Reading First and its Impact on Poor Children

Rethinking Reading First

BY NOW the failures of prepackaged, lockstep, skills-heavy Reading First instruction are as apparent as the failures of its homunculus version when it was proclaimed as George W. Bush’s “Texas Miracle.” During the time of the “Texas Miracle,” independent national testing (i.e., tests not devised in Texas) revealed that the instruction not only did not produce superior reading comprehension or academic achievement, it widened the black-white reading achievement gap. Nor did the purported gold standard document supporting Reading First instruction — the report of the National Reading Panel — muster evidence to justify making this pedagogy the instructional core of No Child Left Behind. Not surprisingly, this failure to find supporting evidence has continued in recent assessments, further underscoring — sadly for the academic futures of children who have been force-fed this instruction — Reading First’s ineffectiveness.

Given the continued lack of evidence, the question must be asked: Why was Reading First mandated and why had other forms of reading instruction been rejected? Why did it take the recent uncovering of the Education Department’s managerial bias in awarding Reading First grants for Congress to cut the program’s funds? A charitable answer might be that a single kind of instruction was approved under Reading First because people with good intentions, particularly President Bush and his educational policy Praetorian Guard, had unintentionally misconstrued the evidence. That answer would be too charitable, however, given the deliberate, consistent lock out of alternative viewpoints in Congressional hearings, the management of Reading First funding, the research reviews employed to justify Reading First, and, not surprisingly, Bush’s speeches (if rote gets the job done, then rote is right). Like the attack on Iraq, the desired policy goal has determined the concoction of evidence.

If Reading First was not about spreading educational democracy, particularly among poor children, what was its real purposes? There are several. It was literacy education on the cheap. Teacher-proof, one-size-fits-all, prepackaged instructional programs cost much less than instruction addressing children’s individual needs, which requires well-skilled teachers, small teacher-student ratio, multiple instructional materials, and extensive classroom libraries. Another purpose was ideological: Lockstep Reading First pedagogy fosters student uniformity and conformity, characteristics that the political right regards as perfect citizenship qualities.

Important as these purposes are for explaining this pedagogy, I will focus on one embedded in the politics of domestic social-spending decisions: Reading First instruction has been a policy concoction that, on the one hand, insists sound reading instruction—especially for poor children—is the panacea for their education and future. On the other hand, it has also been used to cloak an assault on children, especially poor children, grounded in (a) workforce requirements as seen from the perspective of business needs and profits and (b) a goal of shrinking domestic social spending to a minimum. Since the policy insists that everything needing to be done for poor children’s education is being done, it also serves to justify doing as little as possible for poor children in every area of their lives that influences educational outcome. Structurally it is a realpolitik policy grounded in the question, “What’s the payoff for wealth accumulation if poor children are educated?” And since the corporate answer boils down to, “Not much,” Reading First served as a political tool to divert attention from an indifference to poor children.

Texas: The Template
Despite endless photos of Governor Bush among poor children, there persisted, behind his insistence that reading building blocks, basics, and drills would get the job done, a callous disregard for these children. It mattered not, for example, that Texas ranked third among states in malnourished children and that research had long linked hunger to literacy underachievement. He not only vetoed a bill to coordinate the state’s hunger program, he slashed state payments for food stamps.

Equally unconcerned about research connecting children’s health and learning, he chose the financial health of his oil friends when able to change the state’s near bottom ranking in the percentage of poor children lacking health insurance. Flush with a budget surplus that could have funded affordable health care for about 250,000 children, he pushed through a $45 million tax break for oil well owners.

The Strategy Writ Large
As president, Bush amplified the strategy: While insisting that the nation focus on reading as the instructional cure for poor children, he disregarded all else in their lives that influences reading achievement—especially poverty, which increased markedly under his administration. Currently, according to government estimates, 18 percent of children nationwide —13 million children—are living in poor families, but for African American and Latino children, the respective percentages are 35 percent and 28 percent. Horrific as these numbers are, the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), using realistic criteria, finds that about 39 percent of the nation’s children—29 million in 2006—live in poor families. The National Academy of Science has made similar estimates.

Head Start
A graphic example of Bush’s assault on poor children is his effort to destroy Head Start. Based on the research-supported premise that a comprehensive approach is required for children’s early learning and school preparedness, it includes not only education, but basic medical, nutritional, and emotional assistance, as well as parenting support. More than what is necessary, according to Bush.

His School Readiness Act would have eliminated Head Start’s mandatory comprehensive approach and put teaching and testing of initial reading skills—Reading First on training wheels—in the forefront to lay “the foundation for children to become good readers.” He attempted to transfer Head Start to states in block grants that would mention performance standards for the various key areas, but would not require the states to employ them. Head Start advocates had good reason to worry because among state preschool programs only three states had duplicated the range of comprehensive services in the federal program. Fortunately, Head Start advocates were able to muster sufficient nationwide support to pressure Congress to reject the proposal. Nevertheless, under Bush, Head Start funding has been cut, forcing reductions in programs, staff, and student enrollment, and allowing space for fewer than half of the nation’s eligible children. Hence, even after Bush leaves office the damage done to poor children will be hard, if not impossible, to undo.

