‘Dick-and-Jane’ Texts Get Boot From Board : New Readers Emphasizing Classic Children’s Stories Approved by State Education Panel

Goodby to “Dick-and-Jane”-style readers, and welcome back to “Charlotte’s Web,” “The Velveteen Rabbit” and other classic children’s tales.

That, in essence, was the State Board of Education’s message Friday when it approved new reading textbooks for use by California’s 3 million elementary school children.

During a meeting in Monterey, the board gave the boot to dull, formula-bound books, exemplified by the “see-Jane-run” readers, and granted the state’s official stamp of approval to brightly written texts filled with high-quality children’s literature.

‘Grab Kids’ Emotions’

“The sterile prose you see in a lot of books is out,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who led the charge against “dumbed-down” readers that rely on unimaginative, formulaic writing. “As a whole, the books that got chosen reflect what we are trying to get--better stories and better characters that grab kids’ emotions and get them to think and imagine.”

In addition to approving new reading books, the board adopted seven new English and grammar book series. It also rejected a staple of elementary school life: spelling books, drill cards, fill-in-the-blank workbooks and work sheets offered by publishers. The board accepted the reasoning of the state’s Curriculum Commission that such materials teach skills in isolation and take classroom time away from actually reading books and writing sentences, paragraphs and stories.

The board also voted to require publishers to tell readers when stories have been abridged or adapted.

The new texts--17 series of books for kindergarten through the eighth grade--will determine to a significant degree how reading and writing will be taught in California for the next six years, until the next state reading book adoption takes place.

In California and 21 other states, textbooks are chosen by the state education agency. California school districts must choose books from the official list if they use state dollars to purchase them. They may use district money to buy other books.

Because California is widely acknowledged as a leader in textbook improvements and because it has more elementary and high school students than any other state, its decision could help decide what textbooks will be used in other states.

The board’s selection of new books was the culmination of a controversial process involving a small army of reading specialists--from classroom teachers and principals to district curriculum coordinators--who evaluated thousands of new books submitted by publishers seeking a piece of the lucrative California textbook market.

‘Everyone Was Pleased’

Board President Francis Laufenberg said the publishers who won a spot on California’s approved list of books “went out and changed their books to comply (with California’s needs). I think everyone was pleased with the results.”

The winners included such major publishing houses as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Houghton Mifflin, but there also were big names among the losers, such as Science Research Associates and Scribner-Laidlaw.

Contrasted with the readers schools now use, the new books contain more classic tales, such as Aesop’s fables, as well as stories by such respected authors as Mark Twain and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Teachers contacted Friday said they were pleased by the board’s approval of books that emphasize good literature.

‘Motivated and Interested’

“Kids have told me that stories about Dick and Jane or Buffy and Mack are boring,” said Lisa Izutsu, a third-grade teacher at Hamlin Street School in Canoga Park. “Those stories don’t spark their imagination or their creativity. But (children’s literature) really gets them motivated and interested in reading.”

The textbook decision was postponed last month when, in testimony before the board, leading reading experts criticized the state’s textbook selection process as “deeply flawed” and resulting in recommendation of books that actually were inconsistent with the state’s own guidelines on the teaching of reading.

A state evaluation panel, made up of 82 reading teachers, curriculum specialists, principals and school librarians, reviewed more than 7,000 reading books, spelling books, teachers’ manuals and student workbooks over four days last June. Its ratings formed the basis for the Curriculum Commission’s recommendations to the State Board of Education.

In addition to rejecting 17 out of 33 reading series submitted by textbook publishers, the commission criticized books that, through endless memorization and drills, taught reading as a series of isolated skills--such as learning phonetic principles and vocabulary words or picking out main ideas.

Emphasis on Quality

It favored a “holistic” approach that connects the teaching of reading and writing and emphasizes that students should learn to read by spending time actually reading good literature.

According to Richard C. Anderson, director of the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, a prime example of the problems with the state’s textbook evaluation process was the curriculum commission’s failure to recommend readers published by Open Court, a Peru, Ill., company that got its start 25 years ago with books that defied the “Dick-and-Jane” standard of the times.

Open Court’s books received only a partial endorsement from the commission, which approved the company’s books for grades three to six but rejected the ones for kindergarten through second grade. On Friday, however, the board overruled the commission and added Open Court to the list. It also added Foundations for Learning, a series that some educators praised as particularly successful in teaching inner-city children to read.

Andre Carus, Open Court’s president, said that while he is pleased with the board’s decision, he still believes that the evaluation process “deserves scrutiny, not for its rectitude but for its accuracy.”