Excellence and Equity in Literacy Education

The Case of New Zealand

William Tunmer, J. Chapman, William Tunmer, J. Chapman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349682102, 9781137415561
• eBook ISBN: 9781137415578
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Literacy is arguably the most important goal of schooling as, to a large extent, it determines young children's educational and life chances and is fundamental in achieving social justice. New Zealand's literacy education programme has long been regarded as one of the world's most successful approaches to teaching literacy skills to young children. Excellence and Equity in Literacy Education questions this widely held assumption. In the late 1990s the New Zealand government developed a national literacy strategy aimed at reducing persistently large inequities in literacy achievement outcomes. The chapters in this edited volume present evidence indicating that the national literacy strategy has failed, examine the major factors responsible for the continuation of New Zealand's comparatively wide spread of scores in literacy achievement, and describe the most effective strategies for reducing the literacy achievement gap and achieving excellence and equity in New Zealand literacy education.

1

The Development of New Zealand’s National Literacy Strategy

William E. Tunmer and James W. Chapman

Becoming literate is arguably the most important goal of schooling. The ability to read is basic to success in almost every aspect of the school curriculum, is a prerequisite skill for nearly all jobs, and is the primary key to lifelong learning. The complexity of the global economy and the political and social challenges the world faces place ever increasing demands on strong literacy skills. Literacy determines, to a large extent, young children’s educational and life chances and is fundamental in achieving social justice. Given the importance of acquiring literacy skills, it is understandable that education systems throughout the world strive to achieve excellence in literacy education.

In addition to achieving excellence in literacy teaching practices, education systems need to reduce inequities in literacy achievement outcomes between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from higher income families and neighbourhoods. Research reported from several countries indicates that children enter school with large individual differences in the literacy-related knowledge, experiences, and competencies essential for acquiring literacy – collectively referred to as “literate cultural capital” (see Chapter 7 of this volume). In general, the higher the level of literate cultural capital possessed by children at the beginning of school, the more they profit from literacy instruction; they learn to read sooner, and they read better than children who have less literate cultural capital. Given these findings, the challenge for education systems is to develop an evidence-based approach to literacy education in which the child starting school with limited literate cultural capital (typically a child from a culturally diverse and/or low-income background) has approximately the same probability of success in learning to read and write as the new entrant with an abundance of literate cultural capital, that is, an approach that does not contribute to cultural reproduction and inequality in society. The aim of this volume is to examine the themes of excellence and equity in literacy education with particular reference to New Zealand’s approach to teaching early literacy skills.

The research questions of the volume

New Zealand’s literacy education programme is often claimed to be one of the world’s most successful approaches to teaching literacy skills to young children. This includes the Reading Recovery (RR) programme for struggling readers, which has been implemented in several English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada. Smith and Elley (1997), two leading New Zealand literacy educators, noted: “expert commentators from other countries have been fulsome in their praise of our reading programmes, our reading teachers, our reading materials and our Reading Recovery methods” (p. 110). They further stated: “our methods of teaching … are all spreading to other parts of the world” and “[i]t is no wonder that New Zealand is held up as the country whose reading programmes are ‘best in the world’ (Newsweek, 1991)” (p. 110). More recently, in a report on the New Zealand education system from the Center on International Education Benchmarking (2012), reference was made to “New Zealand’s world-class work in the field of reading instruction”, work which has “paid off handsomely” (p. 5).

This volume questions these widely held assumptions, focusing particularly on the growing body of evidence of New Zealand’s relatively “long tail” of literacy underachievement. For the past 15 years, the New Zealand government has initiated major efforts to reduce the persistently large inequities in achievement outcomes in literacy education, including the development of a national literacy strategy that included RR as a central component. The primary contention of this volume is that these efforts have largely failed. The following research questions are the focus of this volume:

1. What is New Zealand’s national literacy strategy; how did it develop; and what evidence supports the claim that the strategy has failed?

2. What are the major factors responsible for the persistence of New Zealand’s comparatively wide gap in literacy achievement, and why the gap has not diminished over the past 15 years despite major efforts by the Ministry of Education (MoE) to address the problem?

3. Based on the available scientific research on literacy development, including New Zealand-based research, what are the most effective strategies for reducing the literacy achievement gap and achieving excellence in New Zealand’s literacy education programme?

By providing answers to these questions, we place this volume at the interface of educational policies and scientific research on reading. The volume provides a comprehensive, evidence-based critique of New Zealand’s approach to teaching literacy skills and concludes that fundamental changes are required before excellence and equity in literacy education can be achieved. This includes replacing RR with an intervention programme that is based on contemporary theory and research on reading and targets children who are most at risk of failing to learn to read. The subsequent chapters argue that New Zealand’s adoption of a rigidly constructivist orientation towards literacy education has contributed greatly to the continuing inability to reduce the relatively large inequities in literacy outcomes. Although the conclusions drawn from the arguments and evidence presented in this volume are specific to New Zealand, they generalize to other education systems that are based on similar misguided theoretical assumptions regarding literacy development and literacy learning difficulties in young children.

