Pseudoscience as a Basis for Reading Instruction

Reporter Emily Hanford has released another provocative podcast series about the reading education problem in the United States that reaches all the way to La Cañada — Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong:

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

The six-part series is a follow-up to Hanford’s award-winning podcast from 2018, Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? and investigative articles she’s written since. Through her investigative pieces, Hanford examines the pervasive use of a reading instruction method throughout American K-6 schools that was long-ago proven wrong by cognitive scientists. The approach, originally called whole language when it was first developed by Ken Goodman in the 1970s, persists today under a different name — balanced literacy.¹

Unfortunately, the majority of public schools in the United States, including La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD), use balanced literacy as the preferred pedagogical approach to teaching students how to read. These approaches and their shortcomings, brought to light with devastating clarity by Hanford in her Sold a Story podcast, are used in the following curricula:

• Fountas & Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System (BAS), Leveled Literacy Interventions (LLI) system, guided reading readers, and other resources.

• Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery program

• Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, and (Columbia Teachers College) Reading and Writing Workshop (TCRWP)

Many parents may recognize some of the effects of balanced literacy in their own children described in this article if they were taught to read at LCUSD elementary schools.

LCUSD and Fountas & Pinnell

GaySu Pinnell and Irene Fountas at Lesley University, where Fountas is the Marie M. Clay Endowed Chair for Early Literacy and Reading Recovery.

LCUSD has a long history with the theories and prescriptions of education professors and early literacy “experts” Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. In addition, every parent of current and recent LCUSD elementary students will recognize the Fountas & Pinnell guided reading levels, a diagnostic tool that is part of their Benchmark Assessment System (BAS), that measure the independent reading levels of students. LCUSD elementary teachers regularly use the Fountas & Pinnell BAS to monitor their students’ reading progress, to identify students that require reading intervention, and they also assign Fountas & Pinnell leveled readers to their students based on those reading level assessments. For example, during the regular meeting of the LCUSD Governing Board on August 30, 2022, La Cañada Elementary (LCE) Principal Emily Blaney presented the following slide as part of her presentation on the results of the responsive teaching plans utilized at LCE during the 2021-22 school year:

Note that Blaney’s success criteria for reading intervention was defined using Fountas and Pinnell reading targets (i.e. an increase of at least two F&P levels for 1st grade and at least one level for 2nd and 3rd grades.) Palm Crest Elementary and Paradise Canyon Elementary also used Fountas & Pinnell reading targets as success metrics in their responsive teaching plan reports at the same Board meeting.

The problem with the Fountas & Pinnell BAS program is that it is unreliable at accurately predicting a child’s reading proficiency and its design is based on a flawed understanding of how children learn to read. Additionally there is no peer reviewed research demonstrating the efficacy of Fountas & Pinnell BAS to accurately assess student reading levels, and struggling students who require reading intervention in particular. There are dozens of observational case studies cited by the publishers of Fountas & Pinnell — Heinemann Publishing — as the research foundation for BAS and LLI, but only two of them involve random control trials (RCT), and both of those were commissioned and funded by Heinemann. Neither were published in refereed academic journals.² Hanford summarized the results of those two Heinemann-funded efficacy studies in episode 5 of Sold a Story:

“The studies showed that kindergarteners, and first and second graders who were in the Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention program got better at reading leveled books. But the studies also showed that the program had no ‘discernible effects’ on their ability to sound out words. Another way to say that: kids moved up reading levels, but they didn’t get better at reading.” ³

In the same podcast episode, Hanford cites an independent third-party study published in a peer-reviewed journal that indicated that the Fountas & Pinnell's LLI system worked little better than chance (i.e. 54% accuracy) in diagnostic reading accuracy of 2nd and 3rd graders.⁴

When asked in December of this year, LCUSD Associate Superintendent of Student Services Anais Wenn acknowledged that LCUSD continues to use Fountas & Pinnell to identify LCUSD students’ independent reading levels, and also that LCUSD uses balanced literacy to teach students how to read. Fortunately LCUSD does not use either Reading Recovery or Reading and Writing Workshop, according to Wenn. Wenn also pointed out that LCUSD also uses Winsor Learning’s Sonday System to identify and help students with reading difficulties.

More concerning, the use of Fountas & Pinnell assessments, readers and other resources is so entrenched at LCUSD elementary schools that their use has strongly influenced other instructional material selections. For example, during the K-6 English Language Arts (ELA) textbook adoption process in the 2016-17 school year, district teachers and administrators on the selection committee favored Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Journeys ELA curriculum over competing programs primarily because of Journeys’ inclusion of “Leveled Readers for Guided Reading by Fountas” that aligned with the district’s use of Fountas & Pinnell. Competing products from National Geographic and McGraw-Hill were scored lower for inferior leveled readers and lack of sufficient Fountas & Pinnell alignment.

