Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
[part 2]
 Says Honig today: "Things got out of hand. School administrators and 
principals thought they were following the framework when they latched onto 
whole language, and our greatest mistake was in failing to say, `Look out for 
the crazy stuff, look out for the overreactions and the religiously 
anti-skills 
fanatics.' We totally misjudged which voices would take charge of the 
schools. 
We never dreamed it would be driven to this bizarre edge. When I tell people 
that we never even say the phrase `whole language' anywhere in the document, 
they look at me like I'm mad."
 A Reading Task Force appointed by California Superintendent Delaine 
Eastin has urged a return to intensive, sequentially taught reading skills in 
early gradeschool, while retaining whole language's use of rich literature 
and 
early writing. But Eastin has been met with a palace revolt in her department 
and from local bureaucracies such as the Los Angeles County Office of 
Education 
in the south and Petaluma School District in the north--just two of scores of 
defiant local bureaucracies where whole language idealogues are firmly in 
control.
 Bitter resistance from these whole language purists has delayed 
Eastin's reform plan, which early reading experts widely agree must heavily 
re-emphasize the direct, explicit teaching of "word attack" decoding skills 
such as phonics, a renewed emphasis on spelling and grammar, and the teaching 
of "phonemic awareness"--a way to overcome learning disabilities in the 
10-20% 
of children who cannot hear the distinct letter sounds within words. Taking a 
cue from the country's most successful reading efforts, the task force has 
urged the teaching of gradeschool reading 2-3 hours per day--an emphasis 
California has moved away from as it has shifted toward secondary subjects 
such 
as personal health care.
 Already, a letter has been sent to publishers alerting them that 
California will select new textbooks which must return to basic lessons. And 
in 
a slap at educators, Sacramento legislators approved an "ABCs" bill requiring 
that gradeschools teach phonics, signed into law by Gov. George Deukmejian, 
and 
lawmakers are now pursuing a similar spelling law. Meanwhile, Honig has 
authored a new book, Teaching Our Children to Read, a call to reincorporate 
"essential beginning-to-read strategies" in preschool through third grades 
nationwide. 
 State officials describe the state's emerging reading plan as a 
"balancing" of two failed extremes--overly repetitive, unnecessarily rigid, 
basic skills and whole language. Eastin says the proposals are based on 
"solid 
research and a growing consensus about how children learn to read." But 
critics 
fear that without mass training, especially for newer teachers who have 
little 
grasp of how to teach early reading skills, the plan could easily fail.
 Says Douglas Carnine, a University of Oregon reading scholar and one of 
Eastin's top consultants, "I fear that the education leaders in California 
still don't see the real problem that has sent California to the absolute 
bottom in reading. You cannot keep using an entire state as an experiment. 
You 
wouldn't administer a drug to 3 million people without testing it first, 
would 
you?"
 How California got itself into such a quagmire, and how the state is 
now struggling to pull out of it, is a cautionary study in the pitfalls of 
untested mass innovation.
    THE SEEDS OF the current reading disaster were planted with the best of 
intentions in a quiet meeting room in Sacramento. There, in 1986, a select 
group of educators, invited by then-Superintendent Honig, met to brainstorm 
about ways to set California on a new course in reading. Early participants 
remember an important undercurrent: they felt their ideas could influence the 
entire nation.
 As participants recall the opening day, Honig gave a ringing 
speechabout creating a document that would inspire dramatic change. "I told 
them to dream, and to forget about old rules that weren't working," says 
Honig. 
Says professor Jesus Cortez Jr. from Cal State Chico, "somebody stood up and 
said that we were there to create a new generation of superior thinkers and 
readers and writers who would run the businesses and set the policies of the 
21st Century. Creating that new generation was the dominant theme from Day 
One."
 Honig asked very few reading experts to join the lofty project, because 
he wanted a broad mix of teachers and scholars without a pre-set agenda. Pure 
thought and open exchange of ideas were the order of the day. But key 
participants recall that, from the start, debate in the meetings was 
dominated 
by secondary school teachers and scholars--people who knew nothing about the 
difficult art of teaching small children how to read. The secondary school 
representatives emerged as natural leaders because they, more than anyone, 
were 
driven by tremendous frustration over skyrocketing dropout rates, the hatred 
many teenagers expressed for reading, and the embarrassing levels of remedial 
reading required by California high school seniors entering college.
 "The people who knew how the middle and upper grades would react to 
reading were very, very strong," says one textbook author who attended, but 
asked not to be named. "They also knew that something had to be done about 
beginning gradeschool reading, but they weren't sure what. The only big 
concern 
was over the older grades."
 Mel Grubb, now director of Cal State Dominguez Hill's California 
Literature Project, had just completed his doctorate paper on how children 
respond to literature, and several participants say that he was so keen on 
his 
theories and so excited about the group's power to change things for the 
better 
that his views often predominated.
[End part 2 - to be continued]
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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* UniQWK #5290* Your family's Coat-of-Arms ties in the back - is that normal?
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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