Sobering Scores

At first the tide was still running against Joseph and Honig. In 1992, culminating a process Honig had initiated, the state board of education adopted a new set of mathematics frameworks that, like the language-arts frameworks of 1987, represented a strong shift of emphasis away from the acquisition of basic skills. The currents began to shift a year later, when the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a long-running federal study, released for the first time state-by-state comparisons of reading proficiency. California finished fifth from the bottom, among the Deep South states that always come in last in national surveys. Three years later a new set of NAEP scores was published, showing that California's reading scores had dropped to next to last, ahead of only Guam's.

California's new state reading test, administered in 1993 and 1994, was a political disaster. Passages about oppression, taken from the work of Alice Walker among other writers, generated furious opposition from the right, and Governor Pete Wilson canceled the test in 1994. But it had been administered, so the scores were released. Like the NAEP scores, they showed disastrously low levels of reading proficiency: 77 percent of fourth-graders were below their grade level.

By the time the shocking scores were coming out, the Republican sweep in the 1994 elections had given California a Republican-majority state assembly for the first time in years—and, in Wilson, a presidentially ambitious Republican governor who had won a come-from-behind re-election campaign by running as a confrontational conservative. For the first time ever in California politics the elementary school curriculum became a political issue.

The consensus was that embracing whole-language had been a huge mistake. The newly elected state superintendent of public instruction, Delaine Eastin, quickly distanced herself from whole-language ("Good people do believe in alchemy at various points in our history," she told me recently, by way of explaining its adoption) and set up task forces on reading and math that wound up recommending more emphasis on phonics and computational skills. In Palo Alto and San Diego angry and well-organized parents' groups, made up substantially of engineers and scientists, emerged to combat the new math frameworks. In the fall of 1995 the legislature passed, without a single dissenting vote in either house, two bills mandating the use of instructional materials that teach reading through phonics and math through "basic computational skills." It also set up a commission to create comprehensive statewide academic standards, which would then become the basis for new textbooks and tests.

Last year Governor Wilson, strongly prodded by his adviser on elementary education, Maureen DiMarco, who is another late convert to phonics, proposed an annual budget containing $100 million for skills-based reading and mathematics instruction. During the spring and summer of last year the reading issue took off. A Republican legislator from outside San Diego, Steve Baldwin, a former aide to Newt Gingrich who has the mischievous, troublemaking quality and the fascination with ideas that the young Gingrich had, held a dramatic hearing on the failings of whole-language; the repentant Honig was lead witness. Marion Joseph began working the legislature full time, drawing on her experience as a lobbyist for the state education department.

By that September the legislature had passed seven separate reading bills with a total authorization of nearly a billion dollars; among other things, they reduced class size in the early grades to a maximum of twenty, directed funds from the federal Goals 2000 program toward supporting phonics instruction, and funded phonics training for teachers. Wilson began filling the state board of education with phonics advocates (including, recently, Marion Joseph). The board decided not to re-adopt the leading whole-language textbook for use in California. The state board of education set up a new math-frameworks committee, on which members of the back-to-skills parent groups in Palo Alto and San Diego are well represented. The California state university system, which educates teachers, set up a new center, headed by a retired state senator, to make sure that the system's graduates would be trained in how to teach phonics.

This year the legislature passed another reading bill, providing more than $50 million to train teachers in phonics instruction for grades four through eight. The bill establishes much tighter central control over the choice of training companies for the state's staff-development contracts in reading; Marion Joseph had heard from her sources around the state that the new training programs were being hijacked by the whole-language forces, and she lobbied to have that changed. Next year may bring more bills, particularly if the math-skills movement feels that the new math frameworks do not undo everything it objects to. Honig and Joseph do not appear to think that their work is done either. "As long as Marion's around," one former legislator told me, "there will be more legislation."

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Photo Credit for Bearden Elementary: Maude Schuyler Clay
Photo Credit for Walton Elementary: Chris Hamilton