Teaching Kids to Read: How One School District Gets It Right

[Igel]

1. Back in '88 I was taking some ed psych classes.

Because I could take them before formal admittance to a teacher's ed program. (Which, of course, I never actually applied to.)

One of the things that the two young dissertating grad student/instructors pointed out was that we knew how to teach reading to kids. There were piles of studies showing what worked, what worked well. Then they pointed out that very few districts or states actually taught reading that way--that we spent all kinds of money on ed research, but what was political and trendy, pandering to some sort of preferred emotional or empathetic methodology, was glossy and slick and had publisher support was followed, not what used controls and had explicit protocols and well-defined data collection methods with a focus on reproducibility and rigorous analysis to make sure they were testing what they thought they were testing.