Waldorf Schools are an interesting natural experiment showing that explicit reading instruction in the very early grades may be unnecessary

We have some family friends whose kids used to go to a (private) Waldorf school nearby.  The kids were wonderful, but I didn't know much about the school or its methods.  A few days ago, when I was saying something about whether children needed to read "informational text" in the very early grades, my wife said, "That's silly. Waldorf schools don't teach ANY reading until second grade, and those kids end up just fine."

I looked this up, and, as usual, my wife was right: Waldorf schools generally don't teach reading until second grade, use a whole language approach and avoid much explicit strategy instruction when they do teach it, and their students apparently end up reading just fine.  This is an important result, because it would seem to show that explicit reading instruction in Kindergarten and first grade may not be necessary, and that students certainly don't need to read much informational text to themselves in kindergarten and first grade in order to learn to read well later on.

Recent Studies
Until recently, most Waldorf schools were private, so skeptics could argue that if Waldorf students ended up being good readers, the students and families at those schools were distinctly different from the norm, so no comparison was possible.  Over the past couple of decades, however, a number of public Waldorf schools have opened, most of them in California, and two recent studies in the U.S.(Oberman 2007(pdf); Larrison et al. 2012) compare the results at these schools with those at traditional schools with comparable student demographics. The two studies find the same result: when it comes to reading on their own, students in the early grades in Waldorf schools are dramatically worse than their peers in regular schools, but by the later grades, the Waldorf students have caught up or surpassed the regular-school students.

The graphic below shows some of the results obtained in the 2012 study. The scores of the Waldorf students start well below average, then catch up by fourth grade, then seem to pull ahead.

These results are striking. When the same researchers looked only at the California Waldorf schools, so as to avoid issues with cross-state comparisons, the same pattern was seen, though with less dramatic divergence in the upper grades. When Oberman did a similar comparison on a more limited scale and with data from two years earlier, she found a somewhat similar pattern--Waldorf students starting out behind and catching up, if not pulling ahead.  A New Zealand study comes to the same conclusion: Waldorf students do badly on reading tests when they are 6 and 7, but by the time they are entering adolescence, they have caught up or even pulled ahead.

Conclusions
Now, of course the students and families at these schools are self-selecting, and of course there may be other ways to explain away these results, and of course this is not a very large body of scholarly literature.  Nevertheless, I can't find any studies that contradict these three, and these results are consistent with thinking that what is important is not explicit instruction in discrete reading skills, and not reading a minimum proportion of informational text--but, instead, developing students minds by engaging their imaginations, creating a culture of engaged intellectual inquiry, doing lots of reading stories aloud and having them sing songs and repeat poems.

So these studies aren't definitive, but they are enough to call into further doubt the blithe assurances of people like Tim Shanahan and David Coleman that their preferred approach is consistent with the available empirical evidence.

Krugman on Ed Reform

Paul Krugman has a good piece in the NYRB discussing the ill-judged move, over the past few years in the west,  to "austerity"-- that is, cutting government spending and raising taxes.  The article is worth reading even for people who aren't usually terribly interested in economics, both because this is one of the major stories of our time and because Krugman's analysis of how the opinions of the elites and the policymakers could be so wrong is more broadly applicable.  In particular, I think the analysis applies pretty well to the Ed Reform movement of the past decade.

According to Krugman, the move to austerity has a few notable features:

* It found support from scholarly studies that are, despite fancy pedigrees (Harvard!), shaky and dubious
* It had a simple moral and psychological appeal
* It did not demand anything difficult from the elites themselves

All of these fit the Ed Reform movement as well:

Support from dubious but ivy-league scholarship
Educational research is, like economics research, anything but conclusive.  A lot of pretty basic questions are surprisingly unclear: whether homework is worthwhile, whether class size makes a big difference, how reliable or valid standardized test scores are as measures of teacher effectiveness, whether vocabulary instruction is useful, and many , many more.  Nevertheless, you would never know this from the self-assured pronouncements of people like Bill Gates, who can move with dizzying fickleness from demanding small schools to demanding Common Core Standards to demanding that teachers be evaluated by test scores to demanding larger class sizes, citing studies for each new "evidence-based" proposal despite the fact that none of these proposals has more than the slimmest of empirical evidence in its favor.  

