Getting Education Back on Track

According to University of Oregon education professors Doug Carnine and Ed Kameenui, America's elementary and secondary education system is in trouble--big spending on fads, failure to teach the basics, little accountability for abysmal student performance. As director and associate director of the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (NCITE), they are dedicated to getting education back on track.
"The most shameful thing about this ailing system," explains Carnine, "is that it continues year after year, affecting millions of students at an incalculable cost to society, even though we know how to fix it."
And that fix, says Kameenui, is straightforward. "Researchers have exhaustively studied these questions for decades, conducted hundreds of studies, and poured millions of dollars into the most important question--how best to teach reading," he asserts. "We know what works."
"What works" are scientifically evaluated, classroom-tested textbooks and teaching programs with proven, repeatable success rates. These practices, Kameenui states, "consistently result in children reading at grade level and performing well in school."
Perhaps the most profound and fundamental change Carnine and Kameenui are calling for has to do with making schools individually accountable for student performance. If methods and materials with known rates of success are used, a school can be held accountable for matching those rates.
"This kind of accountability leads to improved teaching and more successful students," Kameenui says.

The Hardest Hit

Carnine stresses that those who suffer most from unsound teaching methods are the students most in need: learning disabled, impoverished, and nonnative speakers of English--the so-called at-risk students.
"What happens too often," Carnine says, "is that these kids are taught using unproven or faddish methods; they do poorly; they get identified as needing special education; and suddenly, they are on a downward spiral."
To society, the cost of this trajectory is high. School boards typically spend more than twice as much on special education students than on their mainstream peers. Long-term costs are even higher. Illiteracy, Kameenui notes, is correlated with a hornets' nest of social problems: from dropping out of school to incarceration and teenage pregnancy.
"It's a message whose time has come," Carnine affirms.
The national media seem to agree. NCITE researchers have appeared on ABC World News, and they have been quoted in USA Today, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Constitution and in hundreds of newspapers across the country via the Associated Press.

Two-Pronged Approach

Carnine works throughout the nation--Virginia, New York, California, Texas--with legislative and policy groups, recommending changes that will require the use of textbooks and materials that use research-based teaching principles. He recently spent two days discussing educational reforms with Texas governor George W. Bush.
"By changing policies we can change the marketplace. This is the key," Carnine says. "As this happens, publishers will produce better materials and classroom teachers will be better equipped for success."
Carnine's focus on policy is matched by Kameenui's career-long interest in research on the most effective ways to teach. Along with fellow UO researcher Deborah Simmons, he developed a booklet soon to be distributed to one million parents as a key element of President Clinton's AmericaRead Challenge program. The booklet presents parents with practical, research-proven suggestions for supporting reading in their children.
"For the first four years we had a hard time getting people to listen," says Carnine. "Now they are beginning to listen, and we are getting almost too busy. But that's the right kind of problem to have."

Back to INQUIRY, Spring 1997