Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater: Federal Budget Cuts in Reading First not Justified by Ohio's Experience

Ohio Reading Teacher, Fall 2008 by Salzman, James A

The story may be apocryphal, but this is the way I heard it when I was a youngster. Back in the day, before running water and draining tubs, families used to take baths in a rotation, from eldest to youngest. As one can imagine, by the time the baby was bathed, the water was pretty dirty and so, my parents would say, the eldest child was cautioned not to throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater when the tub was emptied. Lest I thought they were trying to get rid of my little sister, they explained to me that what that meant was not to get rid of the good stuff when you were trying to clean out the bad.

I recount this story because, on December 26, 2007, President Bush signed into law a bill that increased federal education spending by 2.9% for the next fiscal year. Title I, one of the biggest beneficiaries, saw an increase of 8.6%. While all of this is a positive for public education, the same bill also included a 61% cut in funding for Reading First nationally. Among the reasons for the dramatic cut was a "series of highly critical reports over the past 15 months by the Department of Education's inspector general that found favoritism for certain textbook publishers and other management problems in the early years" (Klein & Hoff, 2007, p. 2). That there were potential ethical issues is undeniable, as I will discuss later. That Reading First, a program that has helped schools and children of poverty make demonstrable gains in student reading achievement, has suffered from these issues is shameful on the part of our politicians, akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and certainly not representative of the experiences Ohio's schools and districts have had with Reading First over the past four years.

The purpose of this article is to situate Ohio within the national context of Reading First, both the controversies and the successes. I will begin by briefly describing the historical overview of significant federal policies and responses to the literacy challenges that led to Reading First. I will then discuss some of the controversies that have surrounded Reading First and how the design of Ohio's program have kept it above the fray. Finally, I will delineate specific successes of the program on both a national and state level.

The Positive Side of No Child Left Behind

I am well aware that often my opinion is in the minority, but I am a fan of No Child Left Behind. The big problem with previous efforts to change learning for children in poverty was that there was no accountability for improving student outcomes within those change efforts. That changed dramatically with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 2002 with the legislation called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Because of the increased expectations for holding schools accountable for receiving their federal funds, including the requirement that states develop tests in reading and mathematics for grades 3-8 and at least once in high school, hackneyed pundits often referred to the legislation as No Child Left Untested. Included with those tests were sanctions for schools not making sufficient progress toward educating all children. According to John Chubb, the important difference here between ESEA and its extension in NCLB was that "schools are accountable not for delivering education to students, the historical norm, but for actually educating them - and to high academic standards" (Chubb, Linn, Haycock, & Wiener, 2005, p. 10).

There were concerns that the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards may be difficult for districts and schools to attain (Chubb et al., 2005); this made for lively discussions as NCLB was being considered for reauthorization in 2007. As of this writing, it was still too early to tell the complete story of whether these standards and requirements had accomplished the desired effects; however, it was also clear that positive changes were happening for education. According to the Center on Education Policy (2005), nearly 75% of states reported that student achievement was improving since NCLB was enacted. According to their surveys, states and districts identified several school improvement strategies - like aligning curriculum and instruction with standards and assessments, using student achievement data to inform instruction, and providing additional or more intensive instruction for low-achieving students - as being effective and due, at least in part, to the expectations of NCLB.

National Reading Panel and Reading First

One of the key programs in carrying out the mandates of NCLB was Reading First (RF), and the foundational work for RF was done by the National Reading Panel (NRP). In 1997, the United State Congress charged the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, working with the Secretary of Education, to form a panel to investigate the knowledge base that constituted what we knew at the time about the most effective ways to teach children to read. The National Reading Panel (2000) was formed shortly thereafter and consisted of 14 individuals who represented a range of experiences, including "leading scientists in reading research, representatives of colleges of education, reading teachers, educational administrators, and parents" (p. 1-1). As the panel began their work, they discovered that over 100,000 research articles had been published on reading since 1966. In order to manage the massive undertaking, the Panel engaged in public hearings to consider the most important topics for study, discussed and debated a list of possible topics, and settled on a limited number of topics for intensive study by subgroups of the panel. A research methodology subgroup took on the task of coming up with the criteria that all subgroups would use in determining what studies to consider in their reviews. Finally, the subgroups came up with seven broad questions that guided them in meeting the Congressional charge (see Figure 1 for guiding questions).