Some news articles from, um, "tomorrow"
Mar. 9th, 2007 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
(Because I can see the future! WooooooOOOOoooo!)
On on a preschool that is focusing on avoiding pickiness - which sounds boring, but it's an interesting article anyway
Teaching Even the Pickiest Toddlers How to Eat Their Vegetables and Love It
By WINNIE HU
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., March 7 — The picky little eaters at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool are told to play with their food and are allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to leave a little on their plates.
While this eat-what-you-want approach might outrage the parental food patrol, it is a critical part of the curriculum here at this unusual laboratory school dedicated to developing toddlers’ healthy eating habits — and avoiding a lifelong hatred of broccoli.
“If you’re going to get into a food fight with a child, you’re not going to win,” said Harriet Worobey, the preschool’s director, who has gotten 3- to 5-year-olds to eat their peas by making mealtimes more fun.
The school, affiliated with Rutgers University, was started back in 1991 but lately has been attracting parents and teachers striving to introduce healthier foods to children at ever-younger ages, at a time when concern over childhood obesity and food allergies is increasing. More preschools and day care centers are banning cupcakes, chips and juices from their playrooms, replacing them with hormone-free organic milk and whole-grain snacks. Even SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer have appeared on bags of carrots and spinach in supermarkets.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children has noted a greater focus on health and nutrition among preschools nationwide in the past few years. The association accredits more than 10,000 child care centers, using among its assessment criteria how they plan nutritious meals. Dr. Mark Ginsberg, the executive director, said teaching children to eat healthy during the early years was important because it could “provide a strong foundation for the course of their lives.”
The Goddard School in Princeton, for instance, recently switched from Wendy’s to Whole Foods to provide a special lunch bag once a month for most of its 160 students. The Whole Foods version, which at $3 costs nearly twice as much, offers chicken nuggets free of trans fat, and all-natural applesauce instead of French fries. The school even threw in carrot sticks at its own expense. “We’re very big on nutrition here,” said Bryan Scheff, the school’s owner.
Mrs. Worobey teaches classes on early childhood nutrition at Rutgers and holds workshops for preschool directors and kindergarten teachers around the state. In the past three years, she has taken her students to more than a dozen schools to perform puppet shows and read books. Next month, they will test their lesson plans on fruits and vegetables at day care centers here in New Brunswick and in Highland Park for a research project to expand nutrition education in preschools.
She has learned to feed even the most finicky toddlers at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool, whose teachers are students taking classes in the Department of Nutritional Sciences or on work-study programs. An observation booth for researchers — hidden behind one-way glass — looks out onto a large U-shaped playroom with sky blue cinderblock walls. The 34 slots fill quickly in the part-time program, which costs from $150 to $220 a month.
One morning, Mrs. Worobey read to 4-year-olds from the Dr. Seuss classic “Green Eggs and Ham,” in which the character Sam steadfastly declares his dislike for the food until he finally takes a bite. A new boy in the class, Julian Namazi, blurted out that he did not like any vegetables. In a grandmotherly voice, Mrs. Worobey reassured him that she never liked the canned vegetables she ate growing up but now eats fresh vegetables and loves them.
Then the children dispersed to cut their own eggs from wallpaper scraps and play food-themed games. In a miniature kitchen stocked with plastic foods, Erin Mitchell, a Rutgers sophomore, was helping aspiring cooks fix dinner. When Emily Logan, 4, picked up an apple, Ms. Mitchell asked: “Is that an anytime food or a sometime food?”
“Anytime,” Emily said, pretending to slice it on a plastic cutting board.
“And what’s sometime food?” Ms. Mitchell persisted.
“Apple pie,” the girl said.
The preschool tempts the children to choose “anytime foods” for snacks by finding creative ways to make them more palatable. For instance, to get the children to try raw broccoli, teachers told them that they were eating “little trees,” just like the dinosaurs. Spanakopita was passed off as “surprise pie” until someone let slip that it was made of spinach and most of the children turned up their noses.
Lauren Minue, a senior majoring in psychology, chopped up strawberries, bananas and pineapples, and asked each child to make fruit faces on their ricotta muffins. Only one girl, Kristen Uchida, 4, refused, saying she preferred Froot Loops. The others scooped up the real fruit, and later noshed on their handiwork. During snack time, even Kristen had a little banana on the side.
Mrs. Worobey said no child was ever forced to eat anything. If a little one does not like the class-made snack — and there is always someone who does not — he or she is offered two crackers instead. Mrs. Worobey said that most children went through a picky stage, and that parents often misinterpret it and overreact.
