It’s time to dump Reading Recovery
by Aaron Churchill
27th July 2023
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/c ... g-recovery
This month, Ohio joined a growing list of states and school systems that require schools to use high-quality instructional materials aligned to the science of reading, an approach to reading instruction that emphasizes phonics for building foundational literacy skills and knowledge-rich curricula to support vocabulary and comprehension. The Buckeye state also explicitly prohibited three-cueing—a discredited instructional method, also barred elsewhere, that wrongly encourages children to guess at words rather than sounding them out.
With the legislation on the books, Ohio will now turn to implementation. If done well, the state will become a model for how leaders across the country can rigorously implement a science of reading law. One key step for Ohio—and other locales looking to strengthen literacy—is creating a catalog of approved curricula that only includes the good stuff.
In the area of core reading instruction, a number of excellent options should sail through Ohio’s approval process (e.g., Core Knowledge, Wit and Wisdom, and EL Education). And one hopes that flawed curricula such as Fountas & Pinnell’s Classroom and Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study are kept off the list.
Yet it’s not just core curricula that require vetting. Policymakers also need to examine the intervention programs that schools use to support struggling readers. In this realm, one of the most popular—but controversial—models is Reading Recovery. The program provides low-achieving first graders with twelve to twenty weeks of daily, supplemental, one-on-one instruction with a trained teacher. It’s based on the theories of New Zealand’s Marie Clay—an early proponent of three-cueing—and was introduced in the U.S. by Ohio State University professors in the 1980s. The university continues to be affiliated with Reading Recovery, and a group that promotes it is based in the Columbus area.