Sounding out success in Harlem

This is the perfect time for Harlem kids to be taught to read the right way.

The West Harlem Local Development Corp. is just now sifting through grants to fund with the money it got from Columbia University as part of the school’s massive expansion into Manhattanville. The idea is to make some positive differences in a neighborhood undergoing so much disruption.

The outlined goals: to improve local approaches to the usual challenges such as economic development, the environment, housing and, of course, education. More specifically, to embrace innovative ideas that really work, rather than settling for the half measures neighborhoods like Harlem have been stuck with for what seems like forever.

When it comes to education, however, true innovation can mean going back to basics — returning to tried-and-true approaches that have been neglected for far too long.

Or at least true, since what really teaches poor (and yes, black) kids how to read has been tried only in fits and starts over the years — despite the fact that it always works.

Yes, we do have such a method — and it’s not what so many well-intentioned experts will tell you, along the lines of creativity, musical accompaniment, letting kids fidget or being generous about Ebonics.

None of that hurts, on the margins. But the real deal is real simple and now almost 50 years old. It’s called Direct Instruction (DI) — a tightly scripted, phonics-based curriculum. Again and again, it has proven remarkably effective at getting kids to read from an early age. DI uses sounds, syllables and rhyming to help kids sound out words.

It is what most of us would intuitively understand as, well, teaching kids to read.

What showed us the way was an expensive, ambitious education experiment called Project Follow Through, funded by the U.S. government as an extension of Head Start and the War on Poverty.

It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results — over seven years — on 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that of these methods, the Direct Instruction method of teaching reading, developed by Siegfried Engelmann, worked best by far.

In a half-day preschool in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., Engelmann and his colleagues found DI sending students, even poor ones, on to kindergarten reading at a second-grade level.

Their mean IQ had jumped 25 points.

In the 1970s and ’80s, similar results came from nine other sites nationwide.

Many will tell you that teaching kids how to read whole words at a time is better. It can be — for middle-class kids from book-lined homes.

Others will tell you that the best answer is a combination of the whole word approach with phonics. There’s a cozy and convenient feeling to saying that. It splits the difference, it feels reasonable.

Yet what is most palatable isn’t what is best for kids.

Project Follow Through wasn’t about feelings. It was about results, and it showed that phonics worked best. Period.

Those results from 40 years ago have stood the test of time. In 2001, reading scores for students in the mostly black Richmond district in Virginia were the old story, abysmal. Cue the trumpets: Schools need “creativity,” “high expectations.” We bemoan the “savage inequalities.”

But all they had to do was, as it were, Follow Through. DI was brought in, and by 2005, three in four black students were passing the third-grade reading test.

Meanwhile, over in wealthy Fairfax County, with no DI but plenty of “creativity,” the minority of black students taking that reading test were passing it at the rate of merely 59%.

The only reason you’ve probably never heard of Project Follow Through is that these days, schools of education tend to be more interested in social politics than results.

The neglect of such a rousingly successful teaching method is like ignoring penicillin because it isn’t sexy enough.

If the leaders of the West Harlem Local Development Corp. really want to use some of the funds they are about to invest in the surrounding community to “improve academic outcomes,” as they say they do, they should solicit and publicize a Direct Instruction-based reading program, or require all reading-related programs to incorporate it before getting a penny of funding.

Here is a case where fresh thinking means understanding that we don’t need any.

jmcwhort@gmail.com