ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 26, 1996 TAG: 9601260035
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN C. LeDOUX
HAVE PARENTS lost faith in the public-school system?
Consider the following red flags. The 1983 report "The Nation at Risk" had the following statement by John Copperman: "For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents." Can this be true when we are spending nearly $6,000 per student per year, and when new technology and computers are in our classrooms?
The 1993 report on the National Survey of Adult Literacy found that we have more than 40 million adults who cannot read or write. Another 50 million are functionally illiterate - can read only at very elementary level and can write their names but little else. This same report determined that 96 percent of children who attended school for 12 years could not read, write and figure well enough to do college work.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress tests reveal that only one in four children in the fourth, seventh and 11th grades can read at acceptable levels. In Montgomery County, 35 percent of the children in the sixth grade could not pass the Literacy Passport Test, which permits students to enter the track leading to a high school diploma.
Most colleges and universities now offer remedial courses in reading, writing and math for freshmen. Industry and the armed forces spend more than $30 billion per year on remedial courses.
One of the educational goals frequently promoted is that we must prepare our students to be globally competitive. The most recent cross-national tests given by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement for math and science students in 15 to 18 industrialized countries placed the United States at or near the bottom in 1990. In 1970, we were seventh, which wasn't so good; now we are 15th. Before World War II, we were at or near the top.
Enough red flags? We do have a problem in our public schools. The obvious question is why? A statement by an elementary school principal provides some insight: "The purpose of school is not education but socialization." Despite Gov. Douglas Wilder's decree, Outcome-Based Education is not dead in Virginia. Significant time is still spent on the attitudes and feelings of students instead of on academics.
One of the obvious problems is easily identified by the various literacy tests. Most of our kids cannot read at acceptable levels. Has it always been this way?
When we began to take the census in 1790, one of the bits of information that emerged was how many of our adult citizens could read and write. This was determined by giving a short reading test to each person contacted. Each census showed an increase in literacy. This number reached a peak in 1940, when the census showed a literacy rate of 97 percent. It also showed that those who could not read or write had never attended school.
Since going to school and literacy correlated 100 percent and it required considerable effort to give reading tests, the method of establishing literacy in the census was changed to noting the years of schooling. This continued through the '80s, and the census results showed continued high literacy, since almost everyone attended school.
The actual literacy rate surfaced when the armed forces gave tests to inductees starting in World War II. The results were almost the same as the 1940 census, with a 3 to 4 percent illiteracy rate. By the Korean War, less than 10 years later, the military tests showed an illiteracy rate of 10 to 15 percent. The rate declined to nearly 25 percent in the Vietnam war. Today, the rate is closer to 30 percent.
President Johnson, a former teacher, was so disturbed by these numbers that he asked Congress to pass the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Chapter I of this act was aimed at helping disadvantaged (by poverty) children. Ten years later, Congress passed the Individuals With Disabilities Act. Besides physically disabled students, those who just could not read were placed in special-ed classes. Of the 5 million students in special ed, 4 million have no mental or physical disabilities.
Why are we the only industrialized nation with a falling literacy rate?
In the late 1920s and 1930s, a new educational philosophy was emerging founded on two premises: Learning should be fun, and reading was a natural process like speaking. Experiments showed that adult readers took in whole words, phrases and even whole sentences at a glance without apparently looking at each letter from left to right. Learning to decode the language by using intensive phonics required drill and practice. Drill and practice are not fun. Why not teach reading as it is actually done by adults? The "whole-word" philosophy of reading emerged.
The whole-word philosophy began to replace the phonics method in the late '30s and early '40s. The disastrous results are evident in the reports noted above.
Neurologists have determined that learning to decode the language by the phonics method takes place in the logical side of the brain because learning the 70 phonograms of the 44 sounds of the language and the 29 rules of spelling is a logical process. This can be accomplished with virtually every child in one year. They then have access to the entire language. This method of learning to read has been successful for thousands of years.
The whole-word picture process takes place on the other side of the brain, where images are retained. A child can learn only about 400 words per year, and the goal is to learn the 1,500 most common words by grade six. This is the reason the Nation at Risk report stated that the 1980s generation would have a vocabulary 20,000 words less than the World War II generation.
Difficult words in many text books have been replaced with simpler words. There are computer programs used by some newspapers that scan a news article and reduce the language to a third-grade level, so more readers can read them.
Why does the educational establishment persist in this madness? It must be pride or blindness. More than 120 extensive comparison studies have shown the superiority of phonics over the whole-word process. Every other nation that uses our alphabet uses the phonics method. Our students place last when we compete with these nations. Our prisons are filled with nonreaders. The cost to our nation is in excess of $250 billion per year in welfare payments, crime, job incompetence, lost taxes and remedial education.
What should we do? Cancel the Chapter I program. Drop the special-ed courses for all but the truly handicapped. Use some of the saved billions to teach first- and second-grade teachers how to teach intensive phonics. Use more of the saved billions for compensatory programs designed to help disadvantaged children after they have learned to read. The rest of the savings could be applied to the national debt.
The most revealing statistic of all is that 35 percent of public-school teachers in the United States send their children to private schools, where basic academics and intensive phonics still prevail. Could it be that the old-fashioned methods are not so bad after all, and that "progressive" education isn't really so progressive?
John C. LeDoux, of Blacksburg, is an associate professor of engineering at Virginia Tech.
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