Scholastic.com | Read 180 - reading intervention program

Scholastic.com | Read 180

This is the high-tech "cadillac" entry in the Seminole county trials. The author divides the intervention into a "90 minute model"; of which 60 minutes is spent in small groups with the software, 20 minutes whole class and 10 minute summation.

I like the idea of the extensive small group sessions. Otherwise it would be interesting to know how well the software matches up with Sally Shaywitz's writings.

Florida school district tries to sort out commercial reading intervention programs

OrlandoSentinel.com: News - Best path sought for teens who can't read

This fits my emerging impression -- there's a large knowledge gap around interventions for children who have difficulty reading. Every classroom has its own idiosyncratic practices. It reminds me of medicine in 1890. Sadly, I doubt the Seminole County study will have enough funding or expertise to provide high quality answers. These are terribly difficult studies to do well.

These teens probably needed effective interventions 10 years ago, but I suppose better late than never. Credit to Stacy Weiss for this link.

Note this activity appears to have been motivated by the sanctions in the NCLB act. Points to that legislation, it is not entirely malign. Emphases mine.

By Dave Weber | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted January 1, 2005

SANFORD -- Thousands of high-school students in Florida can't read, and educators are scrambling to help them catch up by using a hodgepodge of methods that vary from district to district, school to school and even classroom to classroom.

No one knows exactly what works.

But Seminole County school officials hope to find out. This month, they will begin a three-year classroom research project, partially funded by the state, that they hope will tell them where to put their effort and their money.

... Working with Dr. Laura Hassler, a reading researcher at Florida State University, Seminole officials hope to develop a reading program that can be duplicated in other districts. Seminole will spend about $2 million on the experiment, including hiring 14 new teachers.

... By next fall, about 2,000 of Seminole's poor readers, mostly freshmen and sophomores, will be split among three approaches to reading instruction, with educators watching intently to see which produce the best results.

... Classes will be limited to 20 students, so teachers can give them more attention. Students will spend 90 minutes each day in reading class.

.... The reading approaches include two costly commercial strategies and another that pulls together several methods at less expense.

Read 180 by the Scholastic company relies heavily on students using computers, and is the most expensive at $439,000. Teachers use a script of carefully drawn activities in SRA Corrective Reading by McGraw Hill, which will cost the district about $130,000.

A third approach, called Strategically Oriented Intensive Reading Instruction, was developed by Evan Lefsky, a reading specialist for the state, and relies on teachers using a certain set of instructional activities. It has a price tag of $84,400.

The district also will train teachers of high-school language arts, science and social studies to gear their classes toward poor readers while at the same time helping students to become better readers.

.... For years the schools passed students along, despite their inability to read. Education reforms including the FCAT, mandatory retention for third-graders who can't read and the state's tough school grading system are sharply reducing social promotions.

... School officials are panicking because while poor FCAT reading scores for the past few years were hurting individual students, now they are giving entire schools bad names.

... now the low reading scores of struggling students affect the letter grade that the state hands out to schools each spring. In 2004, Lake Brantley High got a C and Seminole High earned a D under a provision in the state grading system that drops schools an entire letter if poor performers don't improve two years in a row.

Vogel and superintendents around the state worry that dozens of high schools could be hit with the penalty in June, when new grades come out, because poor readers will drag them down.

The journalist implies we know what to do in the elementary schools. That's certainly not true in my school district. I'll have to learn more about the programs they're trying.

The greatest fallacy in special education: using IQ vs. focal disability to allocate educational interventions

Learning Disabilities OnLine: LD In-Depth: NCLD Summit 1999

From a 1999 lecture by the director of an NIH agency:

Distinguishing between disabled readers with an IQ-reading achievement discrepancy and those without a discrepancy reflects an invalid practice at the beginning stages of reading. Specifically, children with and without a discrepancy do not differ in the information processing skills (phonological and orthographic coding) that are necessary for the accurate and rapid reading of single words. Likewise, genetic and neurophysiological (functional MRI) studies have not indicated differential etiologies for reading disabled children with and without discrepancies. Converging data from several NICHD sites also indicates that the presence and magnitude of IQ-reading achievement discrepancies are not related significantly to a child's response to intervention.

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One of the most hideous (I use the word deliberately) policy errors in public education is the baseless conceit that resources should not distributed on the basis of a disability, but rather focally on the discrepancy between "global IQ" and "measured outcome". One presumes this is based on a belief that:

1. Low IQ makes intervention futile.
2. There is something special about a focal deficit that makes this the preferrred tartget of intervention.
3. Children with low IQ results are best locked in a dark room, preferably without a key.