Cutting Into Poor Children’s Lives
Indifference to poor children’s lives has been evident throughout Bush’s domestic budget. For example, although unhealthy children are more likely to miss school days, have cognitive problems, and fall behind grade level achievement, his budget cuts children’s health programs. Currently providing health care to 28 million low-income children, Medicaid is scheduled to see billions cut over ten years through a combination of budget reductions and regulatory changes. Similarly, because of Bush’s opposition, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program provides health insurance to only about 40 percent of the children in need of it.

Another literacy concern should be the relationship between hunger or “food insecurity” (not enough food to meet basic needs), and children’s poor school achievement (see Gerald Coles, “Hunger, Academic Success and the Hard Bigotry of Indifference,” Rethinking Schools, forthcoming Fall issue). Yet a minimum of 3.5 million children go hungry and 14 million live in “food-insecure” homes. The food-stamp program would provide nourishment for these children, but the Bush budget proposes cutting food stamp spending by $63 million in 2008 and billions more in the decade ahead. Also targeted for elimination are the Commodity Supplement Food Program, which is for nutritionally vulnerable pregnant women and their children, and the Community Food and Nutrition Program, which supports local efforts to help needy families obtain food.

These examples are mere highlights of an assault on children stretching from cuts in lead abatement programs (designed to eliminate children’s exposure to lead toxicity), to the elimination of 42 education programs, including the Early Learning Fund, focuses on cognitive, social and language skills necessary for early school readiness. The far-reaching meaning of this assault helps explains why a UN survey of child well-being in 21 wealthy countries found that the U.S. ranked 20th.

Reading First and the Bottom Line
Reading First politics insist that the key policy question must be, What is the best instruction for teaching children to read? Seemingly sensible for guiding literacy policy, it is the wrong policy question because it is limited, misleading, and ultimately yields damaging educational consequences, especially for poor children. Instead, the question should be, What needs to be done to ensure that all children learn to read? When we ask this question, we include instruction as well as all else that contributes to literacy success. Eliminating the second question as the guide for national policy helps put the assault on poor children under the radar screen.

The indifference to poor children is part of a larger framework of the increasingly divided world between rich and poor, with its decline in wages and increase in poverty; the borderless class system, as Jeff Faux has put it. Employment projections over the next decade help contextualize what is behind this indifference: from the viewpoint of wealth and power, there is no profit in using the nation’s resources to ensure that all children are educated. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most new jobs in the next decade will be low-paying, minimally skilled ones, requiring little education and only short- or moderate-term, on-the-job training: jobs such as home care aides, retail salespersons, food preparation workers, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, child care workers, maids and housekeeping cleaners. Attesting to the minimal education most of these jobs require is the competition for this work between the U.S.-born, undereducated poor and the even less educated immigrants. Surely providing more than minimal education for a large portion of young Americans whose lives are going nowhere is, from the viewpoint of wealth and power, a waste of money. That assessment cannot, of course, be openly stated. Hence, they concoct a dazzling answer: reading education! This is a bootstrap solution that will propel poor children to later academic success but make policy that always accords with the bottom line.

Add to this the right’s effort to shrink social domestic spending: starve the beast. Greatly aiding the justification for this shrinkage are tax cuts (mostly for the rich) and increased budget deficits. Of course spending on poor children would not be squeezed if the spending led to increased business profits, but since it does not, the spending is considered to be wasteful. And ever ready for those who advocate for spending on poor children because it would promote their academic success, right-wing ideologues (such as those from the Heritage Foundation) maintain that making such connections is simply making excuses for these children not helping them do better in school. Or, as Bush has endlessly proclaimed, making such connections reveals the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Near Future
What does the near future hold? Will there be a reprise of Reading First? With John McCain as president, Reading First instruction is likely to assume an altered façade but be pushed in its essentials. Surely the assault on children will continue.

With Barack Obama as president and a Democrat-controlled Congress, perhaps Republican efforts to reprise Reading First instruction will fail, but that’s not clear. Unfortunately, in contrast to the Republican’s decades of zealous advocacy for their brand of literacy instruction, the Democrats have not shown a comparable enthusiasm that would grasp the educational and developmental issues embedded in contrasting forms of literacy education. In 1998, they supported the Republican-created Reading Excellence Act, the precursor of Reading First and, of course, in 2001 supported Reading First in the No Child Left Behind Act. Hopefully they have learned a lesson.

Surely an Obama administration will reduce the assault on children, but it is uncertain to what extent. Unfortunately, concerns continue about the degree to which Obama will focus on working families and the poor. Without a popular groundswell on behalf of the poor, as well as of working America in general, the chances are good that Obama—in striving to reduce the huge deficit he has inherited and failing to enact a truly progressive income tax—will not eliminate the assault (recall that Clinton chose deficit reduction over social programs).

In his book, Superclass, David Rothkopf writes that the divide between rich and poor around the world offers accelerating benefits to some while others are told to wait, wait for the process to benefit their children or their children’s children. Like those émigrés in the opening scene of Casablanca waiting for the plane that will take them to Lisbon and safety, poor children here are also likely to wait and wait and wait. With Reading First having failed them and Reading First Redux and its accompanying assault a possibility, these children will only be waiting for what Richard DeLone described as small futures.

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on literacy and learning disabilities. His books include Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation and Lies (Heinemann); Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children (Heinemann); and Reading Lessons: The Debate Over Literacy (Hill & Wang). He is the chair of the social action committee of Congregation Tikkun v’Or. He lives in Ithaca, NY.