Corruption in the Reading Ranks

I'm in the middle of Reading for Profit: How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind (edited by Bess Altwerger, published by Heinemann. It's a terrific - and terrifically, incredibly, distressing - collection. It's all about how reading research, especially research connected with Reading First (which is itself connected with NCLB) is unbelievably corrupt. There's misread/misinterpreted (intentionally) data, there's researchers serving as reviewers for their own work, there are publishing companies (McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin) making enormous profits from the reading programs that they market (whose 'validity' is proven by research by the people who developed the programs). Here's Elaine Garan's summary of the corruption:
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...evidence-based critiques of the NRP show that there is a discrepancy between the actual data and the claims made in the official NRP summary that synthesized the findings (published by the NICHD in 2000). In other words, the claims don't match the data. It is the misrepresentations rather than the facts that are controlling education under the guise of science. (22)

The problem, of course, is that they *are* controlling education. These programs are all about phonics, and none about whole language. Thus, when people (say, education writers) look to the research as background for their stories about "effective educational methods," they see research that seems to be credible that attests to the effectiveness of phonics, and the problems with whole language. But as Garan and others in this book (and other ones, too, like Denny Taylor's Spin Doctors, which I've mentioned before) attest, the reported research findings are inaccurate. (In fact, Garan says, achievement levels decline as a result of the phonics-only curriculum.) This is the power of framing - because wedging in an argument about how these reports are inaccurate (especially when they're endorsed by "legitimate" sources) is a huge endeavor.

Barbara Cambridge, NCTE's K-12 policy director, has a post on the NCTE blog about a report on increased literacy in content areas. She notes that all of the recommendations have to do with learning through context, content, etc. - not through repetition of similar words ("cat, spat, rat").

Meanwhile, I learned yesterday (by looking at the Achieve web site) that Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, is now on the Board of Directors of Achieve.org. See my earlier posts on that. Sigh.