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Do low-income children benefit from skill-and-drill reading instruction?

From The Schools Our Children Deserve (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)
Appendix A: "The Hard Evidence"

Alfie Kohn


Minority children from low-income families typically get the same kind of skill-and-drill instruction that low-achieving students do, sometimes because individual teachers arrange things that way and sometimes because it’s imposed on teachers in the form of heavily scripted commercial programs.  To the extent this represents a deliberate strategy – as opposed to another example of how the least thoughtful, lowest quality of teaching is once again most common in the poorest neighborhoods -- the rationale goes like this:  privileged white children have often learned phonics from their parents before they get to school.  Their peers who haven’t had this luxury need to learn phonics in order to catch up.[1]

One problem with this argument is the tendency, once again, to confuse learning phonics with a particular (intensive, systematic, drill-based) method of teaching phonics.  As explained earlier, Whole Language includes phonics, but in the context of meaningful stories and other authentic uses of language.  The children who show up at kindergarten already reading are typically coming from homes that are more like WL than skill-and-drill environments.  That’s why WL proponents point out that “overemphasizing phonics may be especially damaging for children who have had few experiences with books prior to school.”[2]

This argument is supported by some of the studies mentioned earlier in this Appendix, notably Morrow’s evaluation of at-risk children in New Jersey and the comparison of minority kindergartners in the South.[3]  Now we can add three separate studies of kindergartens and/or first grades that focused on children of low socioeconomic status.  All found that some variation of Whole Language instruction (in one case with a scant 15 minutes a day of skills instruction tacked on) was superior to traditional reading instruction for these students.[4]

Beyond the studies comparing individual classrooms, there is one other kind of evidence worth mentioning.  The National Assessment of Educational Progress includes a questionnaire that provides some information about students and teachers that can be correlated with the scores.  Data from fourth-grade teachers in 1992 and 1994 turned up some intriguing findings.  First, the more frequently students could read books of their own choosing in class, the higher their scores.  (Those who could do so every day had the best scores, those who were never permitted to do so had the worst, and those who could do so occasionally were in the middle.)   Second, those students who never used workbooks or worksheets had the highest scores, those who used them every day had the lowest, and those who used them occasionally again fell in between.  Finally, those who never took quizzes or tests had the highest scores, those who took them every day had the lowest, and those who took them occasionally were in the middle.[5]

More direct evidence comes from simply asking teachers whether they had a “whole language,” “literature-based,” or “phonics” approach to reading instruction.  There are, to be sure, several reasons for exercising caution in drawing conclusions from the answers:  WL and phonics are not opposites; what teachers say in a questionnaire isn’t necessarily what they do; and these are fourth-grade rather than primary-grade teachers.  Still, the students of those teachers who picked “phonics” had a lower average score (208) than those who picked WL (220) or literature (221).  Moreover, when you look at the state-by-state results, the more fourth grade teachers who said they used phonics, the lower that state’s average NAEP score.[6]  If we assume there is some correlation between the way a school’s fourth grade teachers and its first grade teachers approach reading instruction, these results are suggestive indeed.  Oddly, they weren’t reported in any newspapers or popular magazines.

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[For full citations, please see the reference section of The Schools Our Children Deserve.]

1. Lisa Delpit, with whom this argument is often associated, has added that “literacy instruction should be in the context of real reading and real writing, and reading and writing for real purposes.  This means using literature that children like and that connects with them in their homes and lives.  It means writing for purposes the children find useful” (Delpit, 1992).  [She has subsequently (2010) described her position as “nuanced,” in contrast to a defense of “scripted curricula,” which she opposes, that is sometimes attributed to her by antiprogressives.  She distinguishes, for example, between explicit instruction, which she supports in certain contexts, and “decontextualized drills” that consist of “repetition of meaningless bits,” which she opposes.]

2. Weaver et al., p. 104.

3. Lesley Mandel Morrow and her colleagues at Rutgers University (1990) evaluated “at-risk kindergarten classes in an urban school district in New Jersey,” comparing a group that did mostly story reading with a group that spent the year with a commercially produced reading-readiness program (Living with the Alphabet).  The former group ended up being better readers in terms of comprehension while scoring about the same on a skills test.  Two years later, Morrow moved up to second grade, trying out a curriculum that spent less time on the district’s standard basal reader and more time with independent reading and writing.  Again, those children did better on a variety of measures of comprehension and just about as well on standardized tests (1992).  At a public school in the South, meanwhile, low-income minority kindergartners were followed and tested for three years (Manning et al., 1989).  The result was similar:  those in the WL group not only became better readers but, despite the fact that they were “not drilled on words or word parts in isolation, they scored significantly higher” on two standardized measures of basic word skills than those who had been taught the traditional way.

4. Eldredge, 1991; Otto, 1993; and Purcell-Gates et al., 1995.

5. The NAEP questionnaire results appear on pp. 451, 471, 501 of the National Reading Assessments, Data Almanac.

6. These NAEP results were cited in McQuillan, pp. 14, 90.

 

 www.alfiekohn.org -- Alfie Kohn