Resisting Reading Mandates: How to Triumph with the Truth

by Elaine M. Garan

Teachers today are in a stranglehold as a glut of mandates and standards restrict our ability to make decisions in our own classrooms. In many schools, scripted, regimented commercial programs further erode our power to view our students as individuals with unique talents and needs. Even the words we use to "teach" are no longer our own as we read our way through the tightly scripted manuals. How demeaning it is to be told that the curriculum is now "teacher proofed." In addition to district and state mandates, the federal government has joined in the attack as monies are distributed or withheld based on schools' compliance with the smoky, "scientific" research that is robbing us of our power to think and act. In this book, Elaine Garan dejargonizes the research and takes us behind the curtain, using her own research and analysis of the issues and applying them to us as real teachers in real classrooms in an easy-to-read format we can use. Garan takes on the National Reading Panel Report, specifically the research summarized in the phonics subgroup report, and robs it of its power by meticulously documenting its basic flaws. In the process, she enables us to respond to the "research says" claims with solid arguments of our own, using the NRP's very own words. Furthermore, her book reveals the true findings of the NRP's report on commercial programs and isolated phonics instruction and the strong financial links that are connected to its "science." As Dick Allington says in the foreword to this book, improving teaching and learning in the real world of schools and classrooms is difficult enough without government-sponsored misallocation of effort and funding. Garan's purpose, however, is not to produce a research book, but a handbook for empowerment . She gives us all-teachers and administrators alike-the tools we need to stand up and talk back. What Garan proposes is to triumph over outside forces with the truth.

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2002

Reviews

[Andrea]

This book is meant to be empowering, but to me it was extremely depressing. I guess I'm a glass half empty kind of person. It is so frustrating to hear what is happening in education and to see, first hand, the struggles in my school and the insane amount of stress my staff is under to pass a standardized test that is a completely inappropriate measure of reading & writing ability. Not to mention the fact that the way we are told to prepare for this test is to use basal series that are bending facts to sell expensive books and line their own pockets. The flaws and purposely miscommunicated points made by the National Reading Panel are downright scary. I went into teaching because all this money grubbing business stuff irritates the snot out of me.

[Erica]

EDR 621

[Melissa]

stunning research that I'd always suspected! Proof that the mandates, over-testing, and prescriptive curriculum that are destroying children's lives are politically and financially motivated.