I once met a highly decorated retired Air Force colonel only
because he wanted to learn how to teach his grandson to read. This was not
because the grandson was being homeschooled. The boy was attending public school
in a generally decent middle-class school district in South Carolina, but he was
struggling and obviously was not reading well. In researching how to teach his
grandson, the colonel
embarked on a journey that literally changed his life from quiet comfort in
retirement to a one-man grassroots activist.
It occurred to the colonel that he was not a particularly
good speller himself as he discovered that he and his grandson had been taught
reading in basically the same way. This was through the “whole word” method, a
system that has gone by a variety of sometimes sophisticated-sounding names,
including “Look-Say,” “See-Say,” “Sight,” “Psycholinguistic,” “Word,” “Whole-Word,”
and a highly-modified version called “Whole Language.” This involves viewing
the written English word much like a Chinese pictogram, where the word is
viewed as a whole and not broken down into constituent sounds with individual
letters and letter combinations matching those sounds.
The breaking down of words into constituent sounds and
recognizing letters as representing those sounds in order to learn to read is
called the “phonics” method. And once the colonel found out about it, he found
a phonics-based book of lessons called Teach
Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and taught his grandson
to read in two months – something the public schools had failed to do in five
years. Phonics instruction is a primary ingredient in a small set of
complementary scientifically-verified
reading instruction practices. Whole word is not scientifically verified.
Yet, whole word “reading instruction,” often characterized
as the “three-cueing system,” is
still used all over the place in Oklahoma. For that matter, it and
its instructional whole word cousins are still widely used in many other
states. When I got to know the colonel twenty-odd years ago, it was in Texas
where I was working as a legislative aide. He spent at least three legislative
sessions in a travel trailer working with members of both parties to have a
statute enacted that would explicitly require scientifically-verified reading
instruction.
You’d think that educators would trip over each other to get
their hands on a teaching methodology verified by science, including through brain
imaging, but you’d be wrong. I think there are four reasons for
this. First, ignorance plays a part. I can still remember a teacher in Texas
who called Dick
& Jane readers (Run,
Spot, Run!) phonics readers and characterized phonics as boring. Dick & Jane readers were first
adopted in the 1930s as part of the whole word “reading instruction” method
(thus, the boring repetition to pound whole words into children’s heads). In
1967, I started on Dick & Jane
readers although the teacher used phonics. Maybe a situation like that is where
the teacher’s confusion arose. But, she was a teacher. She should have known
better.
Second, teachers at all grade levels have to get an
education degree in Oklahoma to be certified. Colleges of education are notorious
for being intellectual wastelands. Many of the professors have
hardly been in a K-12 classroom but expound worn and too often useless learning
theories. Third, education as a discipline is often hide-bound in ideology. John
Dewey is the intellectual father of modern public education in
America. The colonel, who’d read nearly everything Dewey ever wrote, said he
believed Dewey championed whole word as a way to render common readers of the
time obsolete. Dewey was a committed atheist and the old readers often included
passages from the Bible. But, for decades Dewey was American education’s god
and his wisdom was not to be questioned.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, public education is
almost entirely monopolized. That means it can fail spectacularly and suffer
little financially. When George W. Bush was governor in Texas a “reading
initiative” to re-train teachers was funded. I recently noticed, some 20 years
later, that another “reading initiative” was funded.
Repeated failure in monopolized government education is, in fact, repeatedly
rewarded.
As it has every year since 2002 (save for one anomaly in
2015), Oklahoma’s National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) reading
scores for 4th and 8th graders have come in
under the national average. The 8th grade scores have been
significantly higher in the past.
Maybe it’s time to mandate that the state universities’ colleges
of education teach scientifically verified reading instruction methods, that
they re-teach current teachers at their, the universities’, expense, and that
public schools use those methods. While we’re at it, maybe we should make it
easier to bypass colleges of education altogether to become a teacher.
Whatever we do, let’s not make the same mistake as others. As
Texas illustrates, funding a positive mandate in an effort to correct poor
practices in public education and colleges of education is happily accepted as
a reward for gross failure – and not a reason for them to actually reform.
Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute and can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.
The
opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily
reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.