U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings has been pressuring the Palm Beach County School District to close the achievement gap between black and white students. Yet Rep. Hastings and his Democratic colleagues — Reps. Robert Wexler and Peter Deutsch — helped to defeat a House bill (HCR 214), which recommended that elementary schools teach reading by the phonics-alphabetic method.

The overwhelming majority of elementary schools in Palm Beach and Broward counties use the less-structured "whole-language" approach, which has produced disastrous results in our nation's schools.

Unfortunately, the congressmen ignored the testimony of Dr. G. Reid Lyon, who is chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on July 10, 1997. He reported the results of 25 years of research regarding the process of learning to read in our nation's schools. He testified that his institute considers reading failure to reflect not only an educational problem, but also a significant public health problem as well, which affects all ethnic and socioeconomic classes. He emphasized that the psychological, social and economic consequences of reading failure are monumental.

As a result of the institute's research findings, Dr. Lyon recommended a phonics-intensive curriculum for the primary grades. He indicated that difficulties in decoding or sounding out words are the core of most reading problems. He emphasized that there is no way to bypass the decoding and word recognition state of reading.

Using context to figure out the pronunciation of an unknown word cannot appreciably offset a deficiency in the ability to sound out words. Poor word-recognition skills prevent students from developing the advanced reading skills that all competent readers possess.

One can reasonably infer that Reps. Hastings, Wexler and Deutsch ignored Dr. Lyon's testimony because they succumbed to the lobbying efforts of the teachers' unions whose members have been brainwashed by the marketing propaganda of whole-language publishers.

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