To independently verify how much LCUSD has spent on balanced literacy instructional materials and professional development, I did a cursory search of LCUSD past purchase orders from Heinemann Publishing. The search revealed that LCUSD has paid almost $100,000 to Heinemann Publishing and its training affiliates Heinemann Workshops and Heinemann Professional Development over the past seven years. Most recently LCUSD paid Heinemann Publishing $7,662.38 on September 01, 2022 for “Fountas & Pinnell Classroom Reading Collection K” leveled readers.

What’s Wrong with Balanced Literacy?

As pointed out in the Sold a Story podcast series, balanced literacy is the dominant reading instruction approach taught in schools of education across America. Taken at its plain meaning, the term balanced literacy seems unobjectionable. Who would object to literacy? And shouldn’t all teaching be balanced? But to those familiar with the reading wars, the approach has a much murkier history. Balanced literacy emerged during the reading wars as a compromise between advocates of phonics and advocates of whole language.

Further cementing schools’ continued commitment to balanced literacy in spite of the data, many veteran elementary teachers are heavily invested in the approach, having been taught it in their undergraduate schooling and used it in their classroom for years, and revere the founders and key developers of popular curricular approaches based on balanced literacy like Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, Lucy Calkins, and Marie Clay. Thus, they tend to reflexively resist arguments questioning the efficacy and logic of balanced literacy.

Many of the key proponents of balanced literacy, most prominently Lucy Calkins and Marie Clay, were strong advocates of whole language. Though it doesn’t have a precise meaning, the key components of balanced literacy include:

• For teaching children how to read, retention of the whole language tenets of guessing the meaning of words using contextual clues. In whole language, this was called the three cueing system.⁵

• Additionally, use phonics when needed to teach children how to decode words. However, use of phonics is limited and non-systematic.

• Continually assess a child’s reading progress using what are called Informal Reading Inventories (IRI), and provide special books called leveled readers that are written at a child’s assessed reading level, but “authentic” to a child’s cultural background.

• Provide a “rich literacy environment” to encourage children to read independently.

• Teach children explicit reading comprehension strategies, independent of background knowledge.

The fuzzy boundaries of what balanced literacy means allow whole language proponents to claim they use phonics, but in practice retain their preference for using whole language approaches. For example, in a 2019 national survey of K-2 teachers about reading instruction practices conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, 68% of teacher respondents said they used balanced literacy as the primary approach to teach reading and early literacy, yet only 52% used phonics explicitly while 75% use the three-cueing system to identify unfamiliar words.⁶

Balanced literacy can succeed in teaching novice learners how to read, but it is inefficient, far less effective that other methods according to cognitive science research, makes learning to read unnecessarily difficult for many children, and in the view of critics is a principle culprit for the low reading ability of American children according to standardized tests like CAASPP and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP - colloquially called “the Nation’s Report Card.”)

But Our Test Scores are So High!

Defenders of balanced literacy claim that high standardized test scores in English Language Arts (ELA) achieved by their students prove the approach works. This claim holds especially true in high-performing districts like LCUSD. What is not acknowledged is that many children in high performing districts learn to read in spite of how they are taught at school. Many parents solve the problem of bad reading instruction at school by teaching their kids how to read before they enter school. Another mitigating factor, recognized by Hanford in her Sold a Story podcast, is that parents in affluent districts whose children have reading difficulty hire tutors to do the job the schools couldn’t. LCUSD, to its credit, employs a large number of reading intervention specialists and does a fair job of identifying struggling readers early in the elementary grades to mitigate reading difficulties.

Not acknowledged by Hanford in her reporting is that a fair number of children can learn to read on their own regardless of reading instructional approaches used in school.

Unintended Consequences of Bad Reading Instruction

Eleven states have passed laws requiring their departments of education to adopt reading instructional curricula aligned with what is known as the Science of Reading. California is not among them.⁷ Clearly LCUSD was either unaware of the lack of scientific evidence supporting balanced literacy and Fountas & Pinnell’s BAS and LLI programs, or they failed to do their due diligence when selecting the approach and curricula to use in its schools. Now that they know about the problems, they should conduct a review of their use in district schools and either change course, or defend their decision to stay the course.

