Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University, has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.

These two books are required reading for anyone curious as to how the Whole Language (WL) approach to reading instruction became, and remains a popular practice in today's public schools, despite the fact that none of its novel principles nor unique procedures is corroborated by relevant experimental research. Chall and Ravitch reveal that the ideology of reading instruction on which the WL scheme is based stretches back in time to the early decades of the 20th century.

The late Harvard professor of education, Jeanne Chall, is best known for her 1967 book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Her volume reiterates one of the main conclusions in Rudolf Flesch's earlier best seller, Why Johnny Can't Read. Flesch reported in 1955 that most people in control of how reading is taught in public schools are ideologically enamored with experimentally discredited methods proposed for this purpose. After almost fifty years later, Chall and Ravitch find that opposition to scientifically validated reading tutelage still widely prevails within the nation's public schools.

This dominant ideology about reading instruction is said to be "progressive," in contrast to what is called classic, conservative, traditional, conventional, or "teacher-centered" versions of this teaching. "Progressive" obviously was a clever choice of words by the host of self-styled enlightened professors of education who promoted this radical kind of reading instruction throughout the 20th century. The word connotes a vision of "child-centered" reading tuition that is exceptionally humane, meliorative, dynamic, and highly modernistic.

Many teachers find the psychological allure of progressive reading instruction irresistible. Why they are so easily seduced by advocates of the progressive (most recently, Whole Language) version of this radical reading tutelage is far less apparent, however. This question is satisfactorily resolved by neither Chall nor Ravitch. Nonetheless, there doubtless are aspects of the personality of some people who become teachers that predispose them to reject what scientific findings indicate about how reading should be taught.

In this regard, Chall implies that within the public school educator establishment there resides a common "anti-intellectualist" frame of mind. The likelihood of the existence of that mind set is strengthened by Ravitch's expansive documentation of a rampant anti-intellectualism within the progressive education movement. It aims to eliminate the traditional subject-matter curriculum, Ravitch rightly notes, and thus to reduce the need for schools to develop what traditionally is called competent reading. As a consequence, a major result of progressive education's takeover of schools are students routinely denied full opportunity of learn to read proficiently.

As Chall correctly notes in this regard, under the guise of meeting students' idiosyncratic "felt needs," the cardinal goal of progressive reading instruction is to teach students to "think" about what they read, so as to "solve problems." Unanswered by progressivists is how it is possible for students to aptly cogitate about precise meanings that authors intended to convey, and to apply them to resolve questions, while each student personally devises his/her peculiar idiosyncratic "construct" as to what these meanings are.

That is only one of the irrational assaults by progressivism on what customarily is presumed to be the goals of expert reading teaching. It follows from progressive theory, Chall notes, that if students are empowered to individualistically decide the meanings in texts, they logically should be free to select the type of texts they read. That progressive principle applies, its advocates hold, not only to students making personalized choices within the field of literature, but also to their right to choose what they read in the other academic specialties, e.g., science, history, mathematics, etc.

Drastic reform in the historic assessment of how well students read also is demanded by progressivists. As noted, they insist that students who read only within a narrow range of topics must not be penalized for their eccentric specialization. Instead, progressive reading teachers celebrate this example of students' behavior as a hoped for eager following of their special interests while reading.

Students in progressive classrooms therefore are not all held to a common standard of reading efficacy. Especially abhorrent to progressivists in this respect are standardized reading tests. It is true that by setting grade level standards or norms for reading attainment, standardized tests are designed to frustrate the progressive ideal for de-emphasizing differences between students. Progressivists contend that standardized reading test scores are evil in that they lower students' self-esteem by insisting that differences in reading ability scores among students are significant. Progressivism even offers an unorthodox definition of what reading ability supposedly is. To this effect, students' interest in reading is said to be a more legitimate criterion of their reading ability than are their scores on objective standardized tests.

More thoroughly than almost ever before, Chall and Ravitch elaborate both (1) how progressive ideals, principles, and practices have negatively impacted the quality of reading instruction and its assessment in public schools through the past century, and (2) how progressivism provides a justification for the present Whole Language teaching of reading. From her vantage point as a renowned historian of American public education, Ravitch also reveals in detail the social, economic, and political agenda of progressive reading teaching.

A central goal of progressive education is to reconstruct the nation, in a revolutionary manner, from a meritocracy into an egalitarian society in which competition in schools for grades in reading is eliminated. For example, instead of the administration of objective standardized reading tests, today's progressivists call for subjective evaluations by teachers as to how well their students can read.

These "multiple assessment strategies," as education professor Sheryl Boris-Schacter glowingly describes them (Education Week, March 7, 2001), signify an end to "the entrenched values of competition and graded performance" in reading in daily school life. Implementation of these "strategies" also means the elimination of disinterested evaluation as to how well students can read, she fails to add. No longer would the taxpaying public have access to objective, numerical evidence as to how cost-effective reading teaching programs in public schools are. Into the vacuum of objective information caused by use of the "strategies" would rush countless fads and fancies about reading instruction.

As Ravitch additionally reveals, almost all the leading progressivists in the 20th century were socialists. For instance, education professor John Dewey, the most prominent theoretician of progressive education, praised the educational system of the USSR, as it was dictated by its tyrant, Joseph Stalin. Dewey extolled the end in the USSR to competitive individualism, and the profit motive. He agreed with Stalin that educators, more so than parents or clergy, must assume responsibility for shaping the social, moral, and cultural values of students so that they would have a "desire to think collectively." The school curriculum must be changed extensively, Dewey went on, for this collectivist ideal to be successfully inculcated into children's thinking.

Ravitch emphasizes that traditional academic subject matter was viewed by the progressivists of the past century as a threat to the attainment of these socialist goals. Evidence in this regard are progressivists' strenuous efforts to cast aside the core of widely shared academic information that traditionally all students were expected to acquire. Indeed remarkable is the intensity of progressivists' efforts to "dumb down" the schools, as the media often expresses their derogation of academic standards and intellectualism.

An obvious imperative question remains: How much longer will the public educational establishment endorse or condone the progressive point of view about reading instruction? Neither Chall nor Ravitch offer much hope that its powerful influence in this regard will lessen in the foreseeable future. Chall is almost mute on the issue. Ravitch expresses her desire that progressivists' antipathy, toward what E. D. Hirsch calls Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), somehow will diminish.

However, Ravitch dulls the impact of her hopeful thinking by her inexplicable conclusion that the best practices of experimentally confirmed reading instruction can be balanced, merged, or otherwise amalgamated with those of Whole Language. Ravitch's knowledge of the history of progressive education cannot be faulted. Nevertheless, it is apparent that she is either unaware of, or rejects for some unexplained reason, the fact that scientific findings on how children best learn to read, and qualitative (nonnumerical, anecdotal, impressionistic) evidence on which Whole Language advocates rest their case, consistently refute each other. These two sources of information are irreconcilable, Ravitch must be reminded.

Moreover, progressivists unfortunately pay little heed to the wishful thinking of their opponents. Consequently, if progressive, i.e., Whole Language reading instruction is to be eliminated, it clearly will be the duty of the public and its elected representatives to complete that task. Thankfully, there are stirrings in this direction at local, state, and federal levels. However, whether these efforts will be persistent enough to overturn the control over reading teaching, that a century of progressivism has established, awaits to be seen.

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