“Parents work really hard to prepare food for them, so they take it personally — they feel rejected by the child — when their children don’t like what they’ve made,” she said. “But it’s a natural stage for them to be in. If they were eating everything, we’d have even more of an obesity problem.”
For nutrition-conscious parents, Mrs. Worobey has some advice: toddlers tend not to like foods that are mushy or mixed together “because the one ingredient they don’t like just gave everything else the cooties.” Baby carrots are a good bet. Pureed dips and sauces work because children love to push the button on the blender. And introducing too many new foods at once is a big no-no.
Kate Boriack, a stay-at-home mother, said that her 4-year-old son, Matthew, did not eat a lot because he had acid reflux as a baby. But she said that Mrs. Worobey has a way of getting him to try fruits like grapes and cantaloupe. “She makes it sound like it’s really good, fun and tasty, but she doesn’t pressure them,” said Mrs. Boriack, who has recreated some of the snacks at home.
While Mrs. Worobey is not a nutritionist by training, she has advocated for nutrition policies in schools for more than two decades. More recently, she has lobbied state legislators to support breakfast programs and ban junk foods in schools.
“My philosophy is we’re working on healthy habits, and that’s why it’s especially important to start with preschool,” she said. “By the time they’re in the mid-elementary school, their habits are already set.”
On on the "war between phonics and whole word".
In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
MADISON, Wis. — Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.
“Pumpkin,” ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.
“Look at the word,” the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?”
Parker looked again. “Pea,” he said, correctly.
Call it the $2 million reading lesson.
By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.
The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.
According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
In New York City, under pressure from federal officials, school authorities in 2004 dropped their citywide balanced literacy approach for a more structured program stronger in phonics, in 49 low-income schools. At stake was $34 million.
Across the country — in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey — schools and districts with programs that did not stress phonics were either rejected for grants or pressured to change their methods even though some argued, as Madison did, that their programs met the law’s standard.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
Both the House and the Senate are laying the groundwork for tough hearings on Reading First, which is up for renewal this year.
Robert Sweet Jr., a former Congressional aide who wrote much of the Reading First legislation, said the law aimed at breaking new ground by translating research into lesson plans. Under the law, the yardstick of a reading program’s scientific validity became a 2000 report by the National Reading Panel.
That panel, created by Congress, with members selected by G. Reid Lyon, a former head of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, set out to review the research and tell Americans what worked. It named phonics and related skills, vocabulary, fluency and reading comprehension as the cornerstones of effective reading instruction.
Mr. Sweet firmly believes that phonics is the superior method of instruction; he is now president of the National Right to Read Foundation, a pro-phonics group. His e-mail address begins phonicsman.
With Reading First, he said, “we felt we could put education on a new path.”
Dr. Lyon, another architect of the legislation, also strongly favors phonics. Teaching children to read by reason and context, as Parker did in Madison, rather than by sounding out letters to make words, is anathema, he said in an interview, suggesting that teachers of the whole language approach be prosecuted for “educational malpractice.”
Mr. Sweet agreed. “You’ve got billions used for the purchase of programs that have no validity or evidence that they work, and in fact they don’t, because you have so many kids coming out of the schools that can’t read,” he said.
But educators in Madison and elsewhere disagree about the effectiveness of phonics, and say their results prove their method works.
Under their system, the share of third graders reading at the top two levels, proficient and advanced, had risen to 82 percent by 2004, from 59 percent six years earlier, even as an influx of students in poverty, to 42 percent from 31 percent of Madison’s enrollment, could have driven down test scores. The share of Madison’s black students reading at the top levels had doubled to 64 percent in 2004 from 31 percent six years earlier.
And while 17 percent of African-Americans lacked basic reading skills when Madison started its reading effort in 1998, that number had plunged to 5 percent by 2004. The exams changed after 2004, making it impossible to compare recent results with those of 1998.
Other reading experts, like Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, also challenge the case for phonics. Dr. Allington and others say the national panel’s review showed only minor benefits from phonics through first grade, and no strong support for one style of instruction. They also contend that children drilled in phonics end up with poor comprehension skills when they tackle more advanced books.
“This revisionist history of what the research says is wildly popular,” Dr. Allington said. “But it’s the main reason why so much of the reading community has largely rejected the National Reading Panel report and this large-scale vision of what an effective reading program looks like.”
Under Reading First, many were encouraged to use a pamphlet, “A Consumer’s Guide to Evaluating a Core Reading Program Grades K-3,” written by two special education professors, then at the University of Oregon, to gauge whether a program was backed by research.
