by Robert W. Sweet Jr.
Policy Review
May-June 1997, Number 83

President Clinton is to be congratulated for calling attention to a national disaster: the inability of 40 percent of American eight-year-olds to read on their own. Reading is the gateway skill. It opens the door to all other learning. It is essential for participation in the knowledge-based economy of the next century. The president is right to insist that every American child learn this indispensable skill by the end of the third grade.

But the president's answer for this disaster does not provide a real solution. Under his proposed "America Reads Challenge," the government would recruit a million volunteers, many of them minimally trained college students, to teach children to read under the direction of AmeriCorps workers. The program sounds wonderful-we're all for voluntarism. But it diverts accountability from the colossal failure of the public-education system to achieve perhaps its single most important mission.

Think about it. Forty percent of third-graders cannot read. What a terrible indictment of our public-education system! What more important responsibility do schools have than to teach reading? Almost every child can learn to read by the end of first grade, if properly taught. But schools aren't achieving this by the third grade. For this failure, heads should roll. All teachers or principals or school superintendents who have failed to teach 40 percent of their third-graders to read should be looking for a new job. If 40 percent of third-graders cannot read and nothing has been done about it already, then teachers and principals obviously aren't being held to the right standards of performance.

Even more important, current methods for teaching reading must be completely overhauled. There are now 825,000 teachers from kindergarten to third grade whose principal job is to teach the three Rs. A high percentage of these teachers have master's degrees; almost all have been specially trained to teach reading. Obviously their training isn't working.

The federal government already spends $8.3 billion on 14 programs that concentrate on promoting literacy, including Title I funding for school districts with high proportions of low-income or poorly performing students. If 40 percent of third-graders can't read, then this money has not been wisely targeted and the teaching philosophy must be faulty.

Federal, state, and local governments spend another $40 billion a year on special education, with about half targeted at children with "specific learning disabilities." According to J.W. Lerner, writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, "80 percent of children identified as having learning disabilities have their primary difficulties in learning to read." Special-education reading methods don't seem to be working very well, either. According to research by B.A. Shaywitz and S.E. Shaywitz, more than 40 percent of high-school students identified as "learning disabled" drop out of school prior to graduation; only 17 percent enroll in any postsecondary course, 6 percent participate in two-year higher-education programs, and 1.8 percent in four-year programs. The loss of human potential is staggering.

The 1993 National Assessment of Education Progress reported that "70 percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 64 percent of 12th-graders did not . . . attain a proficient level of reading." These students have not attained the minimum level of skill in reading considered necessary to do the academic work at their grade level. The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), released in 1993, revealed that between 40 million and 44 million Americans are unable to read phone books, ballots, car manuals, nursery rhymes, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, the Constitution, or the directions on a medicine bottle. Another 50 million Americans recognize so few printed words that they are limited to a fourth- or fifth-grade level of reading. Illiterates account for 75 percent of unemployed adults, 33 percent of mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 85 percent of juveniles who appear in court, and 60 percent of prison inmates.

How has a nation that has dedicated so many resources to education allowed illiteracy to grow to such an unprecedented level? We can solve illiteracy now. Poor people, rich people, rural residents and city dwellers, all have an equal opportunity to master the skill of reading, if they are properly taught.

A Simple Solution 

There's no great mystery to teaching reading. It's as easy as a, b, c. The best approach for the overwhelming majority of children is systematic phonics, the simple concept of teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44 sounds they make, and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds. For most children, learning this basic code unlocks 85 percent of the words in the English language by the end of the first grade. Although some words such as "sugar" or "friend" have irregular spellings, children of all levels of intelligence can learn to read most words simply by learning the correspondence between sounds and letters.

This is the great benefit of an alphabet. Historian David Diringer has called the alphabet "the most important invention in the social history of the world." Ancient Egyptians had to memorize hundreds of hieroglyphics. Chinese and Japanese citizens must learn thousands of characters and character-combinations to function in society. It can be done, but with enormous difficulty. Reading in English is simple and accessible to almost everybody if properly taught.

An emphasis on phonics once made America the most literate nation on earth. From colonial times until the latter part of the 19th century, reading instruction was simple and straightforward: Teach the code, then have children read. It worked then; it will work now. Immigrants from every nation on earth had come to America. They all wanted to learn English, and most of them did. Millions of Americans used Noah Webster's Blue Backed Speller, a simple systematic phonics book, to teach their children to read at home or at school. More than 24 million copies were sold. It was second in sales only to the Bible.