More importantly, parents should take responsibility for their own child’s literacy and either course correct outside of school, or demand change from the district. The negative consequences of inferior reading instruction strategies are manifold and parents should be on the lookout for them in their own children:

• At worst their child will not be taught to read properly. The most recent CAASPP results from spring 2022 show that as much as 23% of students in 3rd grade at PCY and 23% of 4th graders at LCE tested below grade level in ELA. This percentage used to be much lower in prior years.

• Failing to properly teach phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping at the appropriate time forces children to guess at word meanings, which interferes with higher order reading skills.

• This makes learning to read unnecessarily difficult, thus diminishing the chances that a child will develop reading fluency and a love of reading.

• The reliance on Fountas & Pinnell reading level assessments can be unreliable, particularly in the early elementary grades so it can give a parent the false sense that their child is reading “on level,” even though they may not be decoding words properly and have substituted cueing (i.e. guessing) strategies and their own strategies such as memorizing texts to pass the reading assessments. As discussed in Sold a Story, this often manifests as children being identified as on level in KG and 1st or 2nd grades, only to regress in grades 3 and above.

• The over reliance on leveled readers in early elementary grades of short length deprives children of the opportunity to read richer material. This also interferes with the accumulation of background knowledge, which the science of reading has indicated is critical to reading comprehension and not acknowledged in current theories of reading comprehension in vogue.⁸

• The overemphasis in balanced literacy curricula on reading comprehension strategies and inefficient teaching and assessment practices like guided reading and F&P assessments that take 15-20 minutes per student necessarily crowd out instructional minutes that could be spent on other subjects like science and mathematics.

• Their child may be misidentified as having a learning disability such as dyslexia.

• The most common symptoms in older children of the negative effects of balanced literacy approaches earlier in their schooling are poor reading fluency and a disinterest in reading for pleasure. A simple test for parents unsure of whether their kids can read fluently is to give them a book without pictures that they’ve never seen before and ask them to read it out loud to you.

While the above deleterious consequences apply to children, the following apply to the school district as a whole:

• The district continues to use instructional resources based on pseudoscience. As a district that claims to be committed to academic excellence and prides itself on being “data driven” and “research based,” the original adoption of and continued use of curricula and instructional approaches that contravene the known science on literacy and reading comprehension is disappointing at best, unacceptable at worst.

• The district spends a huge amount of resources on its reading intervention program in its elementary schools. With up to 23% of some grade-level cohorts in specific schools below grade level, a switch to superior reading instruction curricula could reduce the need for reading intervention specialists and special programs and materials.

• The district owes an explanation to the families of students it failed by using an instructional approach that is known to be harmful to many.

1. Whole language failed miserably when tried widely in public schools in the 1980s and 1990s and precipitated what has come to be known as the Reading Wars. For an overview of the Reading Wars, see “Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert,” by Anne Castles anne.castles@mq.edu.au, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol. 19 Issue 1 (2018) or The Reading Wars: Phonics versus Whole Language, by Jon Reyhner, Northern Arizona University.

2. The research studies commissioned by Heinemann Publishing can be found on their website below, the first conducted on 320 K-2 students in select Denver public schools during the 2011-12 school year, and the second on 427 K-2 students in Tift County Schools in Georgia and Enlarged City School District of Middletown in New York during 2009-10:
Carolyn Ransford-Kaldon, Cristin L. Ross, et al., Efficacy of the Leveled Literacy Intervention System for K-2 Urban Students: An Empirical Evaluation of LLI in Denver Public Schools, Center for Research in Educational Policy, University of Memphis (2013.)
Carolyn Ransford-Kaldon, E. Sutton Flynt, et al., Implementation of Effective Intervention: An Empirical Study to Evaluate the Efficacy of Fountas & Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention System (LLI), Center for Research in Educational Policy, University of Memphis (2010.)

3. Episode 5 - “The Company” of Sold a Story: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2022/11/10/sold-a-story-e5-the-company

4. 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.) 928 students were tested in a rural elementary school district in Minnesota.

5. For more information on the three cueing theory, see Emily Hanford’s 2019 article, “At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers,” APM Reports, August 22, 2019.

6. “Early Reading Instruction: Results of a National Survey,” EdWeek Research Center (January 2020.)

7. See for example, “Coalition says ‘science of reading-aligned’ core curricula barely used in California,” by Ali Tadayon at EdSource (Oct. 11, 2022.)

8. For more on the importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension, see “How Knowledge Helps: It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning — and Thinking,” by Daniel Willingham in American Educator, Spring 2006 or Natalie Wexler’s book, “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System — And How to Fix It,” Avery, New York (2019.)