In the next section, we present a summary of the key literacy reports, reviews, and government policy initiatives that have occurred since the publication of Smith and Elley’s (1997) influential book describing New Zealand’s approach to teaching reading. This includes a discussion of the development of New Zealand’s national literacy strategy. We then describe the structure of the volume and briefly summarize each chapter.

Literacy reports, reviews, and government policy initiatives

For over 20 years, New Zealand has consistently shown comparatively high levels of variability in the test scores from international surveys of reading achievement (Tunmer, Chapman, & Prochnow, 2003, 2004, 2006; Tunmer et al., 2008; Tunmer & Prochnow, 2009; Tunmer et al., 2007). The high degree of variability in outcomes is somewhat unexpected for two reasons. First, New Zealand has a unified national education system with a relatively uniform approach to literacy instruction and intervention. Most aspects of literacy education are controlled centrally by the MoE, including the setting and monitoring of the national curriculum, the establishment of national reading and writing standards, the production of beginning reading materials and instructional guides for primary teachers, and the funding and monitoring of two major intervention programmes for struggling readers – RR and Resource Teachers: Literacy (Chamberlain, 2012). Consequently, compared with other English-speaking countries such as the United States or Canada (that have semi-autonomous education systems at the state or provincial level), there is considerably less variation in the materials, reading methods, and instructional strategies used in regular classroom reading programmes and in nationally implemented intervention programmes.

The second reason that New Zealand’s relatively large literacy achievement gap is rather surprising concerns RR, a nationally implemented early intervention programme developed by Clay (1985) to help children identified as making only limited progress in reading after a year of formal reading instruction (normally children whose reading progress falls to the lowest 15–20% of the enrolment cohort in any given school). The programme involves one-to-one withdrawal instruction for 30–40 minutes/day for 12–20 weeks by a specially trained RR teacher (Clay, 2005a, 2005b). The main goal of the programme is to accelerate students’ reading achievement to the average level of their peers within a 20-week period (Chamberlain, 2012; Lee, 2011). Clay (1987) was very confident about the effectiveness of RR, claiming that it is a

programme which should clear out of the remedial education system all the children who do not learn to read for many event-produced reasons [i.e., environmental, cultural, or economic causes] and all the children who have organically based problems but who can be taught to achieve independent learning status in reading and writing despite this. (p. 169)

However, if the RR programme had been successful in attaining its goal of substantially reducing the number of children who develop ongoing reading difficulties, then the relatively large gap in reading performance consistently observed between good and poor readers since the early 1990s should have steadily decreased after RR was introduced throughout the country in the late 1980s. This has not been the case (see Chapter 3 of this volume for a detailed discussion of issues relating to RR).

One of the first studies to draw attention to the relatively high levels of disparity between good and poor readers in New Zealand’s schools was the international study of literacy achievement carried out in 1991 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The results showed that New Zealand had the largest spread of scores among the participating countries (Elley, 1992) and that the low-performing readers were likely to be Māori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) and/or from low-income backgrounds (Wagemaker, 1993). Further research in New Zealand during the 1990s revealed disparities between children of different backgrounds in important literacy-related skills at school entry (Gilmore, 1998; Nicholson, 1997), and that differences in literacy achievement between Māori and New Zealand European (Pākehā) students steadily increased over the first years of schooling (Crooks & Caygill, 1999; Flockton & Crooks, 1997), throughout high school (Nicholson, 1995; Nicholson & Gallienne, 1995), and into adulthood (Ministry of Education, 1997). Home language was not considered as a possible explanation of the lower mean literacy achievement scores of Māori students because only a small number of Māori learn to speak Māori as a first language (Crooks & Caygill, 1999).

Given the important role that literacy skills have in determining children’s educational and life chances, the growing body of evidence of New Zealand’s relatively “long tail” of literacy underachievement became a major source of concern among educators and policymakers in the 1990s. It was regarded by leading reading researchers as the “single biggest challenge confronting literacy education in New Zealand today” (Wilkinson, Freebody, & Elkins, 2000, p. 8).

