Foorman Responds to Coles: April 21, 1999

Gerald Coles' Jan. 27, 1999, letter--complete with graphic art and advertising for his book--shows how important the so-called literacy debates are to essayists like Mr. Coles as well as publications like yours ("No End to Literacy Debate: Coles Responds to Foorman"). You may believe such exchanges are productive, but the accompanying art and the headline are misleading and maintain the appearance of the so-called debate.

Meaning and skills are not orthogonal, not at war, and whoever said that "meaning" wasn't a "skill"? I hesitate to respond further since it will only perpetuate the silly exchanges that generally occur when Mr. Coles stirs the pot. However, his claims about the results from our study require that we provide interested readers with the data, particularly since you did not bother to check the facts. The data speak for themselves, and we are more than willing to let readers decide whose analysis of the data is credible and whose is constructed simply to tell a story and/or sell a book. I have never initiated any exchanges with Mr. Coles. I will simply state that Mr. Coles does misrepresent my views about reading and would encourage the interested reader to go to primary sources and not rely on his misinterpretations.

We provided the data from our study to Mr. Coles, but cannot attest to the accuracy of his analyses, since he has provided us with no details on his recalculation of the effects. I have no intention of contributing to him financially by purchasing his book to determine exactly what he did, particularly since it is not peer-reviewed. The notion that he analyzed the data more closely than we did is pure hyperbole, as a review of the actual data shows. He did not analyze the data so as to take into account the nesting of students within teachers and the differential precision in teacher-level means that result from having unequal sample sizes. Simple analysis of classroom means based on sample sizes ranging from one to eight ignores important information regarding the precision of those means. Trying to reconcile Mr. Coles' statements about our data with the actual data suggests that his reanalysis of our data is little more than a projective test for him.

In the interest of allowing readers to make fully informed decisions, we provided Education Week with a table of means and sample sizes so that the reader could see how Mr. Coles misrepresented our data. However, Education Week imposed a space limitation that precludes presentation of the data. We refer the reader to our World Wide Web site (cars.uth.tmc.edu) where the full reply and data may be found, clearly showing that Mr. Coles' assertions about our study are baseless and without merit.

Barbara Foorman,
Director and Professor
Center for Academic and Reading Skills
University of Texas-Houston Medical School
Houston, Texas

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