But the guide also rewards practices, like using thin texts of limited vocabulary to practice syllables, for which there is no backing in research. Dr. Allington said the central role Washington assigned the guide effectively blocked from approval all but a few reading programs based on “made-up criteria.”
Deborah C. Simmons, who helped write the guide, said it largely reflected the available research, but acknowledged that even now, no studies have tested whether children learn to read faster or better through programs that rated highly in the guide.
Fatally for Madison, the guide does not consider consistent gains in reading achievement alone sufficient proof of a program’s worth.
In making their case, city officials turned to Kathryn Howe of the Reading First technical assistance center at the University of Oregon, one of several nationwide paid by the federal Education Department that helped states apply for grants. But early on, they began to suspect that Dr. Howe wanted them to dump their program.
At a workshop, she showed them how the guide valued exposing all children to identical instruction in phonics. Madison’s program is based on tailoring strategies individually, with less emphasis on drilling.
Dr. Howe used the Houghton Mifflin program as a model; officials here believed that approval would be certain if only they switched to that program, they said.
In interviews, Dr. Howe said she had not meant to endorse the Houghton Mifflin program and used it only for illustration, and had no ties to the company. She added that she might have been misunderstood.
“I certainly didn’t say, ‘You should buy Houghton Mifflin,’ ” she said. “I do remember saying: ‘You can do this without buying a purchased program. It’s easier if you have a purchased program, so you might think about that.’ ”
Dr. Howe said Madison’s program might have suited most students, but not those in the five schools applying for grants. “Maybe those students needed a different approach,” she said.
Mary Watson Peterson, Madison’s reading chief, said the city did use intensive phonics instruction, but only for struggling children.
After providing Dr. Howe extensive documentation, Madison officials received a letter from her and the center’s director, saying that because the city’s program lacked uniformity and relied too much on teacher judgment, they could not vouch to Washington that its approach was grounded in research.
Ultimately Madison withdrew from Reading First, said Mr. Rainwater, the superintendent, because educators here grew convinced that approval would never come. “It really boiled down to, we were going to have to abandon our reading program,” the superintendent said.
A subsequent letter from Dr. Howe seemed to confirm his view. “Madison made a good decision” in withdrawing, she wrote, “since Reading First is a very prescriptive program that does not match your district’s reading program as it stands now.”
On on a preschool that is focusing on avoiding pickiness - which sounds boring, but it's an interesting article anyway
Teaching Even the Pickiest Toddlers How to Eat Their Vegetables and Love It
By WINNIE HU
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., March 7 — The picky little eaters at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool are told to play with their food and are allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to leave a little on their plates.
While this eat-what-you-want approach might outrage the parental food patrol, it is a critical part of the curriculum here at this unusual laboratory school dedicated to developing toddlers’ healthy eating habits — and avoiding a lifelong hatred of broccoli.
“If you’re going to get into a food fight with a child, you’re not going to win,” said Harriet Worobey, the preschool’s director, who has gotten 3- to 5-year-olds to eat their peas by making mealtimes more fun.
The school, affiliated with Rutgers University, was started back in 1991 but lately has been attracting parents and teachers striving to introduce healthier foods to children at ever-younger ages, at a time when concern over childhood obesity and food allergies is increasing. More preschools and day care centers are banning cupcakes, chips and juices from their playrooms, replacing them with hormone-free organic milk and whole-grain snacks. Even SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer have appeared on bags of carrots and spinach in supermarkets.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children has noted a greater focus on health and nutrition among preschools nationwide in the past few years. The association accredits more than 10,000 child care centers, using among its assessment criteria how they plan nutritious meals. Dr. Mark Ginsberg, the executive director, said teaching children to eat healthy during the early years was important because it could “provide a strong foundation for the course of their lives.”
The Goddard School in Princeton, for instance, recently switched from Wendy’s to Whole Foods to provide a special lunch bag once a month for most of its 160 students. The Whole Foods version, which at $3 costs nearly twice as much, offers chicken nuggets free of trans fat, and all-natural applesauce instead of French fries. The school even threw in carrot sticks at its own expense. “We’re very big on nutrition here,” said Bryan Scheff, the school’s owner.
Mrs. Worobey teaches classes on early childhood nutrition at Rutgers and holds workshops for preschool directors and kindergarten teachers around the state. In the past three years, she has taken her students to more than a dozen schools to perform puppet shows and read books. Next month, they will test their lesson plans on fruits and vegetables at day care centers here in New Brunswick and in Highland Park for a research project to expand nutrition education in preschools.
