The state's tentative blueprint for reading instruction provides little meaningful guidance to teachers and contradicts evidence about the way children learn to read, according to five leading experts in reading.

The authorities say the document does not reflect the most important advances in the field and is unlikely to improve the substandard reading performance of Maryland schoolchildren.

The harsh reviews have prompted state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick to call for significant revisions before the report is sent to schools.

Compared with documents produced recently in states such as Texas, California, New York and Illinois that are leaders in reading reform, Maryland's report is "clearly inferior," said Louisa Moats, head of a Washington research project funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"This framework is truly the most unproductive effort of any I have seen from any state," said Marilyn Jager Adams, author of a widely consulted synthesis of reading research.

"This is a document that could have been written 10 years ago, that is dismissive of research, that does not usefully inform novices, that will not improve veterans, and that cannot serve in any way to bring parity across different schools and classrooms," she said.

The 62-page report is the work of a task force of 25 educators, mostly representatives of state school districts and colleges of education, who consulted 1,500 studies on reading and met monthly over the past 16 months.

The panel is part of a larger effort led by Grasmick to improve reading achievement in Maryland, where nearly two-thirds of third-graders score below the state standard. Forty-five percent of the state's fourth-graders couldn't read at grade level in 1994, a rate slightly worse than the national average. Research shows that much of early reading failure is preventable by proven instructional methods -- methods that many education colleges and schools have yet to embrace.

Last week, the State Board of Education increased the number of reading courses required of Maryland teachers, a reform primarily targeted at education colleges. The task force report, a separate undertaking, is destined for Maryland public schools as a road map for classroom instruction.

Task force chairwoman Patricia Richardson, superintendent of St. Mary's County schools, said the panel will not sign off on a final report before considering the critiques of independent reviewers and making any necessary revisions.

"If we didn't state something clearly enough, we have to go back and see what we can do to strengthen it," she said. "If there's a conflict with the research, we'll go back and review the research. We don't want to misrepresent the research. When it goes out it has to be clean and readable and the message has to be strong."

But John Guthrie, a task force member and a reading authority at the University of Maryland, College Park, said last week that he considered the report nearly final, needing only minor changes.

The report, he said, is aligned with the best research of the past decade -- not only scientific research but studies of the practices of outstanding teachers.

There are varying interpretations of the research, Guthrie said, and the criticisms reflect the views of "very strong phonics advocates, not a mainstream research camp."

While the critics called for more specifics, Guthrie said the panel purposely avoided specifics in some cases so the report could be used for a range of purposes. "We did not intend to compose a book, nor did we intend to present a specific prescriptive teaching program for all schools," he said.

'Our problem is different'

The panel's charge, he said, was to provide a comprehensive map not only for beginning readers but for students at all grade levels. The critics, as well as reformers in states such as Texas and California, have defined the reading problem as a beginning reading problem, he said. "We don't define it that way. We define it as a K-12 charge. Our solution is going to be different because our problem is different."

But in response to negative evaluations from five experts, four of whom reviewed the document at The Sun's request, Grasmick said she was "enormously concerned" and would not accept the report until the panel makes substantial revisions. If the panel doesn't agree, Grasmick said, she'll tap outside professionals to write it.

"I'm absolutely dead set on ensuring that this meets the highest current standard for reading acquisition," she said. "I won't be satisfied with anything less."

Grasmick had asked the task force to pick reading authorities with national reputations to review the report. Of the five chosen, two had generally high praise: Richard Vacca, a Kent State University professor and past president of the International Reading Association, who specializes in "content area" reading for older children who already know how to sound out words; and Bess Altwerger, a Towson University professor known as a strong whole language proponent.

Vacca said the report offers a "balanced, theoretically sound" approach, successfully mixing phonics and literature. He called the treatment of phonics and other "word-study" skills "a model, not only for Maryland but also for the nation's schools."

Altwerger, while applauding the overall effort, made a number of suggestions, among them allowing teachers more flexibility to include strategies other than phonics. And she opposes specifying the content of college courses for teachers, calling it an infringement of academic freedom.

A third reviewer, Martha Denckla, a neurologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, gave a brief response, suggesting more strategies for helping struggling readers. As of last week, the panel was awaiting a response from a fourth

reviewer, Susan Burns, study director of a National Academy of Sciences panel on reading.

But Moats -- who of the five is the most widely consulted authority on instruction in beginning reading -- leveled extensive criticisms.

'Contradictory statements'

"It contains contradictory statements, information about reading psychology that is simply inaccurate according to scientific studies of reading, and many descriptions of reading instruction techniques that are whole language manifestoes unsupported by research," she wrote. Whole language refers to the literature-based method that many experts blame for reading failure because it hasn't paid proper attention to phonics.

Many of Moats' observations were echoed by four authorities who reviewed the document at The Sun's request. They are Adams, author and member of a National Academy of Sciences panel on preventing reading failure; Jean Osborn, who co-directed a reading center at the University of Illinois and consults Texas on its reading reform; Douglas Carnine, a University of Oregon professor who directs a federal center for evaluating educational materials; and Bill Honig, California's former state superintendent, who runs a company that trains teachers in how to teach reading.

Among their observations:

The document is too vague and perpetuates the status quo when proven techniques are available that could fix many children's reading problems.

"There is no mention of the role of validated instructional programs in successful reading instruction," Moats said. "The emphasis is on letting the teacher have her own fiefdom. The whole point of the research is that some programs are more effective than others."

It does not emphasize the most important elements of beginning reading, such as phonemic awareness (recognizing the individual sounds of the language), explicit, systematic phonics, and giving children "decodable" stories to read, with words that they can sound out.

It fails to state that kindergartners should be screened for phonological awareness and letter knowledge, the best predictors of first-grade reading ability, and that first-graders should be screened for decoding ability so that teachers know which students need more explicit instruction and how much.

In some cases it contradicts research. For instance, five reviewers criticized the recommendation that children should rely equally on various "cueing systems" to figure out unfamiliar words. Research shows that good readers first sound out words, and poor readers fall back on other "cues" when they can't sound out words, forming destructive habits, the reviewers said.

"Why does Maryland recommend instructional procedures that promote illiteracy, albeit unintentionally?" asked Carnine.

Said Osborn: "I don't think they've got a sense of the drama, the need, the struggle that some children are going through to try to become readers."

'Back to drawing board'

Honig and other reviewers suggested that Maryland, like Texas and California before it, tap top-name researchers or reading scholars to write the document.

"This thing should be sent back to the drawing board," Honig said. "Remember, Maryland is below-average for a reason. They're doing something wrong."

Pub Date: 8/03/98