Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2014 11:08 am
Pamela Snow writes (via her excellent blog) about the inability to hold anyone in authority to account for the inexplicable continuation of persisting with Reading Recovery with its whole language, multi-cueing reading strategies rationale:
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/2014/0 ... 0174167440
Reading Recovery and Cassandra's Curse
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/2014/0 ... 0174167440
Many aspects of Reading Recovery have long perplexed me, most notably the question of what is being "recovered" for children who had not acquired the requisite skills in the first place? Secondly, I don't understand why any education system would adopt a reading instruction approach (Whole Language) that assumes a 15-20% failure rate (and need for expensive and intensive intervention) by the end of the first year of school ("failure" here referring to the lowest performing students in the class - those whom Clay argued could be brought up to the norm via Reading Recovery).
In the case of reading instruction however, we seem to have a terrain that has elements of religious boundary-setting around what teachers (and their educators) can and cannot be challenged over. This is ethically indefensible and if allowed to continue will simply perpetuate the widening gap between the "haves" and "have nots" in the early years classroom and beyond. There is nothing progressive, socially or educationally, about standing by and being complicit in maintaining such an unfair status quo.
Academics who have interrogated the evidence on Reading Recovery and found it to be wanting seem to have been afflicted by Cassandra's Curse - the ability to predict the future alongside the sure knowledge that they will be ignored.