School Reform Doing Great Harm

There is only One True Path to Enlightenment, and its name is Whole Language. Cast down the old gods of Phonics; throw the spelling books from the Temple of Learning. All must worship the Right Way to Teach.

The California Education Department doesn’t really talk that way, but it has acted as though the way to teach reading was revealed on a mountaintop in a bolt of lightning.

When Superintendent Bill Honig realized his own reading guidelines had gone too far, he was unable to bring the curriculum back into balance. Now, Superintendent Delaine Eastin is trying to get the true believers down from the mountaintop.

Last week, Eastin presented the state Board of Education with new reading guidelines reflecting her reading task force’s recommendations, issued last year.

According to the advisory, children should be taught - directly and systematically - the sounds of words, spelling and vocabulary. They should have books that let them practice these skills. “Students’ first readers should consist largely of simple, short and repeated spelling patterns and basic sight words.”

That doesn’t mean reading about fat cats on mats forever; children should move on to more complex stories with real story lines when they have mastered the basics. And teachers should read literature aloud, so children can appreciate books they can’t yet read.

California Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed spending an extra $127 million to teach teachers how to teach phonics and to buy readers and spellers.

It may sound like common sense, but that’s been uncommon lately.

With the 1987 reading framework, California launched an experiment - with every child in the state. The framework told teachers that children don’t need to learn decoding skills (phonics) or encoding skills (spelling); they would pick up reading naturally, without struggle, by hearing literature, writing with “invented” spelling and guessing the words in good books through context and pictures.

Some teachers continued to teach phonics when nobody was looking. Others tried, but their readers and spelling books were confiscated by zealous principals. New teachers were not taught to teach basic reading skills.

Reading scores fell, and California fourth-graders now are the worst readers in the nation on national tests. This is not because the state has more children who don’t speak English at home. California’s native English-speaking white students doent reed vare gud compared with white students in other states.

“A majority of California’s children cannot read at basic levels,” Eastin’s task force concluded.

Here are some lessons to be learned:

Never embrace a cutting-edge theory. Before adopting a radically different idea, try it out in a few schools. Does it work with some children but not with others? Can the average teacher make this work?

Look at the evidence. If the promoters explain falling test scores by saying the children are learning wonderful subtle things that don’t show up on the tests, ask them to prove it - and to prove that these wonderful subtle things are more important than reading comprehension.

Don’t make a theory into a religion.

Now, California is pioneering the new new math - way out in front of other states. True believers don’t want to wait for evidence that it works. It’s another all-across-the-state experiment.

There are good ideas here, but there’s also a tendency to downplay direct, systematic instruction in skills.

Districts are buying new new math books - or no-text math series. In Palo Alto Unified, a district committee has recommended “Investigations,” which critics say is too extreme.

For example, “Investigations” repeatedly warns against teaching students to “carry” or “borrow” numbers because this might prevent children from exploring different ways to solve problems.

I was trying to explain “Investigations” to my colleague Phil Yost, a skeptic.

How do you subtract 9 from 25 without borrowing? he asked.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “Nine is close to 10, and 10 from 25 is 15, and the 9 is 1 off from 10, so the answer is 14!”

“Actually, it’s 16,” Phil said.

Here we go again.

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