Joane Carlisle's Work With Reading First
Within two years of Joanne Carlisle’s arrival in Ann Arbor from Northwestern University, where she had been a tenured
faculty member teaching courses on learning disabilities, literacy, and language,
she was called on to provide technical assistance as the Michigan Department
of Education applied for a large Reading First grant in 2002, seeking new monies
available through No Child Left Behind. Eventually, she agreed to conduct
the statewide evaluation study of the resulting project.
Dr. Carlisle explains her research interests in Reading First, saying, “I started out working with adolescents who were struggling with reading disabilities. Very soon I became interested in moving back down, to get at these much earlier, to work on the prevention of disabilities. Studies indicate that if you provide intense services in grades K-3 for all struggling students—not just those with classic dyslexia, but also English language learners, students in high poverty urban schools—you can massively reduce the number of language and reading difficulties later on, and that is what Reading First is directed to do.”
Carlisle makes distinctions between various parts of the NCLB legislation,
seeing differing theories of action behind some provisions. “The Reading
First provision (Part B) is set up to help schools and districts with the neediest
readers. A school or district participating in Reading First can’t just
buy a new comprehensive program. There is a broader purpose. The law lists
five purposes, including these: providing teachers with professional development
and other supports ‘so that they have the tools to effectively help their
students learn to read.’ The assessment component includes ‘screening,
diagnostic, and classroom based instructional reading assessments,’ not
just high-stakes tests,” Carlisle notes. She regards the Reading First
provisions in NCLB as less punitive, less regulatory, more amply funded, and
more supportive than other aspects of the legislation. “In a sense, you
could look at Reading First as a new form of comprehensive school reform,
more comprehensive than previous models that were programbased, such as Success
for All and America’s Choice. There are reasons to think it m
ay do better,
but the jury’s still out,” she says.
She is collecting data on every child and teacher in each of the 22 Michigan districts and 119 schools now involved in the project. One of the important features of the research: sharing findings with schools and districts as she goes: “We’ve produced reports for every school and every district, and we share these. We feel obligated to share data we’ve collected that will help these schools and teachers improve their programs.”
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator.