This is a perverse belief; the more one examines it the more it is seen a particularly repulsive combination of belief contradicted by evidence, and a condemnation by IQ test. And yet, it remains the fundamental basis of assigning resources for educational intervention in most school systems.

NICHD (NIH) director lecture on helping children to read (1999)

Learning Disabilities OnLine: LD In-Depth: NCLD Summit 1999

A 1999 lecture by Duane Alexander Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health:

Learning to read is critical to a child's (and an adult's) well-being. The child and adult who cannot read at a comfortable level experience significant difficulties mastering many types of academic content, are at substantial risk for failure in school, and are frequently unable to reach their potential in the vocational and occupational arena....

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The page has a like to a RealAudio file and the text of the speech. The date and location of the speech does not appear on the page content, but it can be found in the browser title (sigh).

We're finding a large gap between reading researchers and school knowledge. It makes the gap between clinical research and clinical practice seem modest by comparison. I have to guess there's just not enough money in education to support effective dissemination of knowledge.

BTW, this appears to have been a limited late 90s initiative of this branch of the NIH. The current NICHD web site has no material on reading education or the science of teaching reading.

National Center for Learning Disabilities: A private foundation

National Center for Learning Disabilities: Resources on learning disabilities

They have some good foundation sponsors (Ford, Emily Hall, ExxonMobil. Seem to sponsor some conferences. Worth exploring further.

Helping Struggling Readers: Explicit phonics instruction

Helping Struggling Readers - New Horizons

What are the Essential Components of Effective Programs for Struggling Readers?

To answer this question, we analyzed the components of six programs for underachieving readers. The programs included Success For All, Reading Recovery, The Spalding Method, Early Intervention Reading, The Boulder Project, and The Winston-Salem Project. We also interviewed six teachers and four reading specialists about what they believed to be essential when teaching struggling readers. There were significant areas of agreement. According to the educators and the established programs, the necessary components of effective reading programs include 1) phonics instruction, 2) listening comprehension , 3) reading comprehension, 4) tutoring opportunities, and 5) extending reading from the classroom to the home. Each component is described below.

1) Explicit Phonics Instruction
There were three key reading strategies that all six programs and the ten educators cited as essential. The three skills included phonics, listening, and reading comprehension. All ten educators agreed that phonics was the number one skill that struggling readers lacked. Likewise, it was interesting to observe that the majority of instructional time in the six programs is dedicated to word recognition and fluency through explicit phonics instruction. The programs typically use prescribed texts in which stories contain letters and words that children have been introduced to.

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I'm no conservative. So it's annoying that I have to align myself with the social conservative dominated phonics-first forces rather than the lefty "whole word" gang. Sadly, the data says the phonics fascists are right, and the commie whole word folks are wrong.

I'm a very strong reader, as is my wife. I probably could have learned to read using any technique. Most kids will teach themselves phonics given a few hints along the way. Children with reading needs need a directed, structured, focused, monitored phonics-driven approach. They need it even though, for the teacher, this is boring, boring stuff. It's boring stuff for natural readers too (it was hard for me to learn to read aloud -- sounding out words just slowed me down).

Boring. Dull. Painful. Necessary.

New Horizons for Learning: Teaching and Learning for Special Needs

Inclusion of Students With Special Needs: Teaching and Learning

A potpouri of articles on special needs education. This site includes Gifted Children as "special needs" (sigh), but the rest of the articles are useful nonetheless. Includes sections on technology and on teaching reading; the Kelly & Campbell article is particularly interesting. They do need to put DATES on their online materials.

The web site is more than a bit confusing, but the organization is serious in supporting teachers and learners. It was started by a group of idealists @1980 and receives funding from Washington state, various foundations, and individual donors.

New Horizons publishes a journal, I think the articles on this page may have first appeared in the journal.

Endocannabinoids, buspirone (Buspar), and behavioral disorders in children with ADHD, PDD, EBD (explosive child)?

Haller J, Varga B, Ledent C, Barna I, Freund TF. Context-dependent effects of CB1 cannabinoid gene disruption on anxiety-like and social behaviour in mice. Eur J Neurosci. 2004 Apr;19(7):1906-12.

This is a mouse study:

CB1 gene disruption promoted aggressive behaviour in the home-cage, whereas it inhibited social behaviour in the unfamiliar cage. Thus, the anxiogenic-like effect was restricted to the more stressful unfamiliar environment. These data suggest that the effects of CB1 gene disruption were context and not behaviour specific. Novelty stress resulted in higher ACTH levels in CB1-KOs than in WTs, which suggests that context dependency occurred in conjunction with an altered HPA axis function. The present data at least partly explain contrasting effects of cannabinoids in different contexts as well as in different species and strains that show differential stress responses and coping strategies.

