David Boulton: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. One of the things that we like do is get a sense of who you are, the work you're doing, and why you're doing the work you're doing. Then we'll use that as a starting point from which to drop down deeper into specific things that we’re interested in.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Well, let's see. Is the Hawaiian connection important?  You’re doing so many different interviews with different people.

David Boulton: Yes, we're covering a broad spectrum. On the one hand there is the social, cultural, archaeological, and anthropological implications of 3,000 years of ‘code’, with an emphasis on the past 500 years, since the 1500’s. Then there’s the brain and the neurosciences and the critical twenty-five milliseconds that swing the difference in processing the virtual reality that underlies our experience of reading. We’re interested in the whole spectrum and that includes different people's difficulty coming into reading because of the structure, the phonemic structure, of their languages.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Right.

David Boulton: So, I'm interested in the general view that you've developed, and the work that you've done relative to reading, and also in the Hawaiian specific dimensions. We do plan to make a Hawaiian sequel to this, that would be specific for the Hawaiian people, talking to people that experience the challenge of learning to read from that different oral language base.

Personal Background:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: I grew up in a household where my dad was pure Hawaiian, had a high school education and my mom was Hawaiian-Chinese and had a high school education. My mom was deaf. They didn't promote school a lot. I went to a very prominent school for children of Hawaiian ancestry - you know it as Kamehameha.

At the time, Kamehameha had a tracking system where kids who were tested at a particular point in time were put in different sections. I happened to end up in a section that wasn't college-bound, namely, the very last section. And I struggled with reading. Also, because my mom was deaf, I always struggled with how do people take in information. How do they negotiate this stuff?

So, that always stayed in the back of my mind. But I majored in English literature, studied Shakespeare, studied Keats - English was my primary focus. I couldn't find a job, and then ended up working at a residential treatment center in Wisconsin for children identified with serious behavior problems. That introduced me to not just to behavior problems, but also to learning problems. Because kids who have behavior problems have serious learning problems. And the behavior just masks the learning problems.

I could manage the behavior. I could manage how to get them to sit down, how to do their work. But I couldn't teach them. And that's why I got interested in this. How do you get kids to get the stuff that's out there represented in the occipital temporal lobe, in the parietal temporal lobe, in the different parts of the brain that allow us to use our systems efficiently, and be able to be imaginative. I enjoyed reading Shakespeare. But here are kids who could not get access to it, and that just puzzled me. How do we do this?

So, it's really based on that experience that I started. I looked around at the universities, and I said, "What university will teach me how to teach?" I came to the University of Oregon, did my doctorate work here, then from there on, went other places, taught, and then returned here.

The Nation’s Greatest Learning Disability:

David Boulton: And inside of the learning disabilities or learning differences you encountered reading was the big one.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Oh yeah, absolutely. Hands down, hands down. I have great colleagues here who work with serious behavior problems. I could have done that, but I realized that, to me, that was not the problem. The problem was in the learning, in the acquisition of information, retention, and so on.

David Boulton: Connected to what you’re saying, it seems to me that the nation's biggest learning disability is engendered by the process of learning to read.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Oh, absolutely.

David Boulton: Right?

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Yes, yes, absolutely. It’s the most public — I mean...

David Boulton: The most widespread learning-disabling thing that happens to human beings is the process of learning to read.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely. And the most public. For example, you can hide from the math stuff. You can get away with the math because you have enough other systems that can help you on that. But the reading one is tough. It's hard to hide on that one. That's a good point.

Getting Schools to Understand Reading:

David Boulton: Let’s talk about your work.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Okay. Well, let me start with some basics.

I think it's fair, and rather obvious, that reading takes place in the brain. I mean the neural circuitry that's there for language is the neural circuitry that we rely on for kind of taking that language mechanism and really appreciating how we use it for negotiating print. That's clear. That's really a no-brainer.

The part that's more complicated from my perspective is: How do you take this peculiar conceit called an alphabetic writing system and get it in place in complex environments known as schools? While it takes place in the brain, teaching reading takes place in complex host environments known as schools. So, most of my work for the last ten years has been around understanding what it takes to get schools to appreciate the complexity of working with kids who have a difficult time negotiating the alphabetic writing system.

So, that's a complex system when you talk about schools because you have people, you have pedagogies, you have personalities, you have principals; you have a lot of stuff coming together and interacting in complex ways. When you have a complex interaction, whether it's a chemical interaction or a social interaction, you have to understand what's responsible for that interaction. In order do that, you have to, in a sense, peel apart the threads, peel apart the pieces in order to understand what's responsible for causing the interaction.

