mmilliken@heraldsun.com; 419-6684
DURHAM -- Is Reading Street helping or hurting children?
Critics of the Durham public school system's approach to teaching literacy -- a group that has created an e-mail listserv and is meeting regularly with each other and local educators -- say the elementary-level reading program is hurting. Durham school administrators, who made Reading Street a prominent part of their literacy curriculum this year, believe it will help.
Studies conducted by the program's publisher provide grist for either argument.
In literature promoting Reading Street, the program's publisher frequently trumpets the results of scientific research it commissioned to evaluate the curriculum.
"Students participating in the Reading Street program demonstrated significant learning gains during the study period," states a background sheet on the curriculum put out by Pearson and its subsidiary, Scott Foresman.
The sheet, which directly quotes a 2007 study by Magnolia Consulting, an independent research firm based in Charlottesville, Va., continues: "Across grades, students demonstrated an average gain of 32 percentile points on the GMRT-4. All students reached, and often surpassed, the end-of-year benchmarks on all fluency measures. Second- and third-grade students gained an equivalent of 47 percentile points on the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) test."
All of which is true. But the promotional literature never mentions the findings disclosed by Magnolia under the heading "How does the reading performance of children participating in Reading Street compare to that of children participating in other basal reading programs?"
That's where the study reviewed data showing that students using competing elementary-level curriculums performed as well or slightly better than those taught with Reading Street.
"The majority of control teachers used reading programs with similar core components to Reading Street and provided differentiated instruction to small groups of children based on reading ability," the 2007 study stated. "Although [some] analyses between student gains in treatment and control classrooms revealed differences, the main analyses found that these differences were not significant, and they did not vary across schools or grades. This indicates that the Reading Street program performs equally well when evaluated against other basal programs."
Another passage in the report noted that "students in the control classrooms [using curriculums that were already in place in the subject schools] gained more than students in Reading Street programs," although the differences were small.
A 2006 Magnolia study showed similar results. Both Magnolia studies were commissioned by Pearson.
When a Johns Hopkins University School of Education-based group called the Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE) reviewed efficacy research on beginning reading programs in January, it found "insufficient evidence of effectiveness" for Reading Street. The BEE authors based their evaluation on the two Magnolia Consulting studies.
A similar review of upper elementary reading programs released by the Best Evidence Encyclopedia released in June also listed Reading Street under "insufficient evidence of effectiveness." In general, both reports stated, programs aimed at changing daily teaching practices appear to be more effective than programs relying solely on a curriculum or on technology.
A representative of Pearson said that the Best Evidence Encyclopedia categorization of Reading Street should not be seen as damaging.
"They're not saying that we are not effective," said Marcy Baughman, Pearson's director of academic research. "They're saying that we are performing comparably to what is on the market."
She characterized the showing that reading test scores produced by students schooled with Pearson's product were indistinguishable from those of students using other ones as praiseworthy.
"I don't think that's actually a negative finding," Baughman said. "I think it's actually a powerful finding that you can implement a program for the first time and the teachers can do equally as well as their colleagues who have been using a program for three, four, five years that they're familiar with, that they can supplement as they wish."
Under the rules of the Magnolia studies, Baughman noted, teachers using Reading Street were not allowed to supplement the curriculum, and "they have to be up and running with very little exposure to the program prior to the start of the school year, and just two days of professional development."
Both Magnolia reports stated that there is a need to see how students using Reading Street perform over the course of more than one year. Although the 2007 study is labeled "Year Two Report," participants were first-time Reading Street users.
To address that area, Pearson launched a two-year longitudinal study of Reading Street last summer. The report should be complete by September 2011.