With phonics the predominant instructional practice, illiteracy was almost unknown at the turn of the century among those who attended school. In 1910, the U.S. Bureau of Education reported, only 2.2 percent of schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 14 in the U.S. were illiterate. Blacks had been forbidden to read under slavery, and only 4 percent of blacks were literate in 1866. But by 1943, as Henry Bullock wrote in The History of Negro Education in the South (1967), literacy had risen to more than 80 percent among blacks who had attended school.

The Phonics Backlash 

But if phonics was the reigning practice, its emphasis on repetition and drill was rejected by the most influential philosophers of education. Horace Mann, Massachusetts's secretary of education in the mid-1800s, wrote: "it is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence and death, that we compel children to fasten their eyes; the odor and fungeousness of spelling book paper; a soporific effluvium seems to emanate from the page, steeping all their faculties in lethargy." Mann preferred a method of teaching called "look and say," based on the ideas of Thomas Gallaudet, who was developing reading programs for the deaf. The premise of this method was that children could learn to read by associating words with pictures. Drills in letter/sound correspondences were unnecessary.

The father of progressive education, John Dewey of Teachers College at Columbia University, became one of the chief proponents of the "look and say" philosophy. In his 1898 essay "The Primary-Education Fetish," Dewey wrote, "The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion." Dewey believed that teaching children to read with phonics was drudgery that would turn them off from genuine learning.

In the early 20th century, "progressive education" and its attendant "whole word" or "look and say" theory of reading instruction spread to the teacher training schools, then called Normal Schools. But one of the paradoxes of a teaching philosophy designed to encourage intellectual curiosity and independence is that it limited children to a simplistic and boring vocabulary: "Frank had a dog," "See Spot run." The spoken vocabulary of most children at the end of the fourth grade exceeds 15,000 words. By contrast, the typical whole-word reading series taught children to memorize only 1,500 words by the end of the fourth grade.

Beginning in the 1960s, Ken Goodman, Frank Smith, and a bevy of "new Deweyites" promoted a reading philosophy called "whole language," which also avoided phonics. Whole-language theorists believe that children learn to read the same way they learn to speak. Teachers are taught that children are born with the ability to read, and all that is required is to surround them with books, read to them, and then let them read themselves, using context, pictures, and the beginning and ending letter sounds of words to guess their meaning. Ken Goodman, one of America's more famous whole-language advocates, writes in the Whole Language Catalogue, "Whole language classrooms liberate pupils to try new things, to invent spellings, to experiment with a new genre, to guess at meanings in their reading, or to read and write imperfectly. In whole language classrooms risk-taking is not simply tolerated, it is celebrated."

For the past decade, whole language has dominated the curricula of all 50 states, as well as the leading remedial tutorial programs such as "Reading Recovery," which has been endorsed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in her book, It Takes a Village. Whole language has been the central principle of reading instruction in virtually all teacher training schools, as well as professional organizations such as the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

The Research Is in 

The great tragedy of all this is that research in reading instruction shows conclusively that whole language does not work, and that phonics-based instruction does. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the federal National Institutes of Health, has funded and overseen empirical, replicable research at eight major universities (Yale, Johns Hopkins, Florida State, Bowman Gray School of Medicine, and the universities of Toronto, Colorado, Houston, and Miami) that has been reported in more than 2,000 refereed journal articles since 1965. The results of this research were summarized by Benita Blachman, a professor of education at Syracuse University, in a 1994 literature review published in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal: 

"We have had a scientific breakthrough in our knowledge about the development of literacy. We know a great deal about how to address reading problems-even before they begin. . . . The tragedy is that we are not exploiting what we know about reducing the incidence of reading failure. Specifically, the instruction currently being provided to our children does not reflect what we know from research. . . . Direct, systematic instruction about the alphabetic code is not routinely provided in kindergarten and first grade, in spite of the fact that at the moment this might be our most powerful weapon in the fight against illiteracy."

In February 1997 Bonnie Grossen, a research associate at the College of Education at the University of Oregon, summarized the NICHD research and identified seven steps for producing independent readers (see sidebar next page).

Empirical scientific evidence for the effectiveness of phonics stands in stark contrast to the unvalidated whole language philosophy. Keith Stanovich, a well-respected researcher at the University of Toronto, wrote in the Reading Teacher (January 1994): "That direct instruction in alphabetic coding facilitates early reading acquisition is one of the most well-established conclusions in all of behavioral science. Conversely, the idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community."

At the 1997 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Barbara Foorman, an educational psychologist at the University of Houston, presented a comparison study of two groups of low-income first- and second-graders who had been classified as "reading disabled." These students scored at the 25th percentile in reading ability at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year, the students taught whole-language achieved mean scores near the 25th percentile. Those taught systematic phonics had mean scores at the 43rd percentile.