Primary Oral Language:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Now, in the context of failure, when kids fail in a symbolic system there are a lot of explanations, a lot of pieces we have to unpack. But that failure sets the stage for a fundamental ambiguity in terms of what is the primary cause for that failure. So, kids aren't able to read. Kids come from Waimanalo, kids come from Kalihi. They come with their own language, and they come with their Pidgin, they come with their own variation of the Creole, and they say, you know, "Bombadda buggah goin o’erther." What they are coming with is the language they know. It's the only language they know. And for most of these kids that come to school, that language is sacred. They don't know that their language is not represented in the print that they're going to see in school.

Think about Hawaiian kids coming to school, they have this Pidgin, they start looking at the print, and yet the words they own, that they learned from their fathers, their mothers, their uncles, their aunts, their brothers and sisters, are not represented in the English print. So, right away you have a discrepancy between the languages they speak every day out in the neighborhood with their families that are simply not represented in the print that's there. Right away you have a discrepancy here.

So, how do we understand that discrepancy? Is the problem the failure with the child? Not at all. The child knows that. The child knows that language. What it suggests is the system, then, has to appreciate that discrepancy, has to make an accommodation, has to make an adjustment. Well, with respect to the child's language and that child's inability to map his or her language, namely the Pidgin that he or she speaks every day, to the English and the alphabetic writing system. So, schools have to appreciate that.

Hawaii, as a state, has been on the bottom of National Assessment of Educational Progress for the last, probably, twelve years. That means that we've got a lot of work to do. Something is going on where the kids in Hawaii aren't getting it. At least one explanation is they're not understanding that the speech they bring to school is not going to be represented in the print. That when they say, "Bombadda buggah," that "bombadda buggah" is not going to be represented in English words. What they're saying is "by and by, that guy." If they don't understand that discrepancy, they're not going to be able to grab the alphabetic insight that's so critical to reading.

Accommodating Learning Differences:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: So, to me, my challenge is really helping teachers and helping school systems put in place the organizational mechanisms, the accountability mechanisms, the instructional mechanisms that have a fighting chance of working so that the odds are in the children's favor. My perspective is not about giving schools a guarantee, but at least getting them to understand if I make this investment in a 180-day school year, what's the likelihood that that investment is going to pay off? That's one. And what's the likelihood that the odds are in children's favor, eighty percent or more, that if they do this, if teachers do this, if principals do this, that investment will benefit kids so that the odds are in their favor at least eighty percent plus. So, that's a big order, that's a big task. And there's a lot of ways for this to go wrong. Sometimes it goes wrong just because we can't get the pieces in place at the right time.

If you accept that reading is about growth and development, we understand that growth and development doesn't happen in equal units per unit of time. We know that. We know that kids will get language more at one point in time in their earlier years, earlier stages of language acquisition than in their later years. So, we need to understand how that growth and development changes over time, and how the windows of opportunity also change, and that schools, by virtue of the systems they are, really exaggerate those differences between kids.

Horace Mann says the schools are supposed to be the great equalizer of men. Well, the reality is that schools exaggerate the differences that kids bring from their home settings, from their home opportunities, from their home language. So, if that's the case then we need to understand what are the mechanisms at different points in time in that growth and development that we need to accentuate, we need to put in place, we need to monitor, we need to maximize, we need to optimize, so that kids, in fact, get the best opportunity; so that schools will, in fact, be the great equalizer, not the great exaggerator of differences between kids.

We know kids come to school with differences. Some kids come to school with a lot of language. Other kids come to school with very little language. Some kids come to school with enormous exposure to literature, to good stories. Other kids don't. Those differences don't stay the same. They don't come to school and freeze. Those differences get greater over time. We can put in place lots of things to make that happen, so that we can, in fact, have schools become the great equalizer of the economic opportunities for all kids.

I've been doing this now for ten years, I’ve been doing this kind of work for about twenty-five years. My primary focus is: How do you work with schools? What are the active ingredients that are required to get everybody on the same page with respect to this outcome so that all kids can reach a level of performance, a criterion level of performance, that's predictive of their ability to negotiate the symbolic system in the future?

I’m not looking to just improve schools, because you can improve schools and schools still don't do the things that you want them to do. I want them to get to a criterion level of performance, through a threshold, where we know if they're there, the odds are in their favor that they can do those things that we expect them to do as citizens in society, and so on.

Understanding the Challenge:

David Boulton: I appreciate your point of view, that angle. We're concerning ourselves with a lot more than just the production of a documentary. We think of ourselves as a social education project as well as a television documentary, and for a reason. We’re trying to find out just who are the constituents and players in all of this? How do we make the kind of changes that are necessary so that so many children don't hit the wall and have their lives mangled...

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.

David Boulton: Because they couldn't negotiate this radically artificial confusion induced by a technological artifact that we have been ignorant and negligent about.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Yes. Did you get that on tape? It's good. Turn the camera on him! That's absolutely right.

