Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
[part 5]
 Joseph, on the board of a non-profit training and policy group, the 
California Institute for School Improvement, began a months-long process of 
talking to educators to find out what was happening in the schools. "I got, 
almost without exception: `Oh my God, Marion, we are having a terrible time. 
The new reading method is not working.'" Teachers related tales to Joseph in 
which, "if they tried to teach phonics or word attack skills to the kids who 
weren't getting it from the storybook and the invented writings, bureaucrats 
came in from their district office and ordered a stop to it. It was terrible 
stuff, virtually a new religion, a cult."
 Joseph, perplexed over "what the heck this damn framework was 
trying to do," met with Honig to share her concerns. But Honig was 
reluctant to believe that Joseph's strange anecdotes were anything but 
isolated events. Honig had other problems to worry about, facing an 
investigation for approving a state public-private partnership with a 
foundation run by his wife.
    Recalls Honig, "My only thought was, `Marion just can't be 
right.'" But Honig began to talk to other educators, and slowly 
discovered that his reading framework was being grossly misapplied in 
local schools. "I realized that Ken and Yetta Goodman and others were 
saying that kids can guess their way into reading, and the districts 
were buying it," says Honig. "What a disservice to kids. We figured it 
out after a year, and we tried to correct it. But we were just 
completely unprepared for how strong the movement was, and how many 
teachers believed they would be fired if they didn't comply. We never 
once told the districts to go whole language, whole-hog."
 In 1991, Honig tried to get the state Department of Education to 
make a midstream correction by publishing a pro-skills guide for 
teachers. But state officials, swept up in national accolades being 
bestowed upon them as "visionaries," were utterly enamored of whole 
language. They instead produced "Ready, Set, Read", a mere recitation of 
whole language philosophy. "We were sabotaged," Honig says today. 
Moreover, there were no state reading scores, because Gov. Deukmejian 
had discontinued the so-called CAP tests. As a result, Honig could not 
prove that kids were actually being hurt by whole language.
  Says Joseph: "Once there were no state test scores, the issue 
of how children were doing went off the press's screen, and whole 
language got terrific press. And then the officials began to believe 
their own press."
 In 1992, Honig was convicted of conflict of interest charges 
involving his wife's foundation and was forced from office in January of 
1993. But he and Joseph continued their fight from outside. Joseph 
recalls a particularly surreal meeting at which she and Honig tried to 
warn Honig's former deputy about the anti-skills hysteria overtaking the 
schools. "This former deputy just kept repeating this mantra about what 
Bill Honig had intended for California," she recalls. "Bill was sitting 
right there, beseeching him, saying no, no, no you've got it wrong. So 
nothing moved."
 In the end, a rudderless group of state officials were left 
struggling to interpret a unique and untested reading philosophy which 
they, themselves, did not understand. At the schools, deep divisions 
broke out as district bureaucrats began dictating bizarre orders to 
teachers and principals.
 At Toland Way Elementary School in Los Angeles's Eagle Rock 
District,the battle lines were drawn in 1992 when frustrated teachers 
and administrators decided to raise funds for spelling books by holding 
nacho sales and seeking parent donations. No spelling book had been 
approved by the state under the 1987 framework, meaning that no state 
funds could be used to buy spellers.
 "Some parents were really upset that we had to ask for money," 
recalls Janet Davis, a mentor teacher and whole language proponent who 
now believes "fanatics" took over the state's whole language program. 
Says Davis: "The parents were saying, `Why on earth isn't the district 
providing you the spelling books?' The district came down and just read 
us the riot act about that."
 But the real pressure came later, when a group of LAUSD 
"compliance officers" came into Toland Way's classrooms for three days. 
"We got written up for using spelling books," says Davis. "A huge 
controversy ensued. But we still have our nacho sales and buy our books. 
I don't use them, but teachers who find them effective must be allowed 
to use them, for God's sake. I've been joking that Toland Way will be 
said by district officials to be suffering a statistical anomaly when we 
are tested on spelling, because our kids will know how to spell and 
other schools won't."
 At Heliotrope Elementary School in Maywood, a Los Angeles 
suburb, teacher Patty Abarca became notorious for defying her school's 
ban on spelling tests and basal readers. Her war began in the early 
1990s, when a now-departed vice principal, a hardcore whole language 
purist with little teaching experience, announced that teachers who were 
using traditional reading primers were "losers." Says one teacher who 
asked not to be named, "She said our reading program, and this is the 
word she used--'sucked'."
 When school officials threatened to punish the veteran Abarca by 
transferring her to another school for defying orders and fomenting 
staff dissent, Abarca, a union activist, merely shut her door. Says 
Abarca, "I wasn't ashamed to say that Dick and Jane is a wonderful story 
about a boy and girl and their neighborhood. And children love it."
[End part 5 - to be continued]
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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* UniQWK #5290* After all is said and done, more is said than done.
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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