When kindergarten students in Cincinnati-area schools were tested on their basic reading skills last fall, examiners found that 13.5 percent of the children needed intensive instructional support in phoneme segmentation fluency-dividing the different sounds, or phonemes, of a word. When tested at the end of kindergarten, only 2.7 percent of the children still needed that help.
Administrators credit the improvement to the tool they used to assess the children- Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), a set of tests that focus on the various skills necessary for learning to read. Ohio authorities say it helped them identify students who needed specialized instruction and that after receiving that instruction, more students scored better on the later DIBELS test.
"DIBELS has been fantastic. It has been the most powerful tool for changing student outcomes that I have ever encountered," says Stephanie Stollar, an educational consultant with the Southwest Ohio Special Education Regional Resource Center. One of 16 regional centers in the state, it serves school districts in Cincinnati and four surrounding counties.
But not all educators share Stollar's enthusiasm. DIBELS is "the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of fl ash cards," asserts P. David Pearson, dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley. Pearson claims that it shapes instruction in bad ways for students and teachers alike. It's bad for students because they are "held accountable to the indicators" rather than to whether or not they really learn to read, he says.
It's bad for teachers, he continues, because it requires them to teach and judge students based on criteria that are "not consistent with our best knowledge about the nature of reading development," including whether students understand what they read.
Some teachers and parents agree. "I get nothing out of it. It tells me how fast they can read and nothing else. It is a waste of my time," declares Melissa Pares, who teaches fifth grade at Bullard Talent School in the Fresno (Calif.) Unified School District.
"I question how reliable and valid the test scores are," adds Sandra Blackburn, a veteran second grade teacher at Longstreet Elementary School in the Volusia County Schools in DeLand, Fla.
Lisa Laser is home schooling her second grade son, Ellis, after she and her husband removed him from Joseph Elementary School in Oregon because of "the horror of DIBELS" he experienced in first grade. His teacher suggested he be held back after first grade. "The test itself is harmful, and the curriculum essentially was to teach to the test," Laser says.
Controversy and Scrutiny
These contrasting perspectives define the parameters of a debate in the education community about the effectiveness of DIBELS, which 45 states have approved for use, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
They also enter into an ongoing congressional investigation of how DIBELS became so widely used in the country's public schools following establishment of the $1 billion Reading First program, a key provision of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Reading First, which funds kindergarten through third grade reading programs, requires the use of reading assessments. Investigators are looking at ties between DIBELS and three former members of a committee established by the U.S. Department of Education to review assessment products.
"It has been the most powerful tool for changing student outcomes that I have ever encountered."-Stephanie Stollar, educational consultant,Southwest Ohio Special Education Regional Resource Center
One of them-Edward J. Kame'enui, a co-creator of DIBELS and a faculty member at the University of Oregon- was named the first commissioner for special education research in the Department of Education in 2005 but resigned that job in June. According to the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor, Kame'enui and the other former committee members, Deborah Simmons and Roland H. Good III, also a co-author of DIBELS, "benefited financially" from the sale of DIBELS.
In written testimony last April to the House committee, John P. Higgins Jr., inspector general of the Department of Education, said his office found that some department activities had led to "a perception that there was an approved list" of assessments. He cited a handbook given to participants at three Reading Leadership Academies that the Education Department and the National Institute for Literacy sponsored to assist states in preparing Reading First grant applications.