David Boulton: So, we're also interested in all the different perspectives that go into this, both from the micro-timing of what's going on in the neuroscience point of view, but also in the cultural environment. What you described isn't restricted to the people of native Hawaiian languages.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: No, not at all.

David Boulton: This is anybody who comes with a variation of oral language proficiency using different tones, different sound elements.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right, absolutely.

David Boulton: So, implicit in where you're going, and there must be more specific instruments that you're using to assess where children are at in a new kind of map, in order to allow educators to see these differences as well as some way to conceptualize this that gets through their resistance.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Yes.

David Boulton: I mean, ultimately this comes down to social inertia.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right, that's right, exactly.

David Boulton: So, we have to find out where are the linchpins that are keeping the social inertia in place that's radiating in parents and in teachers.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That’s right.

Core, Supplemental and Interventional Curricula:

David Boulton: A big part of that is both instrumenting the mechanics, but also getting at the underlying emotional stuff. So, tell me about it, more specifically...

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Well, there are some things that are rather traditional and rather predictable in terms of getting schools to scale up to make this kind of difference. Obviously, you need a curriculum. You need a way of codifying the activities that the society and research deems as critical for kids to be proficient in a language system, in a writing system. So, you need tools.

Teachers need to have a curriculum. The assumption is that the curriculum is valid, it's reliable, it's been tested; it has all the critical elements that are associated with this conceit call the alphabetic writing system, and it's based on research. So, there are a lot of things that schools already have in place that we would continue to argue that they ought to have in place — effective research based curriculum. So, that's one, the curriculum piece.

Now, the question is: Do we have the right curriculum? Is it a curriculum that the public would argue is the best intervention possible? Is it tested? Is it trustworthy? I think right now the answer is no, we don't because we don't have the resources, at least up to this point, we don't have the resources to really test, in a research satisfying way, experimental control group way, curricula that allows us to say, 'Yes, if you pit curriculum A against curriculum B, we have sufficient evidence to suggest that curriculum A gives you the greatest impact for your investment because it gets kids to the kind of reading achievement outcomes you want.'

We're getting there. We still have a lot of work to do. We have a handful of programs that have some empirical evidence that suggests that if you implement the program kids will benefit from the implementation, assuming the implementation has a high level of fidelity. So, that's one big piece, getting the curriculum.

And there's not one curriculum that fits all. So, that's one of the problems. We need multiple types of curricula. We need a core curricula for most of the kids, assuming that you have a normal distribution of aptitude and performance. The architecture is such that it tries to cover a lot of stuff in a short period of time, so it's horizontal. It's going to cover a wide range of things but it's not going to go very deep. In addition to the core curriculum, we need supplemental curriculum that will supplement the holes that you're going to find in the core curriculum.

For example, if we assert that alphabetic insight is critical to reading, the phonics piece, then not all curricula will have the same amount of intensity and explicitness as they should around teaching phonics. We may want to adopt supplemental curriculum to enhance the core curriculum. So, that's two pieces of the curriculum puzzle: a core curriculum and a supplemental curriculum.

Finally, you're going to need a curriculum that's very different in architecture for the kids who are in the bottom twenty, twenty-five percent, because the way they manage information is very different from the kids who can benefit from the core. That kind of curriculum we refer to as an intervention curriculum, because the architecture is very different. The architecture should be more careful in how it thinks about the examples that are used, how it juxtaposes examples, the amount of scaffolding and teacher-wording that's provided, the amount of practice, how much practice is given at any given point in time, how much scaffolding is providing, how much rehearsal, how much fluency is built in.

David Boulton: So, more direct instruction-like control.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Possibly. It need not be direct instruction.

David Boulton: I’m not trying to advocate anything particular, but DI’s basic model of reducing the extraneous ambiguity.…

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right.

David Boulton: And focusing on particular objectives, step, step, step and with less flexibility – more scripting.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. More systematic, more intentional, more aligned with the kind of outcomes, more considerate in the kinds of the tasks it selects, the examples, the range of examples, and so on. So, obviously the curriculum piece, since that's the primary way we promote the symbolic system, we have to make sure that the curricula reflect the best science we have going. That's a big piece.

Differentiating Curricula:

David Boulton: So, we've got this deep nuclear underlying horizontal progression of things that everybody needs to go through.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right.

David Boulton: And we have to differentiate it so it meets the variations and needs of each individual.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly. Nicely put. Yes, it's a differentiated curriculum. It's differentiated instruction. Kids are going to come in at different points.

David Boulton: So, our ability to differentiate comes down to either it's actually folding around and responding to the individual variations in need that's expressed by the student, or...

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Right.

