SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

It’s not about the kids

Educhatter’s latest topic is Reading Recovery, and at the bottom of his column he asks why RR continues to be popular in education circles despite its lack of effectiveness and its huge expense. None of the 51 comments really deals with this question, and so I thought I would take a shot at it.

First, a word of explanation. Reading Recovery is a one-on-one program for struggling readers in the primary grades. There is a range of interpretations but, generally speaking, it uses a whole language/balanced literacy sort of approach, involving a bit of phonics and a lot of guessing. Reading Recovery doesn’t work well for most kids and the cost of one-on-one interventions is staggering. So why are school boards continuing to support Reading Recovery?

The thing is, Reading Recovery is very pleasant for everyone involved (except, of course, the students, but I’ll get to that in a minute). The RR teachers themselves have a great job: they get paid, say, $90,000, deal with only a handful of students every day, require little preparation, and get to go home at 3:00 pm. The classroom teachers like it because they think their struggling students are getting individual help which they can’t give, plus their class size is reduced while the students are withdrawn for the program. Principals, consultants, and school board administrators like it because the additional staff build their empires. The teachers’ unions like it because the additional RR teachers have to become members of their unions. And the various institutions that develop materials and promote RR like it because they have great jobs and big salaries. 

Obviously, if the criterion for adoption of educational measures were whether or not they were good for students, Reading Recovery would have died an early death. But public education has been captured by its producers, and the vast majority of public education policies are decided on the basis of whether or not they are good for educators. Reading Recovery is but one example of a policy that is good for educators but bad for kids. Others include short and few instructional days, progressive teaching methods and materials, dumbed-down curricula, teacher certification, the Ontario College of Teachers, and the list goes on.