In fact, the Ed reformers' emphasis on standardized tests is striking in its radical departure from what has long been understood: that what matters is student engagement with the material in as authentic a way as possible.  But just as radical proponents of austerity economics have, on the basis of thin scholarship and simplistic moralizing ("We must tighten our belts!"), left behind the accepted wisdom of John Maynard Keynes--just so have the Ed reformers radically left behind the legacy of John Dewey on the basis of thin scholarship and similarly simplistic moralizing ("We need to get tough!").

Crude moral and psychological appeal 
Blame and punishment have an eternal appeal.  Just as the Germans blame the Greeks, and demand cuts and austerity from the Greeks even though cutting the Greek economy off at the knees means it won't ever get back on its feet, American Ed reformers blame teachers and schools, and demand punishment.  Never mind changing the larger system of inequality and poverty, never mind the fact that punitive measures never work, blame and punishment are appealing--especially if you can put them onto other people, not yourself or people you know.

Few demands on the elites themselves
Because cutting taxes on the rich helps the rich, cutting government spending doesn't hurt them directly, and failing to tackle high unemployment keeps wages down and corporate profits high, the wealthy proponents of government austerity are remarkably insulated from the bad effects of the policies they propose.  In the same way, the Ed reformers are very far from personally connected to the reforms they propose.  Not only have none of these people (Gates, Broad, Duncan, Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, Coleman, Emanuel, etc.) ever actually been a teacher, not a single one of them, as far as I know, has kids in public school.  The fact that all of the ed reformers send their kids to private school is significant for two reasons: (1) because private schools like Lakeside, Sidwell Friends or the Lab School do not follow an ed reform model now, and (2) because they will never have to.  New standards, new testing regimes, increased class sizes, teacher evaluation based on test scores--all of these dubious reforms will be imposed on those of us in public schools, but their architects and proponents are sheltered and insulated from them.  It is infuriating.

Conclusion
What Krugman says about proponents of austerity economics is, I think, appropriate to Ed Reform as well (and reminds me why the wonk is an invasive species).  Here's Krugman:

"It’s a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It’s also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right."

The Common Core's Supposed Emphasis on Close Reading is a Joke (not much reading, and not very close)

In the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity.  Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous.

Resources from the Standards' authors' own company
The Common Core standards are supposed to promote increased complexity of text, but they offer very little guidance on how to do it. Since the standards don't say much about what teachers should actually do, I couldn't be sure, but I have long been skeptical that the standards would do much to improve students' ability to read more complex texts, since the most important factor is how much students read, and the standards say very little about reading volume. Nevertheless, ready to be proved wrong, I decided to look at some curriculum that was developed with the Common Core in mind by an organization founded by the some of the authors of the standards.

Both Bill Gates and some corporations (I think GE gave 18 million dollars) have supported an organization called "Student Achievement Partners," which describes itself, awkwardly, as a "nonprofit organization that assembles educators and researchers to design actions based on evidence that substantially improve student achievement." (With tens of millions of dollars, you'd think they could have substantially improved their own writing!)  This organization has established a website called "achievethecore.org," which offers "free, high-quality resources for educators to implement the Common Core Standards."  When I visited the site, I was surprised not only by the paucity of resources, but also by their relatively low intellectual level.

What about "literary texts" in high school? What about independent reading?
From a none too extensive list of lessons on close reading, I clicked on an eighth grade unit on Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken and Jeanne Watasuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar--partly because I was surprised that Hillenbrand's book would be taught in the eighth grade (a strong student in one of my Honors Junior classes is reading the book and fnding it challenging because of the length, complexity and the unfamiliar historical content), but also because I wanted to look at a lesson plan on a "literary text", not on an "instructional text," and the site offered not a single lesson plan at the high school level for use with a "literary text." This omission, no doubt related to CCSS's infamous call for 80% of kids' reading in high school to be of informational texts, was disappointing enough--but then I dug into the lesson plan.

