The Inevitable Happens in Rockford - January 25
We found out the sad news last night that Tiffany Parker, the principal in
Rockford who stuck her neck out for intensive phonics was told to pack up her
office by the next day and report to her new job as the asst. principal at the
most challenging middle school in the city. Up until now, Ms. Parker has had no
educational experience with middle school students.
Already some of the best teachers in the school are beginning to think about
transferring to other schools next year that don't have students are as
challenging. In three years, one will look at the test results of the
city's highest achieving minority, high poverty school and see a steady pattern
of decline when it takes it place with all of the other failing city high poverty
schools. Thousands of research studies showing that only systematic, explicit
phonics results in higher numbers of capable readers provide a clear picture of
what will happen. In just the past week the older grade level's Direct
instruction reading time has been cut down to 30 minutes so that the students can
do guided reading with the balanced literacy leveled books.
Fifth graders who are only reading at a first grade level, can no longer work in
first grade level reading curriculum.......they can only go back one grade level
to fourth grade curriculum (and no, this makes no sense, but the rationale is
that the students will be disadvantaged by not having the constant exposure to
higher level vocabulary -- even though they can't decode the words) Since these
are older failing readers who never had intensive phonics in the early grades,
one can look at research studies and predict that the reduced time will result in
little "catch-up."
Now if you are in Illinois, is there anything you can do? Word from
individuals working with Reading First in Washington is that the most helpful,
productive action is calling or writing Randy Dunn (current acting superintendent of
Illinois schools) and letting him know of your keen interest in the state closely
monitoring schools getting Reading First money and sanctioning those schools if
they don't follow the plan they submitted to get the money. This entire
controversy in Rockford started when the new curriculum director brought in by
the superintendent wanted to make changes to the school's Reading First plan and the
principal balked because it was a contract with the federal government. Balanced
literacy AKA whole language guided reading is not a research-based instructional
reading strategy that should have a place in Reading First schools. It's up to
Randy Dunn and his staff to enforce district's getting Reading First money to use
the research based reading practices that they said they would use in their grant
applications. Hopefully, he will show that he has a commitment to enforcing and
encouraging that compliance.