She has learned to feed even the most finicky toddlers at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool, whose teachers are students taking classes in the Department of Nutritional Sciences or on work-study programs. An observation booth for researchers — hidden behind one-way glass — looks out onto a large U-shaped playroom with sky blue cinderblock walls. The 34 slots fill quickly in the part-time program, which costs from $150 to $220 a month.
One morning, Mrs. Worobey read to 4-year-olds from the Dr. Seuss classic “Green Eggs and Ham,” in which the character Sam steadfastly declares his dislike for the food until he finally takes a bite. A new boy in the class, Julian Namazi, blurted out that he did not like any vegetables. In a grandmotherly voice, Mrs. Worobey reassured him that she never liked the canned vegetables she ate growing up but now eats fresh vegetables and loves them.
Then the children dispersed to cut their own eggs from wallpaper scraps and play food-themed games. In a miniature kitchen stocked with plastic foods, Erin Mitchell, a Rutgers sophomore, was helping aspiring cooks fix dinner. When Emily Logan, 4, picked up an apple, Ms. Mitchell asked: “Is that an anytime food or a sometime food?”
“Anytime,” Emily said, pretending to slice it on a plastic cutting board.
“And what’s sometime food?” Ms. Mitchell persisted.
“Apple pie,” the girl said.
The preschool tempts the children to choose “anytime foods” for snacks by finding creative ways to make them more palatable. For instance, to get the children to try raw broccoli, teachers told them that they were eating “little trees,” just like the dinosaurs. Spanakopita was passed off as “surprise pie” until someone let slip that it was made of spinach and most of the children turned up their noses.
Lauren Minue, a senior majoring in psychology, chopped up strawberries, bananas and pineapples, and asked each child to make fruit faces on their ricotta muffins. Only one girl, Kristen Uchida, 4, refused, saying she preferred Froot Loops. The others scooped up the real fruit, and later noshed on their handiwork. During snack time, even Kristen had a little banana on the side.
Mrs. Worobey said no child was ever forced to eat anything. If a little one does not like the class-made snack — and there is always someone who does not — he or she is offered two crackers instead. Mrs. Worobey said that most children went through a picky stage, and that parents often misinterpret it and overreact.
“Parents work really hard to prepare food for them, so they take it personally — they feel rejected by the child — when their children don’t like what they’ve made,” she said. “But it’s a natural stage for them to be in. If they were eating everything, we’d have even more of an obesity problem.”
For nutrition-conscious parents, Mrs. Worobey has some advice: toddlers tend not to like foods that are mushy or mixed together “because the one ingredient they don’t like just gave everything else the cooties.” Baby carrots are a good bet. Pureed dips and sauces work because children love to push the button on the blender. And introducing too many new foods at once is a big no-no.
Kate Boriack, a stay-at-home mother, said that her 4-year-old son, Matthew, did not eat a lot because he had acid reflux as a baby. But she said that Mrs. Worobey has a way of getting him to try fruits like grapes and cantaloupe. “She makes it sound like it’s really good, fun and tasty, but she doesn’t pressure them,” said Mrs. Boriack, who has recreated some of the snacks at home.
While Mrs. Worobey is not a nutritionist by training, she has advocated for nutrition policies in schools for more than two decades. More recently, she has lobbied state legislators to support breakfast programs and ban junk foods in schools.
“My philosophy is we’re working on healthy habits, and that’s why it’s especially important to start with preschool,” she said. “By the time they’re in the mid-elementary school, their habits are already set.”
On on the "war between phonics and whole word".
In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
MADISON, Wis. — Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.
“Pumpkin,” ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.
“Look at the word,” the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?”
Parker looked again. “Pea,” he said, correctly.
Call it the $2 million reading lesson.
By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.
The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.
According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
In New York City, under pressure from federal officials, school authorities in 2004 dropped their citywide balanced literacy approach for a more structured program stronger in phonics, in 49 low-income schools. At stake was $34 million.
Across the country — in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey — schools and districts with programs that did not stress phonics were either rejected for grants or pressured to change their methods even though some argued, as Madison did, that their programs met the law’s standard.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
Both the House and the Senate are laying the groundwork for tough hearings on Reading First, which is up for renewal this year.
Robert Sweet Jr., a former Congressional aide who wrote much of the Reading First legislation, said the law aimed at breaking new ground by translating research into lesson plans. Under the law, the yardstick of a reading program’s scientific validity became a 2000 report by the National Reading Panel.
