National and state reading scores for elementary school students are down. And in Berlin, New Hampshire, some teachers and parents say there’s a literacy crisis happening in their school district.
At a May school board meeting, Berlin parent Aisha Rai Vien said her daughter couldn’t read the books sent home by her school.
“The current reading instruction is failing,” Vien said. “I'm looking out for my daughter and the other students that will soon follow in her footsteps.”
Roughly 70% of elementary school students in Berlin aren’t reading at their grade level. While these aren’t the lowest literacy scores in the state, they are the lowest of all North Country schools.
In a letter sent to Berlin’s school board members this spring, Berlin teachers said the low literacy scores are because of how those students are taught to read.
“[The scores are] a direct result of using Fountas and Pinnell for instruction and intervention,” the letter reads. “It is well documented that F&P is a failed program that has seriously harmed students all across the English-speaking world.”
Fountas & Pinnell is a reading program created by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The instruction and reading materials encourage students to use context and pictures to guess or predict words in a story, in addition to teaching phonics. Scientific researchers and educators have criticized the reading program, arguing it doesn’t effectively teach students how to read.
“I'm seeing kids all the way from first grade through high school who are struggling with mostly the foundational skills of decoding [words],” Kristen Waddell, a speech pathologist with the Berlin School District, said. Waddell wrote the letter to school district leaders that other teachers signed on to, criticizing the use of Fountas & Pinnell materials in Berlin Elementary School.
“[Fountas and Pinnell instruction] creates a very, very shaky foundation,” Waddell said. “So similar to the foundation of a house, if your foundation is not strong, it's all going to fall apart eventually.”
Berlin Elementary School principal Cynthia Pike says the school is using a reading curriculum that’s backed by scientific research with phonics, not a Fountas & Pinnell program. She says the Fountas & Pinnell books are only used in the classroom for reading comprehension lessons where a teacher might read aloud the book and ask students the main idea of the text.
“Instead of tossing really beautiful, culturally rich books, we are holding on to those books so that we can continue as is appropriate to teach comprehension skills and really just building other forms of literacy,” Pike said. “But not specifically for reading instruction.”
But Waddell says some classrooms are still using Fountas & Pinnell to teach reading. “There are a few teachers in the school who have said they won't use [Fountas & Pinnell materials] but for the most part, that is what teachers are using in the school for reading.”
NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Waddell about the struggles students are facing in learning how to read.
Transcript
In your job as a speech pathologist, are you seeing kids struggling to read in your day to day work in the district?
Absolutely. I'm seeing kids all the way from first grade through high school who are struggling with mostly the foundational skills of decoding. It is absolutely something that's been going on for years. A lot of people look at the pandemic as the problem, but these problems have been happening since long before that.
Students all over the country are struggling with reading right now. Why do you think that the way Berlin kids are taught to read isn't working?
It's the same problem all the way across the English speaking world. We've sort of unilaterally adopted this balanced literacy and whole language approach to teaching reading, and it creates a very, very shaky foundation. Similar to the foundation of a house, if your foundation is not strong, it's all going to fall apart eventually.
When we're talking about the foundation of learning to read, what are you talking about, specifically?
I'm talking about phonics and the ability to decode the text, because if you can't decode the words, then you can't understand what you're reading.
So the school system is teaching phonics?
It is teaching phonics as kind of a patch. So phonics is taught, but in terms of practice and carryover, there's very, very little of that. So what happens is we're using a balanced literacy program for "real reading." So kids are not being given books that they can then decode based on the phonics lessons that they've learned.
I want to define that term “balanced approach.” What do you mean by that?
So the balanced literacy approach is based on whole language, where there's a lot of memorizing and guessing going on and very little emphasis on phonics.
The difference between the balanced literacy approach and the whole language approach is balanced literacy brings in that phonics patch, but still maintains this idea that reading is natural and you can just hand kids a book and they'll figure it out. Or they can use context clues, or they can use the pictures to help them figure it out, rather than really emphasizing the need to connect the letter — the grapheme, which is the letters, with the phoneme, — which is the sounds of speech.
For a really strong program and really, really teaching kids how to read pretty much anything, you want them to have that strong phonological skills, which is the sounds of speech and phonics — that ability to combine the graphemes with the phonemes.
You're saying that while the school does teach phonics — how to sound out and decode words — it's also including these balanced literacy books by a program called Fountas & Pinnell that you say doesn't actually help kids read.
Absolutely.
We spoke with Berlin Elementary School's principal, and she says the school isn't using the Fountas & Pinnell curriculum program specifically, and that the school is using evidence-based reading instruction with phonics. The Fountas & Pinnell books are just in the classroom for reading comprehension. Do you have issues with that?
I do have issues with that. I have worked in the school for – this is the end of my eighth year. There are a few teachers in the school who have said they won't use it, but for the most part, that is what teachers are using in the school for reading. I know for a fact that this past spring they have used the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System, which is not a reliable tool, in order to decide what leveled reader each student should have.
So many students nationally and here in New Hampshire [are] struggling to read. Besides phasing out these Fountas & Pinnell reading materials, in your opinion, what do you think students and parents and teachers really need to do?
It's a really systemic problem, and I don't blame teachers. I don't blame admin. It's a problem that goes all the way back to pre-service teacher training. The colleges and universities that are putting out incoming teachers are not giving them the information or the tools that they need to do the job, and this has been going on for truly decades.
I guess one thing that really bothers me is that a lot of times, schools will blame the students or the parents for the struggles that the students have with reading. And it's not the family's job to teach reading or math. For some reason, it's really reading that you hear people say, "Well, if only their parents would read to them at night," or whatever. It's not the job of the families to teach reading. It is the job of school to teach foundational skills of reading and math.
