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Connecticut's Failed Reading Program
April 4, 2000 For over thirty centuries, parents and elementary teachers have relied on a system of reading instruction called Phonics. It is the system on which the English language was created and is based on the relationship between speech sounds and letters.
In recent years, however, the public schools have become enamored of an alternative approach to reading known as Whole Language. It does away with teaching children how to actually read -- to break up words and sound them out. Instead, children are encouraged to memorize words based on their shape, to guess at words using clues from pictures and context, to treat words rather than letters as the basic units of language, and to regard their own invented spelling as the equivalent of norms of orthography. When asked to explain precisely how Whole Language works, its advocates usually end up suggesting that children become literate over time through some kind of magical osmosis.
Since Whole Language has no principles, it is not a teaching method, but a loose set of expectations involving no specific skills. According to Marguerite Hoerl, author of Turning Back the Tide of Illiteracy, Whole Language leaves out the first and most important step in learning to read - the phonetic decoding of words. Without a child being able to master this skill, fluency and understanding are impossible. Samuel Blumenfeld, noted author and language expert agrees: "It's absurd to believe that children can understand, let alone create meaning from what they can't read."
Not surprisingly, Whole Language has proved a dismal failure wherever it has been tried. When California made it mandatory in its public schools during the 1980s, the state's elementary students ended up testing as low as those in Mississippi, America's most academically backward state. The countries of Israel, Russia and Cuba had the same experience and did not recover until they returned to systematic Phonics. Many studies have demonstrated the value of Phonics while, according to Hoerl, "there is no research that supports the current fad, Whole Language."
More recently, Yale Medical School neuroscientist Sally Shaywitz used magnetic resonance imaging to show that children learn words by matching spoken sounds with letters. Her studies, reported in the October 1999 issue of Educational Leadership, support the view that a person's ability to read depends on learned phonemic awareness and processing of printed letters on the page, capacities that are only haphazardly developed in Whole Language, but explicitly taught in Phonics.
Unfortunately, the lessons of such research have yet to filter down to the majority of America's elementary schools. In his best-selling book Why Johnny Can't Read, Rudolf Flesch wrote, "the teaching of reading -- all over the United States, in all the [public] schools, and in all the textbooks -- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense."
Where do Connecticut's schools stand on the issue?
The Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) calls its reading curriculum "a Balanced Approach" and its author, Kate England, describes it as "a compromise between Whole Language and Phonics." But according to Blumenfeld, "With its emphasis on constructing meaning, guessing at words using context and picture clues, sight word memory, high-frequency words, and its relegating of phonics to a last-resort remedial role, Connecticut's approach is neither a balance nor a compromise. It's almost pure Whole Language, which is the cause of most of today's dyslexia."
Even Ms. England admits that many of the state's teachers are not knowledgeable in Phonics and that many of them have little training, knowledge or experience in teaching reading. "It's a problem," she confides.
That would explain the state's poor test results. Even with about ten percent of the state's children "excused" from taking the Connecticut Mastery Test because of diagnosed learning disorders, only about half of the rest can read at grade level and only one third achieve grade level on the combined 3Rs.
Despite claims of excellence, it seems that the CSDE continues to defy the verdict of scientific research and refuses to adopt a reading instruction method that will rescue Connecticut's children from America's disastrous flirtation with Whole Language. In the words of Bruce R. Thomas, head of Chicago's Children's Learning Project, "The system stubbornly clings to beliefs whose errors have long been exposed."
Sadly, the real victims of this failure are too young to defend themselves. And for millions, it's already too late.
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The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute's mission is to "promote economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut." The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is classified by the IRS as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Contributions are deductible to the extent allowed by law.