That panel, created by Congress, with members selected by G. Reid Lyon, a former head of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, set out to review the research and tell Americans what worked. It named phonics and related skills, vocabulary, fluency and reading comprehension as the cornerstones of effective reading instruction.
Mr. Sweet firmly believes that phonics is the superior method of instruction; he is now president of the National Right to Read Foundation, a pro-phonics group. His e-mail address begins phonicsman.
With Reading First, he said, “we felt we could put education on a new path.”
Dr. Lyon, another architect of the legislation, also strongly favors phonics. Teaching children to read by reason and context, as Parker did in Madison, rather than by sounding out letters to make words, is anathema, he said in an interview, suggesting that teachers of the whole language approach be prosecuted for “educational malpractice.”
Mr. Sweet agreed. “You’ve got billions used for the purchase of programs that have no validity or evidence that they work, and in fact they don’t, because you have so many kids coming out of the schools that can’t read,” he said.
But educators in Madison and elsewhere disagree about the effectiveness of phonics, and say their results prove their method works.
Under their system, the share of third graders reading at the top two levels, proficient and advanced, had risen to 82 percent by 2004, from 59 percent six years earlier, even as an influx of students in poverty, to 42 percent from 31 percent of Madison’s enrollment, could have driven down test scores. The share of Madison’s black students reading at the top levels had doubled to 64 percent in 2004 from 31 percent six years earlier.
And while 17 percent of African-Americans lacked basic reading skills when Madison started its reading effort in 1998, that number had plunged to 5 percent by 2004. The exams changed after 2004, making it impossible to compare recent results with those of 1998.
Other reading experts, like Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, also challenge the case for phonics. Dr. Allington and others say the national panel’s review showed only minor benefits from phonics through first grade, and no strong support for one style of instruction. They also contend that children drilled in phonics end up with poor comprehension skills when they tackle more advanced books.
“This revisionist history of what the research says is wildly popular,” Dr. Allington said. “But it’s the main reason why so much of the reading community has largely rejected the National Reading Panel report and this large-scale vision of what an effective reading program looks like.”
Under Reading First, many were encouraged to use a pamphlet, “A Consumer’s Guide to Evaluating a Core Reading Program Grades K-3,” written by two special education professors, then at the University of Oregon, to gauge whether a program was backed by research.
But the guide also rewards practices, like using thin texts of limited vocabulary to practice syllables, for which there is no backing in research. Dr. Allington said the central role Washington assigned the guide effectively blocked from approval all but a few reading programs based on “made-up criteria.”
Deborah C. Simmons, who helped write the guide, said it largely reflected the available research, but acknowledged that even now, no studies have tested whether children learn to read faster or better through programs that rated highly in the guide.
Fatally for Madison, the guide does not consider consistent gains in reading achievement alone sufficient proof of a program’s worth.
In making their case, city officials turned to Kathryn Howe of the Reading First technical assistance center at the University of Oregon, one of several nationwide paid by the federal Education Department that helped states apply for grants. But early on, they began to suspect that Dr. Howe wanted them to dump their program.
At a workshop, she showed them how the guide valued exposing all children to identical instruction in phonics. Madison’s program is based on tailoring strategies individually, with less emphasis on drilling.
Dr. Howe used the Houghton Mifflin program as a model; officials here believed that approval would be certain if only they switched to that program, they said.
In interviews, Dr. Howe said she had not meant to endorse the Houghton Mifflin program and used it only for illustration, and had no ties to the company. She added that she might have been misunderstood.
“I certainly didn’t say, ‘You should buy Houghton Mifflin,’ ” she said. “I do remember saying: ‘You can do this without buying a purchased program. It’s easier if you have a purchased program, so you might think about that.’ ”
Dr. Howe said Madison’s program might have suited most students, but not those in the five schools applying for grants. “Maybe those students needed a different approach,” she said.
Mary Watson Peterson, Madison’s reading chief, said the city did use intensive phonics instruction, but only for struggling children.
After providing Dr. Howe extensive documentation, Madison officials received a letter from her and the center’s director, saying that because the city’s program lacked uniformity and relied too much on teacher judgment, they could not vouch to Washington that its approach was grounded in research.
Ultimately Madison withdrew from Reading First, said Mr. Rainwater, the superintendent, because educators here grew convinced that approval would never come. “It really boiled down to, we were going to have to abandon our reading program,” the superintendent said.
A subsequent letter from Dr. Howe seemed to confirm his view. “Madison made a good decision” in withdrawing, she wrote, “since Reading First is a very prescriptive program that does not match your district’s reading program as it stands now.”
