FIGHTING LIKE C-A-T-S AND D-O-G-S;

FOR NEARLY 200 YEARS, PHONICS AND WHOLE-LANGUAGE ADVOCATES HAVE BATTLED FOR CONTROL OF OUR SCHOOLS; FOR STUDENTS LEARNING TO READ, THE STAKES COULDN'T BE HIGHER.

By Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune, Staff Writer

One day in late December, the 33 students in Tricia Walton's 1st-grade class at Dawes Elementary School on Chicago's South Side were just returning from lunch. Octavia Kelley, 7, sat at the second table from the door, hands folded, ready to work. On the board, Walton had taped three rows of small paper circles, with three circles in each row. The first vertical row of circles bore the letters "ay," the second, "ail," and the third, "ake." "We're going to play 'Long "A" Jeopardy,"' Walton said.

There was a buzz of interest. Eyes swerved toward the board; chairs were scooched around for a better angle on the proceedings. This was something new. Maybe even fun. Walton divided the class into two teams. She asked Octavia, who was on the first team, to pick a circle. Octavia pointed to the top circle with "ake" printed on it in bright blue marker. Walton lifted the circle off the board and read the words on the back: "Tummy crawler." The students on the team held a hurried conference. Finally, a tentative hand went up. "OK, what is it?" Walton asked. If the answer was incorrect, the second team would get a chance. "Snake," said T.J., an earnest, red-headed boy. "That's it!" Walton cried. "Good job, Team One! Good job."

Applause, cheers, stomping of feet. Then it was the second team's turn to pick a card, hear the clue and come up with the word in which a long "A" lay waiting, like a tummy crawler in the grass. Back and forth it went, until all of the circles were removed and the point had been made: A long "A" says its own name.

- - -

Octavia and her classmates were learning to read by a method known as phonics, in which students are taught the links between letter sounds and how those letters are written. Some experts, however, favor the method known as whole language, in which students encounter stories before they break down the words in those stories into syllables. Phonics builds from the bottom up; whole language moves from the top down. For almost two centuries, scholars and researchers have debated the merits of each approach. Since cognitive scientists are still unraveling the intricate, mysterious process by which the brain reads, the argument has continued, with each side gaining ascendancy at various points in the nation's history.

What has infused the issue with new urgency is the 2000 presidential race, in which reading methodology has attained an unlikely prominence. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who seeks the Republican nomination, led a curriculum reform in Texas that now requires phonics to be taught in all elementary schools. In campaign stump speeches and TV ads, Bush often alludes to his pro-phonics position. The New Republic and Newsweek, among other publications, have chided Bush for including in his speeches the relatively arcane topic of phonics. ("Now, there's a winning theme," the New Republic editorialized sarcastically. "It's the phonics, stupid.") Such teasing, though, ignores the fact that education constantly finishes at or near the top in polls of voters' concerns and that Bush's record in Texas justifies his making it a priority in his campaign.

Even one of his harshest critics, author Molly Ivins, agrees. "Education," she writes in "Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush," "is one area where George W. Bush deserves real credit." As the general election nears and the topic of education reform heats up, it could become a big issue for other candidates too.

Bush and other phonics advocates often cite California's experience. In 1987, motivated by theorists who found the phonics approach sterile and antithetical to the beauties of literature, the state adopted a whole-language approach. Students were immersed in stories, rather than in phonics rules about the words in those stories.

Seven years later, the reading test scores of California's 4th-grade students had plummeted to the lowest level in the nation. In Los Angeles, only one in five 3rd-graders read at grade level.

Stunned by the drop, state legislators passed several laws in 1996 under the rubric "California Reading Initiative," mandating the teaching of "explicit phonics."

Virtually every decade, American public school officials have lurched from one method to the other, from phonics to whole language and then back again, like passengers on a ship that can't make up their minds about which side most needs the ballast to keep the ship from capsizing.

And capsizing is not too dramatic a metaphor for the current state of reading. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that remains the most comprehensive portrait to date of the nation's literacy rate. At least 50 percent of the population — almost 100 million adults — reads at the lowest levels, which means they are barely able to make out simple written instructions or find information in a short news story.

The trouble starts early: By 4th grade, one in five are reading below grade level, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress. Some 60 percent of the entire school population have problems with reading, said Bill Bursuck, a professor of teacher education at Northern Illinois University.

But does the solution lie in "decoding" words, as phonics proponents insist, or in surrounding beginning readers with intriguing stories, as whole-language theorists believe?

"From a parent's perspective," said Susan L. Hall of Long Grove, a self-taught expert on the reading wars, "I just kind of sigh. Why does this go on and on? Why does the pendulum swing back and forth?"

- - -

Perhaps the best-known reading textbooks of all time are the "Dick and Jane" series, written by University of Chicago professor William S. Gray. This series, which employed a variation of non-phonics instruction called "look-say," first appeared in 1929 and held court in America's schools throughout the 1940s, '50s and early '60s.

By the end of the 1960s, though, phonics was back in favor. That lasted until the '80s, when whole-language proponents regained the upper hand, as California's experience demonstrates. In the 1990s, religious conservatives made back-to-basics reading instruction an important issue in their political agenda, and phonics rose again.

As a fed-up Alan B. Krueger, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor who now teaches at Princeton University, wrote last year: "How we teach our children shifts with the winds of philosophies and politics, leaving many observers dizzy and dismayed."

Elliot Judd, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois-Chicago, concurred. "What's triggering a lot of this is the politics of education. Reading scores have gone down. But why they've gone down is a complicated problem. Is it reading methodology? Can we fix it just by imposing phonics? I'm not sure phonics is a better method. It's a nice quick-fix solution for politicians."

