An unsound approach to teaching

A second concern about the Rowe Report is while recommendations are made about teacher training and professional development, the report fails to evaluate how effective state and territory curricula are in giving teachers a succinct and research-based road map on how to best teach literacy.

No amount of teacher training and in-service will help if the curriculum documents from which classroom teachers must work are based on a flawed and discredited approach to literacy that is the cause of the current problems.

As noted by Kerry Hempenstall’s analysis contained in a recent Commonwealth funded primary curriculum benchmarking report, the fact is Australian curriculum documents, with the exception of NSW, are based on the whole language, critical literacy approach, associated with outcomes-based education.

While the educrats responsible for writing English curriculum in Australia over the last 20 years or so argue that their documents have always taken a balanced approach, by acknowledging the value of both whole language and phonics, this is not the case.

On reading the Rowe Report, the evidence is convincing: many children are not being taught to read and many teachers and trainee teachers do not have a solid grounding in what constitutes effective literacy teaching.

How has this been allowed to happen? The answer is more than academic, as any attempt to improve literacy standards is doomed to failure, if the very programs and professional organisations responsible for the problem are the ones now called on to provide the solution.

Reading Recovery is one of the most popular programs employed to help problem readers. Originating in New Zealand, the program is based on the whole language model and millions of dollars have been invested in implementing it across Australia, the UK and the USA.

As the Rowe Report stresses the need for early intervention programs to help children at risk, it is strange that the report makes no mention of Reading Recovery. This is especially so, as there are increasing doubts about the program’s effectiveness.

The Victorian Auditor-General has questioned the value of the program, as while students involved achieve short-term benefits, over the longer term there is little, if any, evidence of improved literacy skills.

In the USA, as a result of President Bush’ initiative No Child Left Behind, some billions of dollars are being committed to literacy programs. Significant is that only those programs that have been proved to work will receive funding and 19 American reading experts argue that Congress should refuse funding as Reading Recovery fails such a test.

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the Australian Council of Deans of Education are two professional organisations that have consistently argued against the more formal approach to teaching literacy represented by phonics and phonemic awareness.

Over the years, the AATE has argued that the literacy crisis is a simply a political ploy and, in its submission to the inquiry, warns of adopting “narrow or reductionist approaches which cannot incorporate the complex, cognitive, social, linguistic and emotional variables which impact on student learning”.