How Can Effective Teaching Do Harm?

Tim Shanahan

May 14, 2022, I published what I thought would be my last word on Reading Recovery (RR) http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/me-and-reading-recovery.

Fat chance.

RR, if you don’t know, is a remedial reading program for first graders. It started in the 1970s in New Zealand and was widely adopted throughout the United States. Over the years, it has been both widely lauded and decried by reading authorities. From its inception, it was the focus of lots of research – much of which seemed to support its effectiveness, though I had expressed concerns about this (Shanahan, 1987; Shanahan & Barr, 1995), as had others (Iversen & Tunmer, 1992). The combination of its one-on-one instruction and its extensive teacher development requirements make it an especially expensive intervention.

In 2022, Henry May and his colleagues at the University of Delaware reported a fascinating study – extensive and high in quality. It was a follow up to an earlier study they had conducted evaluating the effectiveness of RR. That earlier study found clear learning advantages for the children enrolled in the program (May, Sirinides, Gray, & Goldworthy, 2016).

The study, first reported in 2022 and published in 2024, evaluated the long-term benefits for the program and the results weren’t pretty (May, Blakeney, Shrestha, Mazal, & Kennedy, 2024).

Reading Recovery advocates claimed that its students would become self-improving systems, no longer with a need for remedial support. A promise meant to allay the concerns about its costs. But according to the May study, these kids needed as much or more of those additional services as the untreated population. Evidently, there was no saving at all.

Even worse, the RR kids did less well in reading by grades 3 and 4. Their achievement levels were lower than those of the comparison kids. In other words, RR hadn’t improved their ability to keep learning. If anything, it appeared that it had somehow made them less able to keep up with their classmates.

That was what I wrote about in that blog that I thought would be my last word on RR.

However, in the past few weeks, I’ve received multiple queries about the May study. Each was as skeptical as I had been about the possibility that RR somehow disadvantaged these children. By the end of grade 1, the RR kids were outperforming the reading of similar kids who hadn’t had the advantage of RR instruction. How could that be a problem?

Some emails questioned the quality of the study. For example, as is often true with longitudinal research, attrition levels were high. Large potentially biasing losses of subjects can undermine the trustworthiness of a study. In this case? There were still 15,000 kids in the study and various analyses showed the unlikelihood that attrition had affected the results.

The results seem screwy – I’ve never seen this kind of long-term negative result from any instruction – but there was nothing screwy about the study.

One questioner raised the best query of all:  

“Something very weird is going on when first graders who got a lot of one-on-one help from an expert teacher end up going backwards. What’s your theory?”

READ MORE...