According to Foorman, "such results suggest that direct instruction in sound-spelling patterns in first- and second-grade classrooms can prevent reading difficulties in a population of children at-risk of reading failure."

In 1985, Arizona's Peoria Unified School District compared the Spalding Program, a phonics-based language-arts system, with the district's existing whole-word program. Kindergarten through third-grade classes were paired in one high-income, two middle-income, and two low-income schools. By the end of one year, control schools' average reading comprehension scores remained at or below the 50th percentile, while scores from all the phonics schools at all incomes ranged from the upper 80th to the high 90th. Based on that evidence, the district adopted Spalding in all 18 of its schools. During the next eight years, Peoria consistently maintained scores 20 to 30 percentile points higher than neighboring districts with school populations of similar income.

Jane Hodges, a professor of education at the Mississippi University for Women, has compared first-graders in Aberdeen, Mississippi, who were taught in systematic phonics with those instructed in whole language. The phonics students scored 42 percentile points higher in reading overall, and 34 points higher in comprehension.

Such research results are beginning to affect teacher training. Columbia's Teachers College, John Dewey's home territory, has reintroduced systematic phonics in the curriculum for special-education teachers. Associate professor Judith Birsh teaches a course in alphabetic phonics that is now a requirement for completion of the Learning Disability Masters Degree program.

In the summer of 1995, the American Federation of Teachers devoted an entire issue of its magazine American Educator to the teaching of reading and the virtues of phonics. In one article, Maggie Bruck, an associate professor of psychology and pediatrics at McGill University, in Montreal, said she has "reviewed the entire database of educational research and [has] not found a single example published in a major peer-reviewed journal that showed that whole language worked."

The Reading Recovery program, which typically costs an astronomical $8,000 to $9,000 per student, has come under fire in five major research studies. As summarized by Bonnie Grossen and Gail Coulter of the University of Oregon and Barbara Ruggles of Beacon Hill Elementary School, these studies found that "Reading Recovery does not raise overall school achievement levels. . . . Research-based alternative interventions are more effective than Reading Recovery . . . and far fewer students than claimed actually benefit from Reading Recovery." Columnist Debra Saunders has written in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Reading Recovery-a program designed to prevent reading failure-is to education what the $600 toilet seat was to the military. Except that no one ever said the $600 toilet seat didn't work as promised."

Most Americans are unaware of what has been called "the phonics wars," but they are nonetheless taking matters into their own hands. Many are astonished that there is any debate about how to teach children to read. During the past decade, more and more parents have been teaching their children to read before they enter school or after schooling begins. Products like "Hooked on Phonics," "The Phonics Game," "Sing, Spell, Read, and Write," "Action Reading," "Phonics Pathways," "Alpha Phonics," "Saxon Phonics" and many others have taken the country by storm. Reports from satisfied parents are overwhelming. Millions of children are becoming proficient readers using these programs at home. Most of these programs are priced at a fraction of the costs of Reading Recovery, yet they work far better. Does it occur to any teachers that the same tools could be used in every kindergarten and first-grade classroom?

During the past several years, California, Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Washington, have passed legislation that requires systematic instruction in phonics. Others are following suit. In 1997, New York, West Virginia, South Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Mississippi, have similar legislation pending. While President Clinton fiddles, state legislators are finally listening to their constituents and taking action, and it is about time.

Meanwhile millions of students still suffer because of a disastrous teaching philosophy. Thaddeus Lott, principal of Wesley Elementary School in Houston, Texas, and a leading authority on African-American education, commented recently: "When students are brought up on the [whole language] system and see an unfamiliar word, they are told to guess instead of decode. Frustration sets in when children are given a problem to solve without the means to solve it. Chronic frustration leads to negative feelings and anger and loss of self confidence. That's not the way to empowerment."

There is a simple solution, one that was voiced by Rudolph Flesch in his classic book of 1955, Why Johnny Can't Read, and 26 years later, in Why Johnny Still Can't Read. "Any normal six-year-old loves to learn letters and sounds. He is fascinated by them. They are the greatest thing he has come up against in life." Teach the letters and sounds directly and systematically, and you will have lifelong readers who love books.

Robert W. Sweet Jr. is the president of the National Right to Read Foundation, P.O. Box 490, The Plains, Virginia, 20198. Tel.-540-349-1614. Sweet was the director of the National Institute of Education under President Reagan, and federal Administrator for Juvenile Justice Programs under President Bush.  

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