The lesson plan only focuses on a few passages from each book.   Each day of the five-day lesson plan has the kids reading one passage from each book, then hearing it aloud, then writing about it, then discussing it.   This would not be terrible--if time were built in for extensive reading beyond these few paragraphs--but the writing and discussion prompts strike me as tedious and shallow, and I am very skeptical that a class doing this lesson plan would have kids actually reading more than a page or two a day.

"Close Reading": Boring Writing Prompts and Discussion Questions

The lesson is prefaced by a warning that since this is close reading, the teacher should not offer students any introduction, background or context for the texts.  This strikes me as truly bizarre advice (the weakness of New Criticism with none of its strengths), especially when the texts in question are brief excerpts from much longer works.  The instructions read:

It is critical to cultivating independence and creating a culture of close reading   that students initially grapple with rich texts without the aid of prefatory material, extensive notes, or even teacher explanations.

These instructions are comically ironic, since this entire teacher-selected, teacher-directed, non-open-ended lesson plan seems designed rather to stifle independence.

Here is the first passage, from Unbroken:

“The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave of a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the  sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them any more. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old [Louie] Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to   be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside his family had given him up for dead.”

The writing prompt is:

In one or two sentences, briefly describe the condition of Louie Zamperini and the other men who were "adrift" in Japanese-controlled waters.

Then there are three discussion questions, one about how the author establishes "time and geographic location," one about the mental and physical condition of the men on the boat, and one about why the author writes about Louie Zamperini's past life and experiences.

For a good reader, these are boring questions.  They are neither very difficult--it is pretty obvious that the men are in poor shape--nor, just as important, are they open-ended.  These are not questions that could have more than one answer (in case the teacher is not himself a good reader, the lesson plan helpfully gives the answer; for example: "Hillenbrand describes Louie Zamperini's former condition as an Olympic athlete to show how, within a very short period of time, a popular star-athlete could quickly find himself weak, emaciated, and near death while floating aimlessly on a rescue raft in the South Pacific. This portion of text helps students establish a sense of how far Louie was from his former life before the war.")

It's hard to imagine a good discussion coming out of questions like the ones in this unit. There are things in the passage that seem interesting to me, either because I wasn't familiar with the phenomena (rafts turning to jelly, salt sores, etc.) or because I was curious about why (the looking at the sky, the singing of "White Christmas," etc.), or because the logical continuity of the writing seemed tenuous (in the last two sentences, there seems to be an implied connection between Louie's famous legs wasting away and his being given up for dead by folks back home, even mthough you wouldn't know his legs were wasting away unless you were on the raft).  But the questions in the unit just don't get at these strange and interesting elements of the passage, and if I were a student in the class I would feel like I was mostly wasting my time.

It seems to me that it would be much more worthwhile to have students mark up and make comments directly on the passage and then have a more open-ended discussion, beginning perhaps with a pretty broad question like "What didn't you understand in the passage?" or "What do you think the author is doing in this passage?" Open-ended questions will lead to real discussion, and real discussion will help students get better at answering even the boring questions like these.  But answering boring questions won't help kids learn anything, except to dislike school and reading.

Kids need to read a lot, and this lesson plan doesn't encourage that

If this were run as a five-day unit, the students would read a total of four pages in class, and at most another three pages at home.  An appendix does present the possibility of doing a three-week unit in which students would read one of the texts in full, but this possibility would require, for kids reading Unbroken, an average of over thirty pages per night, a pace which, for this demanding text, would lead nearly all students to cheat on the reading, pushing some into the arms of study guides, others into desperate skimming, and all into frustration and contempt.

Assuming that the unit is done as a one-week unit, students would get well-organized lesson plans on interesting, but very brief texts with boring tasks and very, very little reading.  This is not a good way to learn to be a good reader.  Students need to read a lot, and the discussions they have about what they read need to be based on interesting, open-ended questions to which the teacher or lesson-planner does not already know the right answer.