David Boulton: It's presumptive. We're making some kind of assessment based on our assumptions.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right.

David Boulton: It's renaissance cannon fire. We say, 'Okay, we're going to shoot over here, and measure them, and adjust and shoot again.'

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right.

David Boulton: It's got that kind of loop in it.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, exactly. But sometimes the measurement has to be more sensitive than we typically are familiar with and used to. Exactly.

Focusing on the Bottom Twenty Percent:

David Boulton: And certainly with the kids that are struggling to learn to read.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely, yes. We talk about getting to 100 percent of the kids, but you don't get to 100 percent unless you go through the bottom twenty percent. So, we can talk about all kids but the reality is that our real task with schools to get all kids reading is really focusing on the bottom twenty percent.

Why do we do that? Because those kids are the toughest ones. They're tough because they may not have the language experience that they should have. They may have different kinds of experiences that don't square with the experience that are in place in terms of social, culture, etc. They may go to schools that don't provide them the opportunities, don't provide them the kind of support that they should get. They may come from homes that don't provide them the kind of opportunities that you would like them to have. There are lots of different reasons. So, differentiating those resources so that we can maximize the resources at the right point in time, at the right spots, in the right places, also requires not only curriculum but an assessment system.

Assessment:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Now, assessment is a big piece of this. And I'm not talking about traditional assessment, per se. Traditional assessment, obviously, is a big piece of it. But the piece that's been missing that represents, I think, a new genre of assessment is assessment that's timely, efficient, parsimonious, targeted to the most essential active ingredients that kids can participate in their writing system readily. It's recursive, in that you get feedback from it, and has the capacity to go to scale with the information technology that's available.

For example, most assessment we think about is outcome assessment, achievement tests and high stakes tests.

David Boulton: Which is way downstream from where the learning is actually happening.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, downstream — end of third grade, end of fourth grade, end of eighth grade, end of twelfth grade.

David Boulton: Or end of the actual stream of flow that's at the core of the progress.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.

David Boulton: Whether it’s a day later or an hour later, it's still downstream.

Because of the resources that we have available we have to be smart about how to use those resources in a way that allows us to acknowledge the differentiation, acknowledge the differences in terms of the risk, but at the same time tries to have an impact. So, that's the curriculum piece.

The other piece is getting a progress-monitoring system in place that allows us to measure growth and assess growth every week, if we have to, so that we can determine whether or not the instruction that's going on is making a difference. So, you need an assessment system that's sensitive to change, sensitive to growth.

David Boulton: So, the basic DIBELS mechanism can slide across the scale and pick up the same implicate readings no matter where they are, at what content level, to be able to feedback into this assessment that prescribes the pieces you’re describing.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. You hit a ceiling, because once you get — I mean, basically we have a handful of measures. We can tap phonological awareness in a minute, lots of different ways. We can tap the phonics piece, the alphabetic principle through pseudo word reading or even word identification reading in one minute.

David Boulton: That last point would imply that you've picked out what you think are the most problematic to focus on because you're not going to hit the spectrum.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: You're not going to hit all of it, that's right.

David Boulton: So, you've got a top five list of where are the greatest letter-sound correspondence confusions that they're tripping on, and you're actually intentionally constructing their one-minute experiences to reveal how they're dealing with the most difficult challenges.

Reading is a Categorical Mistake:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly. You've captured it. Reading is a categorical mistake. It’s a construct that's so unwieldy that you can assign anything you want, you can define it in any way you choose. One of my colleagues that I used to teach with used to argue that reading is about human emancipation. My response is reading is about reading a writing system, and in this case, it’s an alphabetic writing system. Those are two very different interpretations of reading.

So, yes, it's a categorical mistake. It's an unwieldy category. So, we have to make decisions about this peculiar conceit. We can't tap it all. The question is: What does the research tell us about what is most essential to tap? Phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, alphabetic insight, taking the sounds and mapping onto the print, vocabulary development. Children who know a lot of words, have a storehouse of words, have this kind of dictionary in their head, those kids have this kind of home depot of words in their head that they can draw on.

David Boulton: They've got a lower threshold of recognition, which speeds the reading process, because they can hear the word in their head.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. They've got an instant — that's right.

David Boulton: But the struggling readers have to figure out, ‘Does this word make sense, because I've never heard it before.’ This is a big piece of the fourth grade slump.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right, exactly. They have to have something there, a representation from the environment that they can hook up to when somebody says...

David Boulton: Until they get confident that it's okay not to have that because they can reliably assemble the sounds of words and figure out what words mean.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: They can make it up on their own, that's right.

David Boulton: Then with that level of confusion, it's okay to use context to deduce things

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, exactly.  That's right, it's not okay in the earlier part, exactly.