Well, I am not sure here if we are suppose to post about the article we read or our personal feelings about the relationship between practices, research and policy, so I will do a little of both.
In an ideal world I picture the river to run three ways, that sometimes practices would influence research and policy, that sometimes research would influence and sometimes policy. That partnerships between researchers, teachers and policy makers would be common place even though that does not mean that all parties would be in agreement. Also that when policy makers were out to draw up new policies that they would look to more than one “expert” about a given topic and try to understand the complexity of the issue instead of just taking the expert who seems to make the most sense and doesn’t bother or “bore” people with “complicated” things with how a study was designed. Multiple inputs and views are needed to make an effective policy, especially when you are talking about including research and basing policy on that research. Researchers need to have close relationships with teachers in the field, so they are not just putting theories or methods out there without a practical applications and input from teachers and policy makers need to also me part of this process, either teachers or researchers themselves or have a good understanding of elementary education and reading.
However, that is ideally and the article paints a really depressing picture of how one policy about reading was made in California, it was almost diabolical in some areas. But what a vivid example of policy making gone wrong. Wow, the river only runs one way in this picture with only one “expert” scientist consulted. I think in one part of the article Lyon, the expert, choose his words so carefully about what reading is, “phonemic awareness, phonics and high-interest, decodable text are necessary to ensure the “fast and accurate decoding of text”, it seems that he knew reading was more than this, but was just selling this part of reading. I wonder what stake he had in all this? Was his family in the publishing business and going to benifit from the massive amounts of phonics text that would be bought by the state of California, was he just enjoying his power at the moment or did he really believe that he could fix the reading “problem” with such a simple idea that was so easily consummed by policy makers?
There are so many sections of this article that just truly disturbed me, one of those being the implications of to in-service training for teachers having to teach by phonics out of context. The article mentioned that 90% of teachers would have to attend this new mandatory trainings, but I kept wondering who would be conducting these trainings? My feeling is that the state would contract it out to publishing companies from their approved lists of phonics text and publishers would be conducting the trainings. I don’t know if that happened, but is seems one way that they would get this much training done by people who believed in this phonics approach because they have a direct stake in selling textbooks to California and to the rest of the country.
As I mentioned before, the whole article was disturbing and the total lack of consultation with multiple people, teachers and researchers, to really understand what the “problem’ may be (not sure if there was a problem there or not), but just taking the word of one expert that made things sound simple enough for policy makers to understand. It is so disturbing to me that politicians make educational policy now. They really have no idea of what is going on in education, but feel like they make policy. That education just needs these simple fixes and the whole system can be fixed.