In response to these growing concerns, a Literacy Taskforce was established by the government to provide advice on achieving its goal: “By 2005, every child turning nine will be able to read, write, and do maths for success” (Ministry of Education, 1999b, p. 4). To assist the government in developing an effective national literacy strategy, the Taskforce, which comprised mostly practitioners, focused on recommendations aimed at raising the literacy achievement of all students but with particular attention given to “closing the gap between the lowest and highest achievers” (p. 7). The Taskforce recommended that “a description of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that nine-year-olds demonstrate when they are reading and writing for success … be developed and promulgated to teachers and parents” (p. 9), such as that “a nine-year-old reading for success can predict, check, confirm, and self-correct while they are reading” and “has the confidence to take a risk when reading, that is, will ‘have a go’ ” (p. 32). Other recommendations included drawing up and promulgating to schools a statement of best practice in literacy instruction (p. 14), developing a video “that illustrates taking and analysing running records … and using this data to inform the teaching programme” (p. 17), developing a comprehensive professional development package “to assist teachers to implement best practice in their teaching of reading and writing” (p. 19), providing support and advice to develop “literacy leadership in schools” through a “nationally coordinated service” (p. 19), and developing a nationally coordinated system of reading interventions that reviews and builds “on the interventions that already exist, in particular, Reading Recovery and the Resource Teachers of Reading” (p. 23). The recommendations of the Taskforce constituted the national literacy strategy for reducing the large disparity in reading achievement outcomes between good and poor readers.

In addition to the Taskforce, a Literacy Experts Group was convened “to provide the Taskforce with advice from a range of theoretical and academic perspectives on literacy learning” (Ministry of Education, 1999a, p. 1). The Literacy Experts Group comprised literacy researchers from New Zealand tertiary institutions and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. The literacy researchers were excluded from direct participation in the proceedings of the Literacy Taskforce for the following reason stated in the Literacy Taskforce Report (Ministry of Education, 1999b):

Because the development of literacy is a fundamental role of schools, the Minister of Education wanted the taskforce to comprise mostly principals or teachers who are working successfully with those children considered most at risk of failure. (p. 6)

The development of literacy policy in New Zealand has been, and continues to be, largely under the control of “stakeholders” (i.e., practitioners in schools) – that is, the policy formulation process is, for the most part, “sector captured”. Not all of the recommendations made by the Literacy Experts Group were adopted by the Literacy Taskforce; therefore, the Literacy Experts Group submitted its own report which included several recommendations not made by the Taskforce (Ministry of Education, 1999a). For example, based on a thorough review of the available scientific research, the Literacy Experts Group unanimously recommended that “greater attention needs to be focused on the development of word-level skills and strategies in beginning reading instruction, including the development of phonological awareness” (p. 6). They further recommended that RR should place “greater emphasis on explicit instruction in phonological awareness and the use of spelling-to-sound patterns in recognizing unfamiliar words in text” (p. 6).

In March 2000, the Education and Science Committee of the New Zealand Parliament initiated an inquiry into the teaching of reading in New Zealand to determine “how and why many children are failing to learn to read effectively” and “to provide recommendations to the Government on how the reading gap can be closed” (New Zealand House of Representatives, 2001, p. 5). Following the inquiry, the Committee made 51 recommendations that were unanimously agreed upon by representatives from all political parties in the Parliament. These recommendations were largely rejected by the government. Rejected recommendations included those calling for significant changes in New Zealand’s approach to literacy education – for example, “that the Ministry of Education provide advice and support to schools to incorporate successful phonics programmes into the classroom” (p. 17), “that all primary teacher-training providers incorporate the teaching of phonetic skills and word-level decoding into their programmes” (p. 27), and that “there be a greater emphasis on the benefits of phonics instruction in Literacy Leadership materials” (p. 28). Instead, the government decided to adopt the recommendations of the Literacy Taskforce (Ministry of Education, 1999b), which essentially called for a continuation of New Zealand’s existing constructivist approach to literacy education with only minor modifications, that is, do more of the same, but better (see Chapter 6 of this volume for a detailed description and critique of New Zealand’s approach to literacy education).

The MoE was given the responsibility of implementing the recommendations of the Taskforce. As part of this effort, the MoE established the Literacy Reference Group, in May 2006, to provide informed advice and guidance on future directions of the New Zealand Literacy Strategy. However, this did not include any consideration given to changing New Zealand’s approach to literacy education. The Group, which comprised mostly practitioners, met at least once each year until the Group was disbanded in 2011. Topics of discussion included the MoE’s Literacy Strategy Progress Report (for internal discussion only), the draft Literacy Learning Progressions (Ministry of Education, 2010), the draft National Literacy Standards (Ministry of Education, 2009), strategies for assisting students with literacy problems, and the findings of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006 (Mullis et al., 2007).

The PIRLS is the most recent test of reading achievement developed by the IEA. It focuses on the achieveme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Series Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Development of New Zealand’s National Literacy Strategy
• Part I: Evidence that New Zealand’s National Literacy Strategy Has Failed
• Part II: Factors Contributing to the Failure of New Zealand’s National Literacy Strategy
• Part III: Strategies for Reducing the Literacy Achievement Gap and Achieving Excellence and Equity in New Zealand Literacy Education
• Index