Why California Kids Can't Read

A fascinating article about how and why California embraced the whole language nonsense, and the tragic results:

But whole language, which sounds so promising when described by its proponents, has proved to be a near-disaster when applied to--and by--real people. In the eight years since whole language first appeared in the state's gradeschools, California's fourth-grade reading scores have plummeted to near the bottom nationally, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP). Indeed, California's fourth graders are now such poor readers that only the children in Louisiana and Guam--both hampered by pitifully backward education systems--get worse reading scores.

 

Charges and countercharges are flying as opposing sides try to affix blame for the deepening reading debacle.

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Blackboard Bungle: Why California Kids Can't Read

 

By Jill Stewart, LA Weekly

http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/whole.1.html#top%20

 

Rebecca, a tiny ponytailed second-grader, sits in class at a Westside gradeschool that is among the best in Los Angeles. She is contemplating her personal journal, the latest classroom rage for teaching kids to read. She toils with a pencil, filling a page with her crooked sentences, then proudly hands the work to me, a visitor. "I can't spell," Rebecca says shyly, "but I know what it means."

 

I read the page. It begins, "I go t gum calls." This, Rebecca explains with a slight frown, means "I go to gym class." I read on, but cannot do so without Rebecca's help. I cannot determine where her sentences end, since she has not been taught punctuation. Nor can I gleen her meaning by relying upon key words, because they are incomprehensible. Seed is written "sd", for example, smile is "sinil."

 

Although Rebecca is clearly tense and worried, the teacher cheerfully tells Rebecca she will "do just fine" in time. Indeed, Rebecca's teacher tells me later that she considers barely legible personal journals to be "very good," and red correction marks on a student's work by an authority figure to be "bad."

 

At a school on the east side of Los Angeles, 7 1/2-year-old Manuel swaggers up to his teacher with a thin, simplistic storybook. Manuel reads quickly - too quickly. He turns the pages long before he is done "reading" them. It is clear that he has memorized the story. I notice a small boy near Manuel, whispering words to him. The teacher praises Manuel for trying. When the friend moves off, I ask Manuel to read the first page, beginning with the word "the." He cannot read the word "the." In fact, he cannot read at all. His teacher hopes that with enough time immersed in fun books, Manuel will finally pick up reading.

 

While these new techniques known as "whole language" may seem bizarre, they now predominate in classrooms from Marin County to San Diego, and this hottest fad since the "open" classroom of the 1970s is now marching across the country. The techniques, now growing popular in such states as Texas, North Carolina, Washington, Florida, Maryland and Massachusetts, stem from a philosophy which says that many children are poor readers because the old skills-based approach that emphasized phonics and memorization turned reading into a hated chore, alienating kids from reading.

 

In 1987, whole language theory began its sweep across California in the form of a nationally acclaimed reading "framework" adopted by the state Board of Public Instruction that downplays the teaching of traditional reading skills. "The core idea of whole language," says one of its most vocal proponents, Mel Grubb of the California Literature Project, "is that children no longer are forced to learn skills that are disembodied from the experience of reading a story. The enjoyment and the wonder of the story is absorbed just as the skills are absorbed."

 

The central tenets of the philosophy hold that small children trained with such techniques will write more expressively, love reading, fully consider whole meaning over mere words, and emerge as more sophisticated readers, writers and thinkers...