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The Phonics TestWhole-language is being made to bear a very large load of blame—all the blame, essentially, for what is wrong in public education in California. The mythos of the state holds that public institutions, including freeways, law-enforcement agencies, and universities as well as public schools, have fallen in just one generation from a state of grace during which they worked much better than their equivalents back east and formed the foundation of a casual, open, efficient, democratic society. Terrible reading scores also tap into the large reservoir of emotion about the decline of reliable government as the basis of a good society in California. Real fury has been directed at whole-language. If elementary schools were ever golden, a great deal more than whole-language is responsible for their not being so anymore. During the 1970s first the "revenue limits" policy of Ronald Reagan's governorship and then Proposition 13 severely reduced school funding in California. In 1965 the state was fifth in the nation in per capita funding; now it is thirty-seventh. Class sizes mushroomed. Immigration filled the schools with non-English-speakers. Public school libraries in the state now have three books per child, when eighteen is the standard nationwide. "The thing that troubles me is, What if it wasn't whole-language?" says Jerry Hayward, a veteran California educator who co-directs a policy-research organization in Sacramento. "What if it was the teachers? Or the textbooks? Or class size? Or money?" The next few sets of NAEP results should settle the question, though if California scores go up, it will be difficult to tell how much of the increase is owing to phonics and how much to class-size reduction, which has received the great bulk of the new funding. Certainly, whole-language has been isolated. Support for it is limited to an enclosed community of devotees, including teachers, education-school professors, textbook publishers, bilingual educators, and teacher trainers. Virtually no one in the wider public seems to be actively promoting whole-language. No politicians are crusading for it. Of the major teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers is a wholehearted opponent and the National Education Association is neutral. No independent scientific researchers trumpet whole-language's virtues. The balance of parental pressure is not in favor of whole-language. (In contrast, parents are supporting out of their own pockets a private phonics industry, consisting of instructional materials like "Hooked on Phonics" and the computer program Reader Rabbit, and after-school tutoring operations like Score and Kumon.) With apologies for being another national reporter who has gone to California and seen America's future, I'd like to offer three predictions arising from the California curriculum wars. First, efforts to establish greater quality control in public education, which will almost inevitably mean trying to impose more central authority over the advanced countries' most decentralized system of schooling, will go on constantly over the next few decades. Second, given that the traditional side is now winning the ongoing battle between traditional and progressive education, schools all over the country will be pressed hard by parents and politicians to move toward imparting skills and away from simply inculcating the joy of learning. Third, the longer the United States remains in its current peaceful and relatively prosperous condition, the more issues like school curricula, which politicians and the press aren't used to considering at any length, will come to the fore in American politics. Politics can be contentious and consequential without being about the adjudication of world affairs. Great clashes of ideas and interests can take place on the battleground of everyday life. COPYRIGHT 1997 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine
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© 2003 WETA/Reading Rockets. All rights reserved. Photo Credit for Bearden Elementary: Maude Schuyler Clay |
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