March 16, 2002

NICKLEBY BUILDS THE RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR TEACHING

President Bush titled his education reform plan, signed into law in January, the ``No Child Left Behind Act.'' Admirable sentiment, awkward name; I think I'll call it Nickelby, from the initials, in lieu of drowning you in alphabet soup.

Eugene Hickok, U.S. undersecretary of Education, was in Denver this week for a Nickelby conference sponsored by the Fund for Colorado's Future. The principles underlying the law, he said, are:

* Accountability and results -- that is, testing based on state standards

* Disaggregating the data -- look not just at averages but outcomes for identifiable groups

* Flexibility -- states will implement the law in varying ways

* Options for parents -- choice at least among public schools

* Research -- find out what works and what doesn't, then implement what works

As several speakers at the conference observed, Colorado is ``ahead of the curve'' on most Nickleby requirements. We have statewide standards-based tests, and will need to add only a few; we have school report cards; we have public school choice.

But raising the standards for educational research to something more nearly comparable to what is expected in science and medicine could be more revolutionary in the long run than all the rest of Nickleby.

Much education research is of poor quality, amounting to little more than one person's experience with a single class or a few students. Without any kind of statistical analysis, or any control groups, the results are meaningless.

``Some things work because we feel good about doing them,'' Hickok said.

And even where research has provided definitive results they are often ignored in practice.

Instruction in reading is a case in point. Researchers know what it takes to teach children to read, said G. Reid Lyon, of the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Reading starts with phonemic awareness, the understanding that spoken words can be divided into separate sounds called phonemes.

As former California Superintendent of Instruction Bill Honig once put it, if you ask a child what is the first sound in ``cat'' and he says ``meow'' you know you have a problem.

Next comes phonics, explicit teaching of the correspondence between print and sounds.

Yes, the correspondence in English is less regular than in many languages, but it can be taught and learned; 90 percent to 95 percent of children should be reading at grade level if they are taught correctly.

Next come decoding and word recognition skills, fluency and accuracy, strategies to increase comprehension. But it must start with direct and systematic instruction. And only about 10 percent of teachers, Lyon estimates, know how to do it.

Of course some children learn to read merely by being read to. I did, long before I went to school. My son did too. But we're anecdotes, not a policy.

He used to teach third grade, Lyon said. ``I was lousy at it. I didn't know any of this stuff, because nobody taught me.'' Instead, he said, he had to take courses like ``Philosophy of Education in the 20th Century.''

Reading is a skill, not something that comes naturally, Lyon said, calling the idea that it's just something you can pick up ``the dumbest idea since the formation of the planet.''

It must have been an uncomfortable moment for the members of the audience who teach ``whole language,'' a theory in which that particular dumb idea is a central tenet.

Training teachers in how to teach reading must be grounded in this kind research, Lyon said. As it is, ``people come out having entirely different ideas about how children learn to read - as if graduates of some medical schools took out the appendix from the front and others from the back.''

Emphasizing the acquisition of skills in no way diminishes the importance of literature -- any more than practicing the violin takes away from the richness of musical interpretation.

``Children can't get to `rich authentic literature' until they can pull the print off the page,'' Lyon said. And -- especially if they come to school already behind -- they must be taught clearly or they will be lost.

That's what Nickleby is all about.