Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

Anyone who is an language arts educator or student preparing to be one could tell you the pendulum in methodology is constantly swinging. During the late 80’s that pendulum had swung in the direction of whole language in ways many could not have predicted just 20 years earlier. California had forced schools within the state to move to a whole language based curriculum that totally abandoned phonics. 

This approach gained thousands of acolytes during the 1980s. The nation’s colleges of education produced a new crop of teachers weaned solely on whole-language philosophy, while influential professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association (http://www.ira.org/) embraced its basic premises. At the state level, California spearheaded a virtual reading revolution. The state department of education rewrote its entire curriculum in 1987, ditching phonics for a literature-based, whole-language approach. Teachers were told to throw out their old methods and embrace the cutting edge. Other states and local school districts soon followed. “All the major publishers moved to whole-language readers once California implemented it,” says Bonnie Grossen of the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, at the University of Oregon. “They had no sequenced instruction, just pretty pictures and poetry. It has taken hold in all 50 states.”

Soon the pendulum had started to sway in the direction with attacks on whole language mounting. Scores were dropping and the whole language was to blame. The above excerpt is from an article in late 1997. While the article is old and some what dated in its arguments I include it here to give context to the criticism at the time. The mid to late 90’s were a time that whole language was under attack and people were jumping off the bandwagon. The article goes on to read:   

Most damaging to whole language’s adherents, last year California punted its whole-language curriculum altogether, stressing the need for systematic, explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. The state reversed course in response to a wave of public criticism after California’s poor performance in the 1994 NAEP, when it tied Louisiana for last place. Janet Nicholas, a member of the California State Board of Education, recently told the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce: “Unfortunately for California children, the unsubstantiated claims and enthusiastic visions of whole-language ideologues proved to be disastrous when applied to real children.”

The reaction to California’s actions was predictable. “Whole language is being used as a scapegoat for dropping scores, when California has many minorities and high immigration,” says University of Arizona education professor Ken Goodman, regarded by many as the godfather of whole-language theory. It is true that whites are a minority in California and a large portion of its Hispanic population are recent immigrants who speak bare-bones English. Yet apologists for whole language ignore the fact that scores dropped equally among children whose parents graduated from college.

“These data [from the NAEP] underscore the fact that reading failure is a serious national problem and cannot be attributed to poverty, immigration, or the learning of English as a second language,” says Reid Lyon, who has directed the NIH reading studies for the past six years.

By showing this part of the articles you can see why educators would be frustrated in the process of researched based curriculum and selection. Many people believe educators don’t want to use a methodolgy in the curriculum that is backed by research because of a belief that their profession is an art. This belief does not seem to hold water when we look a little closer at the situation. The fact is the pendulum keeps swinging as education boards and administrators keep jumping on new or sometimes old curriculum methods in the hopes of improving test scores. These new methods might be based on research but have not went through the process of having the research replicated and thereby verified. This was the case in California moving to a whole language based curriculum. This was compounded by the state not backing this curricular change wioth training for its educators that would implement the change. I would like to end this post with an excerpt from an article I wrote from another class.

It is also evident from going through the process of becoming an educator that there is a belief that teaching is an art acquired through years of experience and a natural calling. This art is the ability to adapt to the context of an individual classroom. Most educators seem to believe that science based research is only feasible in the controlled environment of an experiment or test but is to rigidly defined for the ever changing classroom. I cannot see any reason that science based research cannot be used as the cornerstone to methodology that is creative, flexible and honed through experience. In other words, science can be art, when used correctly by an expert professional which is what we as educators are supposed to be.

Hoover Institution-Policy Review
See Dick Flunk
By Tyce Palmaffy
November/December 1997