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The endocannabinoids are a relatively recently identified set of neurotransmitters. They affect appetite, diet, social behavior, anxiety, aggression, sleep, memory, and learning. Most of our knowledge comes from the effects of the plant cannabinoids (marijuana, etc).

Naturally there is great therapeutic interest in the endocannabinoids. If we could influence their activity in a safe manner we might have new ways to treat disorders of anxiety, of aggression, and of diet (both anorexia and obesity).

Coincidentally, fairly recently there've been studies of using Buspar, a medication marketed as an anxiolytic (Buspar abolishes REM sleep -- a side-effect that I feel has been rather understudied), for marijuana withdrawal syndrome (aggression, anxiety).

Buspar has also been used in children with anxiety and behavioral disorders, including the group that gets labeled as "Emotional behavioral disorder/EBD", Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), severe ADHD, and "exposive disorder".

Also, some of the behaviors of these children, including a peculiarly setting specifiic tendency to either anxiety/withdrawal or aggression, resembles marijuana withdrawal syndrome.

Lastly, book I've quite appreciated, written by an adult who'd suffered from severe ADHD/Explosive disorder, emphasized how severe his withdrawal syndrome was from marijuana, and provided anectdotal evidence that for children with ADHD marijuana is a particularly disruptive drug.

Given all of the above, it does not seem to be a great leap to a speculative relationship: Buspirone and endocannabinoids and "Explosive Disorder"/ADHD.

An interesting axis to explore. So I fired up scholar.google.com and entered the search terms: endocannabinoid buspirone. Intriguingly that led to the article cited here, a mouse study that makes no mention anywhere (in the abstract) of buspirone). More mysteries of Google! The study does, however, note that Endocannabinoid CB1 disruption did produce a peculiar mouse behavior -- anxiety/withdrawal in unfamiliar settings, aggression/activity in familiar settings. Hmmm. That sounds interesting.

It will be very interesting over the next few years to see how the Buspar, endocannabinoid, CB1, ADHD, PDD, explosive child, EBD, CCBD (complex cognitive behavioral disorder) axis evolves. Look for some interesting work on children with EBD using PET scans and Buspar. We are probably five to ten years from well undestood therapies however -- even if this relationship holds up.

NYT does an extensive review of autism therapy - esp. behavioral treatments

The New York Times > Health > To Treat Autism, Parents Take a Leap of Faith

.. the science behind behavioral treatments is modest at best. Researchers have published very few rigorously controlled studies of the therapies, and the results of those studies have been mixed. While some children thrive, even joining regular classrooms, the studies have found that most show moderate or little improvement....

The most recent analysis of treatment research, financed by the National Institutes of Health and scheduled to be published next year, concludes that although behavior treatments benefit many children, there is no evidence that any particular treatment leads to recovery. Doctors do not yet know how to predict which children will improve in the treatments, or even how treatable the condition is, the report concludes.

'If so many kids are being cured, then where are they? Who are they? Show me 10 percent,' said Dr. Bryna Siegel, director of the autism clinic at the University of California, San Francisco. 'The reason practitioners can't show you all these kids is because there simply aren't that many of them out there.'

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We need better science, and we need to be skeptical. Even if these interventions weren't expensive, they'd still ask a lot of parents and families, and they limit the opportunity to pursue other treatments (though I don't know of any alternatives!).

How to talk about funding of public education

Faughnan's Notes - education funding

Of all the sterile discussions I have to endure, among the least valuable are discussions about educational funding. In my experience, no-one presents any useful data.

I'd like each presentation to begin with 4 charts, with an optional 5th chart for discussions of local funding (all inflation adjusted of course):

1. A 15 yr chart of per student funding.
2. A 15 yr chart of spend on infrastructure (buildings, etc).
3. A 15 yr chart of the average salary of a state legislator.
4. A 15 yr chart of the % of students enrolled in public education (vs. private education).
5. Optional: A 15 yr chart of local tax revenue.

Once those charts are up front, one can talk intelligently. I would expect student per student costs to rise faster than inflation because:

1. Knowledge workers are becoming more costly, so there's increasing competition for teachers.
2. We're working harder to educate chidlren with language, cognitive and income disadvantages.
3. Regulations and computerization are impacting infrastructure spend.
4. Migration to private schools or to wealthier districts increases public school educational costs (private schools "cherry pick" children who are less costly to educate).

If one finds that educational spend is barely tracking inflation, then we likely have a serious underspend.

Ahh, but what if tax revenues are declining? Our population is aging and may consider education to be a lower priority. That is the crux of the matter. It is fundamentally the same issue we face with social security "reform". What is the duty owed by society to citizens, and citizens to society?

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I'm quoting myself here. Special education will be badly hurt by the funding cuts that are likely to emerge.