Reposted with the permmission of the author, Jill Stewart.
[part 6]
 But Abarca watched in dismay as inexperienced teachers at her school 
and in neighboring schools became swept up in the new method. Recalls Abarca, 
"I will never forget these two brand-new, first-grade teachers who seemed 
competent but didn't have a clue how to teach reading. One of them had not 
been 
taught a single reading method in college, so I said, `You need the basal. It 
has a teacher's guide that will give you the basics.' And, incredibly, she 
said, `What is a teacher's guide?' When I told her, she shook her head and 
said, `No, no, we can only use literature to teach children to read. The vice 
principal says so."
 Perhaps in a state less fascinated with trying to lead the nation in 
"innovation," education officials might have been sufficiently alarmed by 
such 
incidents to rescind the reading framework. But instead, in 1992, when the 
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) announced that 
California's 
reading scores were among the worst in the nation, state education officials 
were dumbfounded. The fourth-graders who'd been tested had spent four years 
learning to read under the popular new framework. What had gone wrong?
 In response, a meeting of top state curriculum officials was called in 
1993. There, whole language "true believers"--including the powerful 
California 
Reading Association, California Literature Project and several state 
officials--successfully deflected an attempt to re-emphasize basic skills in 
gradeschools. According to those who attended, state education officials 
Dennis 
Parker and Fred Tempest argued that teachers would "go nuts" if asked to make 
another big change in reading methodology. Teachers, they insisted, merely 
needed time to absorb whole language's unusual techniques.
 But several months later, in 1994, new NAEP scores were again 
announced, and the scope of California's reading debacle was fully revealed. 
Gradeschool reading levels were in a freefall, with California 4th graders 
beating only Louisiana and Guam. "The 1994 test scores finally got everyone's 
attention," says Honig. "The leaders in suits finally began to realize that 
they'd been sold a bill of goods."
 At the same time, word spread that the National Institute of 
Health was completing a $25 million longitudinal series of studies of 
gradeschoolers--the most extensive research of reading ever conducted by the 
U.S.--which definitively showed that small children don't pick up reading 
anymore "naturally" than anthropologists learn to decipher hieroglyphics or 
Marines figure out the Morse code. According to research director Reid Lyon, 
the study found that in normal children the eye "decodes" every single 
letter, 
then melds the letters into sounds and words so effortlessly that the process 
cannot be observed by the human eye. Indeed, Lyon says that the very speed of 
the decoding process is probably what caused California's whole language 
proponents to claim that the mind skips over and guesses words from context. 
Unfortunately, they used this misbegotten belief to insist that children were 
being forced into "unnatural" and "joyless" skills-based reading methods.
 Says Lyon, "Fluent readers decode so fast that they don't even know 
they are tearing each word apart. It is unconscious and automatic. They spend 
all their time considering the meaning of what they read. But the converse is 
true for poor readers. Poor readers are bottled up at the data-in stage. They 
get only these teeny, lurching sounds as they read words. So to them, what 
the 
hell's a book? A book is a completely inaccessible object. We found that 
first-graders who aren't shown how to decode right away begin to feel stupid 
before the end of the first grade. It happens that fast."
 ARMED WITH the 1994 scores and the NIH study, advocates of basic skills 
launched a philosophical war on reading. Honig and others got the ear of 
state 
Superintendent Delaine Eastin, who took office in 1995 and walked, 
unprepared, 
straight into the bitter controversy. Eastin created the Reading Task Force 
in 
May of 1995 to get to the bottom of the disaster.
 But whole language idealogues quickly launched a public-relations 
counterattack. In published articles and at education conferences, whole 
language proponents attributed the bottomed-out reading scores to 
California's 
burgeoning population of immigrants, understocked school libraries, the 
national recession, and other non-curriculum factors. And they passionately 
attacked the NAEP test itself, arguing that whole language imparts such 
subtle 
skills to children that those skills cannot be measured, even by NAEP's 
widely 
respected mix of long, short, open-ended, and multiple-choice questions.
 At USC, a hotbed of whole language theory, professor Jeff McQuillan 
attempted to deflect the blame being placed upon whole language by pointing 
to 
California's household income drop during the recession, an influx of 
immigrants, and increasingly inferior school libraries, while professor 
Stephen 
Krashen released a scathing satirical essay in which he urged the teaching of 
phonics to newborns. "Couples considering marriage may want to have their 
prospective partner screened for defective phonemic awareness," Krashen 
scoffed. The purists angrily accused the California Department of Education 
of 
failing--despite millions of dollars spent on in-service training--to 
properly 
explain whole language to principals and teachers.
[End part 6 - to be continued]
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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* UniQWK #5290* Buzzword:  [n]  The fly in the ointment of computer literacy.
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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