Blackboard Bungle: Why California Kids Can't Read - Part 2

By Jill Stewart

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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 anymore."

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."

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 his 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."

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 Institutes 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.

On the opposing side, however, a raft of pro-skills educators poured forth, emboldened after years of being dismissed as mere fossils. They convincingly pointed out that reading levels among California's white children had dropped to the absolute bottom for their racial group in the U.S.--even below white children in Louisiana--so claiming that the poor performance of Latino immigrants had skewed California's scores was not only cynical, it was dead wrong. And pro-skills advocates revealed that New Zealand--even to this day still much ballyhooed by Sacramento education officials--had not, in fact, benefitted from whole language. Indeed, one-quarter of that country's gradeschool children could not read, and needed costly tutors. New Zealand, deeply embarrassed by its reading crisis, has begun a discomforting internal debate. Meanwhile, an international study found that New Zealand actually lagged behind the U.S. in gradeschool reading ability, despite its widely repeated claim that it was the "most literate" country in the world.

"It turned out that New Zealand was behind us," says Honig, "so we had to ask, why on earth are we copying them?"

Treadway, the professor at San Diego State, recently became the most prominent whole language proponent to publicly concede that whole language theory was fundamentally wrong for teaching beginning reading, even while some of its techniques, such as using rich literature and early childhood writing, were good ideas that should be retained.

"In my mind," says Treadway, "we cast our eyes across the Pacific to such an extent that we ignored the findings in our own country, which said New Zealand was wrong. We felt, rather smugly, that American scientists merely had not caught up with us. We were very proud and maybe even self-righteous. We had real strong conversations with people who agreed with us from New Zealand. We validated one another in the most insular way. It was a basic, self-affirming, life affirming way to go. I don't mind saying it has been a disaster, as long as it's clear to everyone that it was done with the best of intentions by a lot of really committed people."

Now the officials, consultants and scholars are sitting down in Sacramento to try to fix the mess they've created. According to Honig, at gradeschools in fad-driven areas where administrators went "whole language, whole hog," up to 30% of the children now need tutors and special intervention to catch up, and many of those schools are using extremely scarce funds to herd children into the lavishly expensive Reading Recovery tutoring system. "Officials in Sacramento and places like L.A. County are still saying beginning readers can pick up their reading skills in the context of a story, while absorbing whole ideas," says Honig. "It's like watching doctors bleed their patients."

The internal resistance to reform by whole language proponents has delayed state implementation of the new reading plan backed by the Task Force, and its prospects remain unclear. In fact, high-placed whole language proponents are spreading the word to whole language purists in local districts that they "can ignore" whatever the state decides, according to several sources. Nevertheless, proponents still expect that the state will approve a plan that, while retaining some use of literature and early childhood writing, will heavily emphasize word decoding and word attack skills through the second grade, with two hours per day devoted to reading lessons.

Douglas Carnine, the Oregon scholar who is advising Eastin, warns that even though her proposals are solid, teachers, like any professional group, cannot absorb continual, massive change without creating an inferior product. "California," Carnine says, "is going to suffer terribly with its continuing addiction to massive innovation. I don't know if they can see what is obvious: that California is the first to innovate, and the first to fail. They don't understand the nature of change theory. California has got to slow down. Let individual schools pick what works and prove it to their community with test scores and visible, non-fuzzy, measurable achievements. Stop trying to fix the whole damn world and end up failing to fix a single school."

Moreover, the state's teacher colleges continue to reject the vast body of research into beginning reading, and are expected to stubbornly resist altering their badly deficient reading methodology courses for new teachers, experts say. In response, the state is trying to reform its official teacher certification reading requirements, thus forcing the colleges to change their ways. But that effort has only just begun.

Meanwhile, California's gradeschool teachers are left to pick up the pieces from what has been an unpleasant, close-up battle in the classroom. At schools where administrators fought their teachers, ordering them around like naive children, it will take a long time to repair the damage to fragile, internal school cultures that tend to thrive upon mutual respect, but wither under authoritarianism.

Many teachers are beginning to choose what works best for them and shrug off the worst aspects of whole language. At Toland Way Elementary School in Eagle Rock, for example, Janet Davis remains committed to the use of rich literature, invented spelling, personal journals and other techniques of whole language, but she has made concessions to traditional skills. "If phonics worked so friggin' well, do you think we would have stopped doing it?" she asks. "Older teachers were successful with a large percentage of students using their old way of teaching, but there were always kids who did not benefit. But then we lost what the old teachers knew by being so radical, and we started losing those kids too."

Davis now creates her own spelling tests--over the objections of the anti-spelling LAUSD. And, as a mentor teacher, she has given her younger apprentice an old basal reader to show her how to teach basic skills.

Not far away, at Los Feliz Elementary, in a first-grade ESL classroom, teacher Patricia Franco Simonowski uses a traditional reading approach with heavy homework and lots of repetition. Simonowski is one of the apparently few teachers who has read Honig's reading framework in detail. She keeps it in her classroom, where she periodically pulls it out and pores over it in disgust.

"I don't think many teachers have actually benefitted from reading this thing," says Simonowski, pointing to a page of the framework. "I tried out these concepts, and I see this framework for what it is: a jobs program for tutors, reading consultants and child psychiatrists. Give me a child who has been taught simple discipline at home, and I will use what we all know about teaching reading to give you a child who can read and write fluently." She has taught fifth and sixth grades at other Los Angeles schools, and she has seen dozens of non-reading older kids--all victims, she believes, of overzealous whole language concepts. For older children, Simonowski says--and most educators agree--it is already too late. "It's pitiful out there, and I blame the experts and the textbook companies who make big bucks every time California figures out a whole new way to teach reading."

Asked about the state's new reform plan, Simonowski dismisses Eastin and Honig with a wave of her hand. "Teachers and kids," she says, "have become sitting ducks."

Eastin and Honig appear to be aware that teachers like Patty Simonowski, Patty Abarca and Janet Davis feel twice bitten and remain wary of any new state-driven ideas. But the two leaders--one the ultimate government insider, the other now a respected outsider--are upbeat about the state's plan and its eventual acceptance in the classroom. This time, they say, the state is going forward with its eyes open, fully informed, research in hand.

"The new plan," says Honig, "is a huge improvement over what's been done for the last several years."

One can only hope that he's right. Because that, of course, is what the visionaries said the last time.

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