The politics of literacy - The Culture War - Brief Article

Humanist, May-June, 2002 by John Buell

I was ten years old in 1955, the year Why Johnny Can't Read was published. I knew how to read and I tried not to take the insult personally. Little did I realize that this book's themes would come back to haunt educational debates five decades later.

Today's bipartisan educational "reformers" share the same assumptions that underlie this misguided work: just give students a heavy dose of basic phonics and students will be on the right educational path for life. Reassuring as this message may be to some, it has little empirical support and may well undermine public education's fundamental mission: to encourage life-long learning and democratic citizenship.

Critics of our public schools today suggest that, if schools reverted to the tried and true, especially with respect to phonics, more children would learn to read. They accuse liberals and progressive educators of seducing schools, parents, and children with tales of the pleasures and success of whole language and word recognition approaches to reading. The perfidy of liberals and progressives has left our once successful public schools awash in illiteracy.

Buying this analysis, and claiming the support of new educational research, the Bush administration is pushing a return to basics. In addition to the much-advertised emphasis on standardized tests, the administration will be spending about a billion dollars a year to promote its approach to childhood literacy--phonics. The Bush administration claims the support not only of the business community but of educational "science" as well.

That many in the business community buy this analysis isn't hard to understand. Stephen Metcalf, writing in the January 28, 2002, issue of the Nation, points out that the same groups that love testing are even more enthralled by phonics because "phonics is traditional and rote." Metcalf quotes another scholar's even broader point that "phonics is a way of thinking about literacy that does not involve thinking about larger social injustices." Rote instruction with the right textbooks can make up for poorly trained teachers and inadequate home environments.

One problem with this new orthodoxy is that the good old days weren't what they are now cracked up to be. In a New York Times op-ed in March 2001, Times education reporter Richard Rothstein points out: "As far back as 1892, a study of New York City schools found word recognition, not phonics, was typical. If there was a golden age for reading, phonics drill wasn't the key."

If the Bush administration is guilty of nostalgia for a past that never was, its science is equally problematic. Metcalf points out that close examination of the studies on which the administration premises its faith in phonics suggests their approach is flawed and the conclusions drawn from them overstated.

Rothstein and Metcalf aren't suggesting that phonics plays no role in successful literacy education, but they seek to avoid reliance on easy panaceas. Nor are they comfortable with any approach that reduces teachers or students to automata. Rothstein suggests that "good teachers sometimes use whole language methods that urge children to guess at unknown words from context or pictures. Teachers should urge pupils to sound out syllables, but learners shouldn't have just one strategy." A teacher with a variety of strategies at his or her disposal, along with ample time to recognize and respond to the interests and abilities of the individual child, appears to be vital.

Equally important is what happens out of school. By out of school, I mean something other than homework--the other great conservative panacea for educational deficiency. A Canadian child, asked by a CBC correspondent to comment on homework, raised the following point:

   Homework is one thing the average student dislikes a lot. The average
   student spends about eighteen and a half days a year doing homework.
   Instead of doing homework you could be doing other things that are just as
   educational but much more interesting. Building models helps you learn to
   use your hands and mind together. Building toys, such as legos ... helps
   you learn how to design and make your own creation. Drawing will help you
   when you have to make a sketch.... Tobogganing teaches you ... about
   friction.

A Johns Hopkins study, recently reported by Gerald Bracey in the Washington Post, lends weight to this child's perspective. The study suggests that affluent children make greater academic gains over the summer than poor children not primarily because they spend time in summer schools but because they are more often able to avail themselves of city and state parks, fairs, or overnight trips. The affluent children also "took swimming, dance, and music lessons; visited local parks, museums, science centers and zoos; and more often went to the library in summer."

Unfortunately, as conservatives well know, there is no free lunch. Money spent on obsessions with phonics and standardized tests will mean less money to train and retain gifted teachers or fund adequate pre-school programs. The very obsession with narrow phonics approaches, coupled with standardized testing, may well drive many of the most gifted teachers from the profession.