That's right - they're wrong

National Review, Sept 14, 1992 by Regna Lee Wood

It is also the reason 10 million of the nation's 40 million public-school students in all grades--25 per cent-are struggling with grade-school lessons in thousands of very small, very expensive special and remedial education classes. Struggling, even though 9 of the 10 million in these classes for the deprived or disabled have normal sight, hearing, and intelligence.

This transition from sounding syllables to sighting whole words must be the reason for such extraordinary numbers in these two compensatory programs. For schools in other countries with instructors who teach beginners to read by matching sounds and letters do not have more than 2 or 3 per cent of their students requiring special instruction in special classes, and nearly all of these have diagnosed mental or physical handicaps.

Teachers in other countries with alphabets have successfully used phonics for the last 3,500 years. The United States is the only country in the world with teachers who try to teach most of their students to read with sight repetition of whole words. And the United States is the only country with illiterate schoolchildren, and with illiterate adults who were once illiterate schoolchildren.

We must stop pinning our hopes for better schools on "free choice" systems for millions of parents and students who live in towns with one poor grade school, one poor middle school, and one poor high school. And for millions more who live in inner cities with fifty poor grade schools, twenty poor middle schools, and ten poor high schools. Chester Finn's "world class standard" achievement tests won't help students who can't read "world class standard" questions--much less answer them. More trips to the zoo and the ballet for pre-schoolers aren't the answer.

We need to give all children the only "head start" that matters--literacy by the age of seven. We did it before the introduction of "see and say." We can do it again. Then we can see what else needs to be done. Many of these new proposals might help.

But offering calculators and computers, more college loans, and longer school days and years to the 20 out of 40 million students who never learned to read well enough to understand junior-high-school lessons is a travesty.