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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students are getting individual help which they can’t give, plus their class size is reduced while the students are withdrawn for the program.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.
Agree, that any educational program and policies net benefits go to the educators, and students get the secondary benefits, if there is any benefits in the first place. One thing you have mentioned, is the teachers have a reduced class size. True, but since recovery teachers work with only one student at a time, for a 30 minute block, the student becomes responsible for the work missed in the classroom. The RR students, will have extra homework on the work missed, on top of extra reading at home. What is interesting is the 20 % figure that is used for the lowest performing students. A class of 25, that would be 5 students, and a class of 20, it would be 4 students. Why the 20 %? Why not 15 % or 25 %? The 20 % fits in nicely with the school day, of 5 hours of instruction time, instruction is no more than 30 minutes and a total of 10 students per recovery teacher. The average school, due to decrease class sizes, have two grade 1 classes of 20 or so students.which does reduce it to 8 students for the day, with a hour for prep time. How it works nicely not only for union contracts, but as well as creating a turnover of students every 20 weeks, where half of the students are put back into the classroom at around the 12 to 13 weeks.
Now, to get in the RR program, as student must meet the criteria, which is done by careful observation using the Observation Survey. I call it very subjective, because there is no measures of objective data such as phonemic awareness, and other hard data that has the potential to pinpoint and targeted the reading problems. My question is, and it has been others that have question it, how many students that the RR for 12 weeks or so, and was returned back to the classroom, are treated as new students for the second term of 20 weeks? Keep in mind under the data, students who did not finished the whole 20 weeks, and are returned back to the classroom, are marked as being successful in RR’s data base. But in RR’s data base, there is no distinction between new students and former students taking the RR sessions.
Even the criteria is prefect for a busy teacher, since many of the observations if not all, would be already watch and recorded already by a teacher, in their day to day activities. An extra form, would present no problem to a teacher, that has it already noted in her daily observations.
Every aspect of the RR program is ideal for administration purposes, and does not cause undue hardship for grade 1 teachers. Except for the students…............