But Does it Really Matter?

Abstract

Mr. Shanahan's main concern with criticisms of the NRP report is that -- whether they are legitimate or not -- they distract us from the essential work of giving children the most effective reading instruction possible. I WAS surprised to learn that Elaine Garan and Steven Krashen had written yet two more critiques of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report. Each already has more NRP-related publications than any member of the panel, and both have been issuing their complaints over a longer period than the panel worked on the eight studies that make up the report. I was also surprised that the Kappan was publishing these critiques, given that, for the most part, no new points are made here. Most of these claims have been refuted, with no discernible effect on the critics. Of greater concern was my trepidation about entering once more into this unfortunate arena. Critical exchanges of this type can be unpleasant, unproductive, and -- more worrisome -- misleading. Since the NRP report was completed, I became a district administrator in Chicago, where we successfully applied the NRP findings to improving student achievement. Our district invested heavily in professional development to ensure that our teachers knew how to teach what research had repeatedly found to benefit children, with great results. As a novice administrator, I had to learn to distinguish what mattered from what did not. I found that there was no time to pick over bones of contention for the sake of academic argument. Instead, I had to focus my attention on what mattered to the success of the students. Wide Acceptance of the NRP Report And it's the importance of the success of students that leads me to fear that some critics may be trying to render the NRP's helpful findings into something controversial in order to dissuade administrators from using them. That could be why Garan seems so peeved that I noted the great imbalance between the relatively small amount of criticism the report has received and the many positive uses of the NRP findings. Her opinion seems to be that the report has generated only negative responses. However, an examination of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) belies that view. Researchers commonly judge the value of a study by how often it is used by other scientists. The NRP report and the reports of its subgroups, according to SSCI, have been cited more than 250 times over the past four years, and the vast majority of those citations have been positive, an indication of the general acceptance of the report in the scientific community. Another indicator of respect is the publication of parts of the report in high-ranking, rigorously reviewed scientific journals. The findings of two of the subgroup reports (phonemic awareness and phonics) have been published in such journals, one in the International Reading Association's Reading Research Quarterly and the other in the American Educational Research Association's Review of Educational Research. These studies were judged to be meritorious by the independent reviewers for these journals. In addition, the structure and findings of the NRP have been used in the development of several consensus panels (for example, the National Early Literacy Panel and the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth) and cited in reports published by the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences1 and by the RAND Study Group.2 Would It Matter If the Critics Were Correct? But no matter how sound a report or how widely accepted, Garan is right that it should not be above professional criticism. However, from the critiques offered by Garan and Krashen in this issue, one cannot discern the point of my chapter in The Voice of Evidence.3 While I refuted many specific criticisms of the NRP report, I came to think that the critiques, by their very nature, were irrelevant to the question of whether the report should be used by schools. …