I reacted with strong feelings to this article because Jaeger criticized a reading program that I taught for 8 years with very good results. I have seen firsthand the effectiveness of the Open Court reading program with first graders. Yes, it is a scripted program, but teachers in my district were never required — or even expected — to read the script word for word. And yes, there were definite ways to use the sound/spelling cards that accompanied the program, but the repetitive activities and response card drills worked together to build a sequential teaching/learning pattern that produced very good results for our district. We only used Open Court in kindergarten and first grade, but our reading scores on the annual TCAP were among the highest in the state. My students certainly did not remain silent, and there was communication and cooperation among them. There were decodable texts in the beginning of the program, but students were reading trade books by the middle of the year (as part of the Open Court “bundle,” I might add).
There is a huge sense of bitterness in this article, which makes me wonder how objectively Jaeger saw the situation in her school. She states that the “struggling readers I saw in my pull-out intervention classes were . . . weakened by a curriculum that didn’t meet their needs.” She doesn’t tell us the intervention strategies she was using, only that she was “reluctant to speak freely about these difficulties in order to protect the small acts of resistance that classroom teachers took with my encouragement.”
It sounds like this school had problems above and beyond the Open Court issues. I sense a tremendous power struggle. Jaeger’s writing is so different from that of Freire with his humility, lovingness, joy of living, and other qualities. Even his courage is more palatable to me than Jaeger’s almost militant attitude. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe I would not like Open Court if I had to teach it again after experiencing more holistic approaches such as Reader’s Workshop and the Four-Block literacy approaches our county espouses. I never felt as though I was “teaching scripts instead of children” when I taught Open Court phonics, though. There is a place for specific phonics instruction, but the teacher’s attitude still matters.
