Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
[part 4]
 Reading scholar Marilyn Adams was completing a book, "Beginning to 
Read", which detailed widespread findings that small children have a tough 
time 
with the "miscue and review" method, which encourages a child to guess at 
words 
from context, then learn later by revising their errors. "Science has 
consistently, firmly and indisputably refuted these hypotheses," Adams wrote. 
The new research confirmed a huge body of studies from the 1960s through 
1980s, 
which showed that gradeschoolers must very directly and clearly be shown how 
to 
decode and sound out each letter and word on their own. Without being 
explicitly and systematically taught that basic ability, the studies said, 
all 
but the most exceptional children were doomed to a long struggle with the 
printed page. 
 Honig says he assumed that everyone on the committee agreed with the 
years of weighty research, and that it "went almost without saying" that 
children in kindergarten through third grade needed to be taught traditional 
decoding skills. But ultimately, the committee ignored this vast body of 
research. Looking back, Honig says, "it is the curse of all progressives, who 
control much of what happens in the field of education, that we are 
anti-research and anti-science, and we never seem to grasp how irrational 
that 
attitude is. This is probably our deepest failure."
 Grubb, of the California Literature Project, the most aggressive of the 
state's whole language groups, defends the lack of interest in reading 
research. "I don't mean to be defensive about the framework, but it was a 
philosophical document," says Grubb, who still insists teachers needn't spend 
very much classroom time on phonics or word decoding. "We didn't even cite 
researchers. It was philosophizing about making sense of one's world by using 
literature, and it promoted the idea that skills be taught to kids in the 
context of exploring literature, not from separate how-to books. It never 
said 
don't use phonics. It told teachers to look at the research about phonics on 
their own, and apply it wisely."
 In the end, the committee produced a thick document that was adopted by 
the state Board of Education and praised nationally on talk shows. Official 
textbooks were selected that were mostly literature; the book chosen by most  
California school districts contained no traditional reading lessons at all. 
Schools were expected to follow the new approach, and district "compliance 
officers" began appearing in local classrooms.
  The late 1980s and early 1990s were heady times for whole 
language. In California alone, an estimated 20,000 teachers took 
in-service classes or learned the new approach from mentors. Others paid 
$650 to private trainers like Bob and Marlene McKracken, just two of a 
contingent of consultants who swarmed California. Expectations grew so 
high that several other states copied California without awaiting the 
outcome. They snapped up the hot new Houghton Mifflin storybook, whose 
teacher's manual did not contain a single traditional lesson in how to 
read, and whole language swept across much of the country, popping up in 
Texas, Washington, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland and numerous 
other areas. (In Massachusetts, educators caught up in the whole 
language phenomenon have proposed a new reading framework that is 
virtually identical to California's disastrous plan, prompting 40 
professors at Harvard and MIT to sign a petition urging the state to 
reject the proposal. Pointing to California's reading crisis, the 
scholars are demanding that Massachusetts not repeat such a debacle.)
 At California's 72 teacher colleges, meanwhile, a near-religious 
fervor took hold. Whole language purists like Barbara Flores at Cal 
State San Bernardino peddled the idea, via teacher credentialing 
classes, that teaching phonics and other skills directly and 
systematically to children was actually bad for them. According to 
teachers who were trained at Cal State Northridge, Cal State San 
Bernardino, USC and other California colleges, the reading methodology 
course was reduced to a "child-centered" discussion dominated by whole 
language ideas. By 1995, some 10,000 fresh new teachers had poured into 
California gradeschools, thousands of whom had no idea how to teach 
beginning reading. Recalls Treadway: "People like Barbara Flores said 
the child must learn phonics largely on his or her own. The purists 
became convinced that the black squiggles on a page would begin to make 
sense to kids while teachers taught larger ideas."
 Signs of trouble emerged immediately, but a smattering of early 
complaints were laid to mere start-up wrinkles. A few uninformed parents 
telephoned their schools, angry that their children were creating such 
nonsense words as "ppdgz" because teachers were refusing to explain how 
to spell or sound-out words like "puppy dogs." Baffled parents were 
assured that "invented spelling" was part of a whole language approach 
that had made New Zealand the most literate country in the world. 
Children who grew frustrated or fell behind because the teacher was 
preventing them from sounding out their letters were labelled by reading 
specialists as "slow readers" or "learning disabled."
 But one very concerned--and highly influential--grandmother 
didn't buy those answers. Marion Joseph, chief policy analyst under 
former state Superintendent Wilson Riles, visited a gradeschool one 
spring day with her daughter to pick up her grandson's reading primer 
for the upcoming fall. But the women were told: "We don't do primers 
ymore."
 As Joseph recalls it, "The teacher showed us a truly beautiful 
storybook by Houghton Mifflin, like a book you'd have at home. And I 
said, `But where are the lessons? My grandson doesn't know these words.' 
And my daughter asked, `Can the other kids read this book?' And the 
teacher said, `Some can, some can't.' So we said, `Well, how will you 
teach the kids who can't?' And we just got this blank stare from the 
teacher. I realized then, we're in big trouble."
[End part 4 - to be continued]
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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* UniQWK #5290* A friend in need is a pest indeed...
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