanced literacy curricula, F&P pays lip service to phonics instruction and teaches “reading strategies” for students to infer unknown words based on context clues. This is known as three cueing, which has been widely discredited as an effective method for reading instruction.1 F&P use three cueing, but by a different name — MSV analysis. Quoting from F&P’s own blog post attempting to explain what MSV analysis is:
“MSV stands for meaning, language structure or syntax and visual information, which includes graphics, the letters and phonological information, the sounds. It is a way for teachers to analyze what information a young reader uses and does not yet use as he builds a system for processing written texts from his earliest encounters with print.
The goal for the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously. And that includes processing each letter in words from left to right. If a reader says ‘pony’ for ‘horse’ because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures, as well as the structure of the language, but is neglecting to use the visual information of the print. His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.
At an early point in development, the teacher prompts for the child to monitor his reading and recognize that pony makes sense, but doesn’t look right. A student at a later point in development might require a different prompt such as, ‘Try that again, and be sure what you read looks right and makes sense’, or ‘Check the letters to be sure you are right.’”
This is merely three cueing by another name and affords F&P and its proponents cover for insisting they don’t use it. As an example, LCUSD Associate Superintendent Wenn asserted in a December 2022 email that LCUSD does not use three cueing theory in its reading instruction practices to her knowledge. Yet at the Jan. 26th meeting both elementary principals indicated in their responses to questions that cueing strategies are indeed taught to students. In fact, one principal produced an actual F&P assessment that showed a student demonstrating the classic “pony for horse” error described by F&P above. This had been flagged by the teacher administering the assessment as a partial error. Here is what Mark Seidenberg had to say about the “pony for horse” example that F&P use to defend their use of MSV:
“In defense of their approach, F&P (like Lucy Calkins) cite the example of a child who reads the word HORSE as PONY. This example clarifies what is at stake.
For F&P such errors are a natural occurrence in beginning reading. The error shows that the child understands the context (perhaps from pictures) and just needs the tools to correct the error, with the teacher’s support. Later they will be taught to ‘monitor’ their own reading to identify when errors have been made and use the strategies to correct them.
I view the error quite differently: it indicates an astonishing instructional flaw, failing to teach the child basic facts about print. A child who is attending to the printed word and has learned that the spelling of a word represents its sound would know that the word cannot be PONY. This type of error is called a semantic paralexia when it occurs in adults whose reading is impaired because of stroke or other brain injury. It’s a rare error among beginning readers unless they haven’t been adequately taught about print.”2
As to F&P’s claim that, “Fountas and Pinnell’s approach to foundational literacy includes explicit and systematic phonics…,” others who have closely reviewed their materials believe otherwise. In November 2021, the national non-profit curriculum review organization Ed Reports reviewed F&P Classroom and gave it a failing rating, primarily for its inadequate attention to phonics instruction:
“The materials for Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 do not meet the expectations for text quality and complexity and alignment to the standards.
…
In foundational skills, the materials use an analytic approach to teaching phonics. The program cites some general research; however, the program does not present a research-based or evidence-based explanation for the teaching of phonological skills or for the hierarchy in which the skills are presented. Additionally, while in Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study Lessons, the program cites studies supporting explicit teaching of phonics skills, the program does not present a research-based or evidence-based explanation for the sequence of phonics. Materials contain phonological awareness lesson structures that provide teachers with the opportunity to explicitly teach phonological awareness. However, daily phonological awareness practice opportunities for students are not provided. For phonics instruction, the Fountas and Pinnell materials contain lessons which provide the teachers with instruction and repeated modeling. However, foundational skills lessons are recommended for 10 minutes a day, which may not provide sufficient time for students to receive daily explicit instruction to work towards mastery of foundational skills. Since Letter-Sound Relationships and Spelling Patterns lessons do not span the entire year, students do not have daily opportunities to practice decoding sounds and spelling patterns. Lessons provide limited opportunities for students to develop orthographic and phonological processing. ”
With regard to EdReport’s failing review of F&P Classroom, Emily Hanford had this to say, quoting a school board member from the Palo Alto Unified School District:
“‘If you’re a parent concerned about literacy, you should be asking your superintendent, your principal, your board members, ‘Why are we using a program that got the lowest possible rating?’ said Todd Collins, who serves on the school board in Palo Alto, California. His district has long used Fountas and Pinnell and Calkins materials, but — prompted by the national conversation about the science of reading — is adopting a new curriculum.”
