Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
[part 3]
 "The group was charting new ground, and we wanted an inspirational 
document," recalls Jerry Treadway, a non-voting committee member, author 
for Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and a professor at San Diego State. "I 
remember specific meetings at which Mel Grubb and other whole language 
proponents convinced everyone that there was no distinction between 
learning how to read as a first-grader, and the way a mature reader 
would handle the printed word. We decided that until we got kids to deal 
with language the way it is used by adults, as a whole thought, our 
reading programs wouldn't work."
 Outside the insular debates of the committee, a revolution was 
brewing in the classrooms that would soon work its way into their talks. 
Whole language gurus like Ken and Yetta Goodman, professors at the 
University of Arizona, were selling the romantic notion that childhood 
reading was a "natural" act which was being repressed by teachers hooked 
on low-level issues like word recognition, letters and sounds. Whole 
language, the Goodmans and others claimed, was a smash in New 
Zealand--but no rigorous evaluation of that country's gradeschool 
reading levels had been conducted. They instead relied heavily upon 
their own poorly tested ideas, as well as the beliefs of theorists such 
as Frank Smith, whose book, "Reading Without Nonsense", urged teachers 
not to "interfere" with a child's learning of reading. "There are no 
rules of reading," Smith wrote, insisting that small children don't need 
phonics skills to "identify words they have not met in print before" and 
that "spelling has nothing to do with reading."
  Unfortunately, whole language theorists were promoting such 
beliefs without the benefit of controlled studies or methodologically 
accepted research. According to articles published in 1995 by the 
respected American Federation of Teachers, to date, no meaningful 
research has ever verified their claims. "The movement's anti-science 
attitude forces research findings into the backroom," the Federation's 
articles noted. Ominously, the Federation noted, the primary tenet of 
whole language philosophy, that learning to read is akin to learning to 
speak, "is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist or 
cognitive scientist in the research community." 
 Nevertheless, Treadway remembers how whole language thinking 
overtook California's framework committee discussions. "We underwent a 
real interesting perceptual shift in the meetings, and what we finally 
stated, almost derisively, is that in the traditional reading approach, 
the emphasis is on mere accuracy," Treadway says. "We said, `How absurd 
it is to care about individual words and accuracy!' Under whole 
language, the rule was efficiency of the mind: Get the meaning using the 
least perception possible. Skip words. Absorb ideas instead. At the 
time, it sounded great."
 But tension began to arise over draft language that soft pedaled 
the need to teach basic reading skills. At one point, Elfrieda Hiebert, 
an author on reading, cautioned the group about relying on "gut 
feelings." The noted Harvard researcher and author Jean Chall met with 
Honig, spelling out her key findings about how gradeschool children 
actually learn to read--by the careful decoding of each and every 
letter, sound and word, until it can be done seamlessly and without 
effort. According to the textbook author who has asked not to be named, 
Honig relayed to the framework committee Chall's concern that, "given 
the number of at-risk children in California who faced a possible 
lifetime as poor readers, we were playing with fire by dropping the 
teaching of specific reading skills. But Chall's findings were 
completely ignored."
 One day, then-state curriculum official Francine Alexander made 
a well-received presentation in which she urged the group to seek 
statewide adoption of storybooks similar to the Impressions series from 
Holt Canada, which were filled with literature instead of traditional 
reading text. The group quickly warmed to Alexander's proposal. "We all 
said, how could we have been such fools?" recalls Treadway. "Of course 
if we give children great literature, fascinating stories, and wonderful 
tales, it will stimulate them to read."
 Once the core idea of using storybooks rather than textbooks 
swept through, Treadway says, "phonics became a huge scapegoat. The 
secondary teachers were saying, `Hey, you gradeschool guys are killing 
these kids' interest in learning with all your obsession with phonics.' 
And the elementary teachers on the committee bought into that, because 
they really loved the literature books and were bored by the old 
primers. What we forgot is that a lot of California teenagers do hate 
high school, and they do hate reading, but it's due to a whole host of 
social, economic and psychological reasons. It's not solely because of 
the first grade."
 Another powerful influence came into play about the same time. 
According to Cal State Chico's Cortez, some Latinos, Asians and blacks 
on the committee began to complain that California's emphasis on basic 
skills had left minority children behind, because most teachers required 
the mastery of one skill before a child could learn the next. Students 
who did not master the initial skills had to keep revisiting them.
 "We felt that these kids, especially kids who did not speak 
English, never got around to the actual writing," says Cortez. "We felt 
we had to kind of reverse that and focus first on the meaning of a story 
and on a child's own writing, and worry about pronunciation and sounds 
and spelling later. That's where invented spelling came from. There was 
a lot of discussion about what we should do about all the parents who 
were adamant about having their children learn to spell. We decided we 
had to educate these parents about how children really learn, which is 
by miscuing and review."
 UNFORTUNATELY, important research was at that moment 
re-confirming that just the reverse was true about how children learn to 
ad.
[End part 3 - to be continued]
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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