School Failure : A Teaching Trial--the Unread Tale

A decade-long effort by the nation’s schools to teach reading through hundreds of tiny “sub-skills” appears to be going the way of new math and television in the classroom.

Last month, after an outside study found that two-thirds of its ninth-graders were reading at “an appalling, low level,” the Chicago school system scrapped its highly touted program that broke reading into 290 separate skills.

Education researchers who originated the program had contended that all children could learn to read if they were carefully taught and tested at each step of the way.

In practice, however, this often meant that teachers were told to ensure that children had learned their “consonant blends” and “diphthongs” and could “identify homonyms” and “select topic sentences.”

Drawing Lines

And for pupils, this meant sitting at their desks drawing lines from the word “red” to a red balloon or circling the consonant that appeared most in a sentence.

In Chicago and elsewhere, teachers complained that they were burdened with all of the paper work of certifying who had mastered what. Children complained that they were bored.

But critics noticed an even more fundamental flaw with this approach: Children rarely got a chance to read.

“It was like teaching someone all the skills of tennis, but never letting them play the game,” said Prof. Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago, who devised the mastery learning concept in the 1960s, but disavows the program in the Chicago schools. “If there is a way to screw up any theory, there’s always a school system that will find the way.”

But other educators claimed the concept itself was deeply flawed because it put the focus on skills that could be easily taught and tested.

Workbook Exercises

Indeed, a recent study found reading instruction in the nation’s primary schools consisted mostly of pupils doing exercises in workbooks. Very little time was devoted to reading stories. Among the nation’s fifth-graders, 50% read on average for less than five minutes a day, according to the report, “Becoming a Nation of Readers.”

Though Chicago’s was an extreme example, “These highly structured reading programs were seen as the vision of the future in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” said Prof. Richard Anderson, director of the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. “Bloom may want to disassociate himself with what happened in Chicago, but I don’t think it was just poor execution.

“Maybe you can teach math by breaking it down into small parts and measuring how well they do on learning each part,” Anderson said. “But in reading, I think it creates severe, fundamental problems,” Anderson said.

The new approach to teaching reading managed to work its way into most reading texts published during the 1970s, according to reading researchers.

With this approach, school officials could show parents they were serious about teaching basic skills. It also had a “pseudoscientific look” that made it appealing to educators, commented a University of Pittsburgh professor, Isabel Beck, a national reading expert.

The system was also adopted by many school districts throughout the country. As an elementary school teacher in San Francisco in the early 1970s, California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig recalls that he bought books and stories for his students to read and discuss in class.

“The principal came by one day and said, ‘Bill, you are not teaching reading,’ ” Honig said in an interview. “I said, ‘What do you think they’re doing if that’s not reading?’ She told me I had to teach the diphthongs and all the other skills.”

But as with the new math, the highly detailed approach to teaching reading has proven to be another educational innovation that was new but not better.

At first, school officials were heartened that children were scoring better on tests that measured the more mechanical skills, such as recognizing words. But a few years later, the evaluations were reversed when students fared poorly on junior and senior high school tests that required them to read and understand longer and more complicated passages.

Just Didn’t Work

“Our main criticism of the (Chicago) program was that it just didn’t work. Our ninth-grade reading scores are just dismal,” said Sharon Weitzman, research coordinator for Designs for Change, a citizens group in Chicago that issued a harsh indictment of the school system’s reading program.

“We found that students had to work through page after page of workbooks. Teachers were judged on how well they (pupils) were mastering the skills, not on how well they were reading,” Weitzman said. “It was a monster that gobbled up all the reading time.”

The national study of reading released in May found the same pattern occurring throughout the nation.

“Students spend up to 70% of the time allocated for reading instruction in independent practice or ‘seat work.’ Most of this time is spent on workbooks and skills sheets,” said a report of the Commission on Reading organized by the National Institute of Education. “The silent reading time in the typical primary school class is seven or eight minutes per day, or less than 10% of the total time devoted to reading.”

The reading commission urged educators to move away from teaching reading as a set of isolated skills. Instead, it recommended a return to the more traditional approach of having children read stories and books.

“If you want children to love to read, you have to give them real books and fantastic stories. They are not going to love to read with ditto sheets and workbooks,” said Beatrice Cullinane, a New York University professor and past president of the International Reading Assn.

School officials are quick to note that children do need early instruction, typically through a phonics approach, that will help them recognize and sound out words. But soon after, they can benefit from reading and talking about real stories.

“The emphasis is shifting now toward literature and more writing,” said Lorna Round, assistant superintendent for elementary education in the Los Angeles school district. “The approach (in recent years) has been too mechanical. The skills have been divorced from content.”

She cited an example from a second-grade book that contained a brief story titled “The Big Enormous Carrot.” But rather than offering an interesting story, the passage is in fact a set piece for teaching the students words with “double consonants” like “hugged” and “saddened.”

“These workbooks are still popular nationwide. But why would kids want to read if that’s all they saw?” Round asked.

In the last year, top education officials have been pushing hard to get teachers to use more books and stories in class and to teach reading through subjects like history, literature and science.

Because they lack general knowledge in these areas, many students cannot understand what they read, researchers say. E.D. Hirsch Jr., a University of Virginia professor, calls this knowledge “cultural literacy” and contends that students must have it to become successful readers.

For example, an educated Englishman may have trouble reading and understanding American sports pages, while an American might have the same trouble with sports coverage in British newspapers. Both can read, but they lack the knowledge about the sports needed to fully comprehend what they are reading.

Hirsch said American readers need a “broad, but superficial knowledge” about the nation’s history and culture to be able to understand what they read. He set forth a list of examples of people and places: “Pre-1965 people: John Adams, Benedict Arnold, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Aaron Burr, John C. Calhoun” and so on through the alphabet. Under geography, he added, “Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Baltic Sea, Black Sea.” Under “literary and mythic heritage, he listed “Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, David and Goliath, Humpty Dumpty” and others.

U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett has often cited Hirsch’s work in arguing for more teaching of history, literature and science in the schools. The national reading experts cited the same theory as further evidence of why the schools should not waste too much time on teaching reading as a set of tiny skills.

“At present, our education is long on technique and short on tradition. Teaching skills is important but knowledge is at least as important,” Bennett said. “We should want every student to know who said ‘I am the state’ and who said ‘I have a dream’. They should know where the Amazon flows, about isosceles triangles and ellipses, and what the First Amendment means. They should know about the Donner party and slavery, and Shylock, Hercules and Abigail Adams, where Ethiopia is and why there is a Berlin Wall.”

Student Motivation

Since winning election as school superintendent in 1982, Honig has been encouraging teachers and school officials throughout California to motivate their students to take part in independent reading programs. Further, Honig has suggested that schools need to use reading in the upper elementary grades as a way to teach history, science and literature, rather than treating it as a separate subject in itself.

Los Angeles Schools Supt. Harry Handler, in a recent speech to the district’s 700 principals, stressed that the goal of reading instruction is comprehension, not just recognizing words.

“It’s easy to believe you are making great strides in reading when you are teaching word recognition,” Handler said. “Our analysis shows that we are teaching the mechanical skills of ‘decoding’ (words). We are weakest in comprehension.

“Current practices in delivering reading instruction haven’t worked and aren’t working now for far too many children,” Handler told the principals. He urged primary teachers to use “high quality” literature like “Charlotte’s Web” and “Johnny Tremain” to teach reading.