Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
Whole Language Debate in California
 
           Blackboard Bungle: Why California Kids Can't Read
                           By Jill Stewart
(Jill Stewart, a contributing editor for Buzz Magazine, the Los Angeles 
Times Magazine and LA Weekly, wrote this article for LA Weekly.) 
 Rebecca, a tiny ponytailed second-grader, sits in class at a Westside 
gradeschool that is among the best in Los Angeles. She is contemplating her 
personal journal, the latest classroom rage for teaching kids to read. She 
toils with a pencil, filling a page with her crooked sentences, then proudly 
hands the work to me, a visitor. "I can't spell," Rebecca says shyly, "but I 
know what it means."
 I read the page. It begins, "I go t gum calls." This, Rebecca explains 
with a slight frown, means "I go to gym class." I read on, but cannot do so 
without Rebecca's help. I cannot determine where her sentences end, since she 
has not been taught punctuation. Nor can I gleen her meaning by relying upon 
key words, because they are incomprehensible. Seed is written "sd", for 
example, smile is "sinil."
 Although Rebecca is clearly tense and worried, the teacher cheerfully 
tells Rebecca she will "do just fine" in time. Indeed, Rebecca's teacher 
tells 
me later that she considers barely legible personal journals to be "very 
good," 
and red correction marks on a student's work by an authority figure to be 
"bad."   
 At a school on the east side of Los Angeles, 7 1/2-year-old Manuel 
swaggers up to his teacher with a thin, simplistic storybook. Manuel reads 
quickly - too quickly. He turns the pages long before he is done "reading" 
them. It is clear that he has memorized the story. I notice a small boy near 
Manuel, whispering words to him. The teacher praises Manuel for trying. When 
the friend moves off, I ask Manuel to read the first page, beginning with the 
word "the." He cannot read the word "the." In fact, he cannot read at all. 
His 
teacher hopes that with enough time immersed in fun books, Manuel will 
finally 
pick up reading.
 While these new techniques known as "whole language" may seem bizarre, 
they now predominate in classrooms from Marin County to San Diego, and this 
hottest fad since the "open" classroom of the 1970s is now marching across 
the 
country. The techniques, now growing popular in such states as Texas, North 
Carolina, Washington, Florida, Maryland and Massachusetts, stem from a 
philosophy which says that many children are poor readers because the old 
skills-based approach that emphasized phonics and memorization turned reading 
into a hated chore, alienating kids from reading.
 In 1987, whole language theory began its sweep across California in the 
form of a nationally acclaimed reading "framework" adopted by the state Board 
of Public Instruction that downplays the teaching of traditional reading 
skills. "The core idea of whole language," says one of its most vocal 
proponents, Mel Grubb of the California Literature Project, "is that children 
no longer are forced to learn skills that are disembodied from the experience 
of reading a story. The enjoyment and the wonder of the story is absorbed 
just 
as the skills are absorbed."
 The central tenets of the philosophy hold that small children trained 
with such techniques will write more expressively, love reading, fully 
consider 
whole meaning over mere words, and emerge as more sophisticated readers, 
writers and thinkers. 
 But whole language, which sounds so promising when described by its 
proponents, has proved to be a near-disaster when applied to--and by--real 
people. In the eight years since whole language first appeared in the state's 
gradeschools, California's fourth-grade reading scores have plummeted to near 
the bottom nationally, according to the National Assessment of Educational 
Progress(NAEP). Indeed, California's fourth graders are now such poor readers 
that only the children in Louisiana and Guam--both hampered by pitifully 
backward education systems--get worse reading scores.
 Charges and countercharges are flying as opposing sides try to affix 
blame for the deepening reading debacle. It has become clear that many of the 
problems stem from a tragic misreading of California's 1987 reading 
framework, 
in which school administrators saw whole language techniques not merely as a 
helpful supplement to the traditional lessons needed by children in 
kindergarten through the third grade, but as a wholesale replacement for 
them. 
Hundreds of gradeschool principals banned spelling tests outright, saying 
childrens' natural urge to read and write was being stifled by pressure from 
teachers to be precise. At hundreds more, phonics was prohibited by 
principals 
who said it was meaningless to gradeschoolers, citing a now-infamous 
absurdity 
from a traditional reading primer: "The cat sat on a fat hat."
 While some teachers found ways to combine the best elements of whole 
language with the needed skills of the old methods, others used whole 
language 
to escape the hard and time-consuming work of instructing beginning readers 
in 
phonics, grammar, spelling and other basic reading skills. The training 
gradeschool teachers were given to adapt the new ideas to the classroom was 
heavy on philosophy and soft on how to teach little kids to actually read.
 The situation has deteriorated so far that former California 
Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who oversaw the creation of 
the reading framework, has distanced himself from it, calling the framework 
"fatally flawed" particularly for its failure to anticipate the whole 
language 
overreaction. Indeed, he is now at the forefront of an opposition movement 
that 
is trying to reintroduce intensive teaching of rudimentary reading skills to 
gradeschoolers.
(End part 1 - to be continued)
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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