While the storm rages in public schools, their parochial counterparts have tended to stick with phonics. In part, that's because phonics instruction is more traditional. But there's another reason, many observers speculate: Most simply don't have the budgets to keep purchasing new textbooks.

Public schools, however, are a major market for the textbook publishers who often are seen as militaristic hawks in the reading wars. Rudolf Flesch, author of "Why Johnny Can't Read" (1955) and its sequel "Why Johnny Still Can't Read" (1981), reserves his harshest words for those publishers who, he claims, have deliberately kept the pot boiling in order to sell more books.

Theorists in the debate remain firm and unyielding, with whole-language proponents such as Kenneth Goodman, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, squaring off against Bursuck and other phonics advocates.

Creator of a phonics-intensive reading series called Open Court, Blouke Carus has spent the last 38 of his 72 years preaching the phonics gospel. Open Court, which the resident of Peru, Ill., sold to McGraw-Hill in 1996, has been adopted by one in eight elementary schools in California, prompting the Los Angeles Times to call Carus "the darling of California's phonics revolution."

Those who favor phonics often have had a rough time, said Carus, who publishes Cricket and other magazines for young people. "We've been called 'these crazy right-wing nuts.' In 1962, when I first started trying to talk to people about phonics, they wouldn't listen. They had 'the truth.' But we won the war."

Goodman, of course, disagrees. "Reading is not identifying words accurately, but making sense of what you read," he said. "Reading is a constructive process. We want kids from a very early age to be involved with books. It means lots of literature." Goodman labeled the pro-phonics trend "the pedagogy of the absurd."

But Bursuck argues that phonemic awareness — understanding the relationship between letters and sounds — is crucial to reading success and must precede involvement with books: "Most reading problems are due to a lack of fluent word identification skills." Throwing kids into the midst of books, before they understand how words are formed, is unfair, he said.

In fact, most contemporary research, including a book that virtually every expert agrees is key to understanding the controversy — "Learning to Read: The Great Debate" (1996) — is adamant that phonics is necessary to learn to read efficiently.

So if phonics works, why do some educators continue to resist it?

"Perhaps," Bursuck said, "phonics isn't as exciting and romantic as working with a child, finding a book they enjoy. Sitting in a room and saying, 'R-U-N' doesn't fit our romantic notions of education.

"But the shame of it is, many children aren't learning to read who could be taught how to read."

- - -

Hall, co-author of 1999's "Straight Talk about Reading," says any talk of a truce in the reading wars is premature.

"I'm not confident," she said. "That's not what I'm seeing in the classroom. In California and Texas and a handful of other states, there has been some improvement. There's been leadership. But other places? Well, in Illinois, we have a long way to go."

The problem, said Hall, who writes and speaks frequently about how learning disabilities affect reading skills, is that teachers' colleges often still train teachers in whole language, or provide so little phonics instruction that teachers are not equipped to convey it to students.

"Even if everybody agreed tomorrow on phonics, the next question would be, 'OK. So what do we do?' The real task is to retrain teachers to put this in effect in classrooms. It's a huge, overwhelming task."

The situation in Illinois is complicated by the fact that, unlike states such as California and Texas that make statewide recommendations for textbook adoption, instructional materials in Illinois are sold "from building to building," as one salesman put it. That's a bit of an overstatement, since school boards sometimes choose textbooks for an entire district, but in essence, he's correct. At many Illinois schools, a committee of teachers and principals selects the textbooks. Those teachers obviously are influenced by how — and how much — they were taught about how to teach reading.

While precise figures are difficult to ascertain, since the terms "phonics" and "whole language" often are avoided because of their pejorative nuances, observers generally say Illinois tilts strongly toward whole language. (Most whole-language classrooms also include some phonics, which makes definitions and statistics notoriously slippery.) Nationwide, some 85 percent of public schools employ a predominantly whole-language approach, according to several sources. That doesn't please Indiana State Sen. Murray Clark, a Republican who has proposed a bill now pending before the legislature that will require prospective teachers in his state to pass a phonics exam as part of the licensure process. Such an exam, he argued, will encourage Indiana colleges to teach phonics without the government having to force them to do so.

"I've had teacher after teacher tell me that a lot of newly educated teachers are being told that phonics are a bad thing," Clark said.

Phonics often is derided as a cult that produces robotized students spewing back vowel sounds instead of free, happy, absorbed readers.

Yet even if one believes strongly in phonics, one might have reservations about government interference in classroom instruction. And federally mandated reading instruction would seem to violate a central tenet of the conservative agenda: local, rather than national, control of schools. Addressing that point, Bush told a crowd at a recent rally that he did not intend to become "the national principal."Carus, however, doesn't mind the idea of bringing high powers to bear upon an issue as significant as reading: "You need a bully pulpit. You need somebody to stand up there and say, 'This is what needs to be done.' If you don't get government involved, it won't get done.

"Reading is more important than anything. Reading frees us from the here and now. It makes us human."

- - -

For Octavia, catching on to long "A" was a snap. She was in the top reading group. But it hadn't always been that way.

The year before, Octavia had struggled. "She wasn't fluent," recalled her mother, Vanessa Kelley. "Her reading was weak. It was hard for her to stay on task." Something seemed to be holding Octavia back, keeping her from leaping into reading the way her mother knew she could.

Octavia had started 1st grade the year before, when she was 5. It was a gamble; some children are mature enough, some aren't. Although she was bright, although she worked very hard, Octavia was having trouble with her reading. For that reason, at the end of the school year, her parents decided she should repeat 1st grade.

Over the summer, Vanessa realized that Octavia was nearsighted and needed glasses. And Octavia worked every day on her reading.

Now she was one of the best readers in Walton's class.

"Once they catch it," Walton said of reading, "they want to read all the time. They're gone. They just fly into it."

Octavia was airborne.

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