It’s Not Whole Language!
Another claim in the resource sent by Wenn defending LCUSD’s use of F&P is that it is not based on whole language:
This claim is technically correct insofar as F&P Literacy is often classified by education publishers as balanced literacy, but ignores F&P’s roots in whole language and its employment of many whole language tenets, most notably the belief that learning to read is a natural process, and its use of three cueing to recognize unknown words. It also ignores Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell’s history as proponents and experts on whole language. After all, before whole language fell out of favor after the “reading wars” in the late 1990s, Irene Fountas co-authored a whole language resource guide in 1992:
It’s Evidence Based!
F&P and its defenders, including LCUSD, insist its products are research based:
This assertion is true in part, but as discussed in my last article, the claim requires close interrogation by looking at each research study individually, and evaluating the soundness of its design, judging the reasonableness of its results, and whether the authors’ stated conclusions can properly be drawn from the results. The assertion is false in part because unlike most scientific research where investigators approach an issue or area of study neutrally not knowing the results, and then draw conclusions based on the study’s results, F&P did not create its reading instruction approach based on dispassionate investigation of how children learn to read. In other words, as in most educational studies, research does not inform theories of learning, rather researchers already believing a theory conduct research to support their theory. Contrary results from research are ignored or discarded.
Heinemann Publishing, the publishers of F&P’s products, lists dozens of studies purporting to prove the efficacy of their goods on its website, but ignore those that question or contradict them. This is understandable — after all, Heinemann wants prospective customers to buy their wares, not pass on them because of contrary evidence they presented. But supposedly responsible educational consumers like school districts and private schools have an obligation to do due diligence before they spend taxpayer or parent tuition money. They must do the hard work of reading studies purporting to prove the effectiveness of the materials they buy. Unfortunately, most educational consumers don’t. They take shortcuts and rely on the advice of colleagues and journals/websites they frequent without scrutinizing the research.
As stated in my previous article, a study from a peer-reviewed reading research journal indicated that the Fountas & Pinnell’s assessment system worked little better than chance (i.e. 54%) in diagnostic accuracy of 2nd and 3rd graders who required reading intervention (established as students who performed below the 25th percentile on the MAP3.) The study’s researchers used F&P’s BAS as an example of an informal reading inventory compared to the widely available Oral Reading Fluency (ORF), the most commonly used universal screening tool.4 ORF also had higher levels of sensitivity (0.86) than F&P’s BAS (0.33) and and superior specificity (0.78 vs 0.66), yet ORF takes just 1 minute to test each student while F&P BAS takes 20-30 minutes for a trained teacher to administer to each student. To no one’s surprise, this research article is not listed among Heinemann’s research page citations.
F&P’s claim in its “Get The Facts: Responding to Misinformation About Fountas and Pinnell Literacy” resource that its LLI product has been proven effective in a “gold-standard study endorsed by the US Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse” refers to a study that was funded by Heinemann, though they claim it was “independent.”5
A Position Staked
LCUSD continues to defend its use of a reading instruction approach that has been severely questioned by independent journalists, cognitive scientists who specialize in reading, reading specialists, and skeptical teachers and parents. While schools, districts, and at least eleven states across the US repeal and discard flawed reading instruction approaches and curricula, LCUSD has staked its position that there is no problem in La Canada, and even if there were, there’s nothing wrong with the way they use the same approach and materials.
To understand three cueing and what is wrong with it, read Emily Hanford’s 2019 article “At a Loss for Words: How a flawed theory is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers.” A podcast version of the story is available at the same link.
MAP is the Measures of Academic Progress, a suite of pre-K-12 standardized formative and interim assessments published by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA.)
Parker, D. C., Zaslofsky, A. F., Burns, M. K., Kanive, R., Hodgson, J., Scholin, S. E., et al. , “A Brief Report of the Diagnostic Accuracy of Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Inventory Levels for Reading Failure Risk Among Second- and Third-Grade Students,” Reading and Writing Quarterly, Volume 31 - Issue 1, (2015.)
See LLI Efficacy Study at Heinemann’s research website for LLI: https://www.fountasandpinnell.com/research/lli/