It might be tempting to think that this lesson plan is just a lemon, but it's not.  The Common Core sets an expectation that students will be "given frequent opportunities to read a high volume of
texts independently and be held accountable for this reading", but nothing in the Standards, or in the materials I've seen developed for them, or in presentations I've watched by David Coleman or others, offers any hint as to how this could be accomplished, especially in the context of all the other stuff students are supposed to be doing.  I know from experience, and from the very, very consistent literature on fostering higher-volume reading (by Mary Leonhardt, Nancie Atwell, Stephen Krashen, Richard Allington, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, and others) that teachers must make a concerted effort to provide students with high-interest books, and with time to read them.  The Common Core just doesn't do this; therefore, unless we teachers take matters into our own hands, students will not advance on the "staircase of text complexity."

The high school lesson plans are no better

For the high school grades, there are no sample lessons on fiction or literature, only on "informational text," and for grades 11 and 12 there are only two sample lesson plans.  The first is a three-day lesson on a two-paragraph speech by the great jurist Learned Hand about America and freedom; the second unit takes "several days" to read and re-read Andrew Carnegie's four-page article,  "The Gospel of Wealth," about how wonderful inequality is, and how poor people should be grateful for it, since it allows rich people to spend some their wealth on philanthropic endeavors.  

Leaving aside the fact that these texts, especially the Carnegie essay, are of dubious literary quality and are essentially propaganda, there are again two major problems with these lesson plans:  (1) the questions and prompts are not not very interesting, and any good reader would hardly have to do any "close reading" in order to answer them; (2) they are together less than five pages long, and yet would seem, along with the "text-dependent questions" and the culminating essays, to be all that was intended to occupy the students for over a week of class time.  This is not a curriculum that is prioritizing reading.

Conclusion
The Common Core's supposed emphasis on close reading is a joke.  Again: in the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity. Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous. Of course, a good teacher could probably make these lesson plans work--but then, a good teacher wouldn't need them in the first place.

Although I am more and more sure that the CCSS effort is basically a stalking horse for standardized tests and for-profit curriculum, and that the authors are mostly clueless about how to help students develop into good readers, I do think it would be possible to develop a CCSS curriculum that would work very well.  That curriculum would involve large amounts of independent reading at the students' own reading level, along with focused close reading and instruction in how to read closely.  You might say, Well, that's just what Student Achievement Partners is trying to do!  Perhaps, but they are ignoring the independent reading side of it and doing the close reading side poorly.

In the future, I'm going to put up some curriculum I think would be better--and I'll also have to write about those lesson plans on how great America and inequality are...

The Common Core is not "research-based" and its "efficacy" is unproven

In poking around looking at PARCC (the new testing associated with the Common Core) I stumbled onto an interesting document: the "publishers' criteria" set out by the two lead authors (Coleman and Pimentel) of the ELA Common Core "State" Standards. These criteria are intended to guide publishers in their development of curricular materials for teaching under the Common Core regime. (Although I don't actually know any teachers who use a publisher's curriculum materials, many must do so, since producing these materials seems to be a huge industry.)
 
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:

CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.

This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.

I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"

My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself.  It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.

The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy.  The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards."  The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor.  Its three pages make roughly the following case:

1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)

2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.) 

3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)

As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy.  For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety.  There is neither.

First, the historical fallacy.  Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss.  The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids.  The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago.  The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency.  What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007.  This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP.  The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)


Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data.  As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion.  I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.

     References that don't support what they are cited to support

I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text.  The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement.  I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.  

I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all.  Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained".  None of those words appears in the text.  Neither does "non-fiction."  Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
  
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching." 

First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers.  Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.

Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand.  This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.

II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need

The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements.  Books support student "readiness for college."  Books have "a clear and documented research base."  Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."

The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college.  I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum.  Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product.  Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much. 

The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies.  This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play.  I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs.  That might be okay...

Conclusion

Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection.  If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great!  But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.

On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell.