O.C. Tackles ‘Whole Language’ Reform : Schools Closing Book on ‘Dick and Jane’ Era

When Orange County’s 28 school districts open for the fall semester this week, students and their teachers will return to a near-revolution in education.

From high school accounting classes to elementary school art courses, a fundamental change is taking place in schools this year in the way children learn to read and write. Called the “whole language” approach to education, it is part of a series of statewide reforms. And for one thing, it means no more “Dick and Jane.”

Spelling and grammar textbooks are out. Whole literary works are in for elementary schoolchildren. High school students will have to do more writing in all their classes, from industrial arts to physical education.

“We no longer will have a (primer) that has stuff like, ‘See Spot run,’ or that asks you five spelling words,” said Dennis Gibbs, director of elementary education for Irvine Unified School District. “There no longer will be a vocabulary list that every fifth-grader should know. Now, you will read a piece of literature, and within that context you learn spelling words, you learn vocabulary.”

Back to Basics

This new approach is part of the state’s back-to-basics reforms, which call for changes in the language arts curriculum this year. Some school districts are implementing the program in stages, but in just about every Orange County district, teachers have been preparing for the new wave by attending workshops and seminars all summer.

As teachers last week readied new lesson plans and attended one last seminar on the sweeping reforms before the opening of school, administrators grappled with other pressing issues, such as growth. Enrollment overall in county schools will increase by nearly 2%, to 353,522, but it marks the sixth consecutive year of growth in the schools.

For Capistrano Unified School District in the fast-growing South County, it meant adding 52 portable classrooms, or the equivalent of two elementary schools.

“South County is booming, there’s no getting around it,” said Jackie Cerra, spokeswoman for the Capistrano district, where enrollment this fall is projected to jump 8% over last year, making it one of the fastest growing districts in Orange County. (Placentia Unified leads the county with a projected growth this fall of 9%, but much of that is attributed to its merger with Yorba Linda School District.)

The Santa Ana Unified School District, the county’s largest, is opening a new high school--the all high-tech Century High in southeastern Santa Ana--as part of an ambitious building plan to accommodate continued growth.

South County Growth

And the problem of growth is expected to get worse before it gets better. A state report released two weeks ago that examined birth rates and population trends predicts Orange County school enrollment will soar 27% in the next decade.

Yet at the other end of the scale, a handful of Orange County districts are suffering from a decade of deep declines in enrollment, and as a result, are struggling to make ends meet without cutting into educational programs. Huntington Beach Union High School District, for example, will begin the school year with about 50 fewer teachers than last year. The cutbacks--both through attrition and laying off of temporary teachers--has prompted students and parents to protest that many of the school’s best and brightest teachers were leaving, jeopardizing arts and science programs.

Still, the biggest change facing students and their teachers this year is the new emphasis on reading and writing.

The subjects aren’t new to schools, of course. But this year, spelling, grammar and phonics no longer will be taught separately; instead, they will be taught as part of learning to read books or excerpts from literary works. And students will be have to write about what they learn. At both junior high and high school levels, writing and more reading will be emphasized throughout the curriculum.

For the Garden Grove Unified School District, the reforms meant spending $1.5 million to buy all new textbooks for language arts throughout the schools. And these new books are, for the most part, anthologies of literature, not texts produced for the express purpose of teaching a particular skill.

Reading-Writing Emphasis

Last year, four Garden Grove schools instituted the new curriculum as a pilot program. Now, every school in the district will emphasize reading and writing. And writing will be emphasized in every class, not just in courses in language arts.

“We’re all using writing as a tool for learning, because writing mirrors thinking,” Michael Carr, a writing specialist who is also a teacher in Carlsbad, told a group of 45 Garden Grove teachers at one workshop last week.

“There is nothing wrong in the way you and I were taught, but there was an over-reliance on testing, an over-reliance on short answers,” Carr told them. “You need to know that what we got was an emphasis on editing skills, not on thinking skills.”

Instead, Carr said, teachers should be making assignments that encourage creativity and challenge thinking in all subject areas.

Even in her computer and business accounting classes, teacher Benita Dill of La Quinta High School in the Garden Grove district said the new curriculum will be evident.

“Take accounting: You might ask the students to write about the difference between manual accounting and computerized accounting; and why they think one method is better than the other,” she said. “We don’t want them just regurgitating something. We want them to show us, not just tell us.”

More Work for Teachers

The new curriculum also means more work for teachers.

More writing means more papers to grade, Dill said. If a teacher has 150 students a week, the workload can be formidable. For some, it also may mean rewriting lesson plans they have relied on for years.

“In Garden Grove, the staff is getting older, and I would imagine that there is some resistance to this,” she said. “It’s a lot of work, and I know some teachers are looking at some of the models and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got enough to do already.’ ”

The whole-language approach signals a swing of the educational pendulum from the methods of the ‘70s, when reading and writing was taught by breaking the task into small, measurable skills such as diagraming sentences.

Educators say poor test scores showed what a dismal failure that approach was. And a 1985 national study, “On Becoming a Nation of Readers,” revealed that 70% of the reading time in elementary classrooms was devoted to tasks such as filling in blanks or underlining answers on work sheets.

A key aim of the new approach is to teach writing skills within the context of real literature, said Susan Despenas, deputy administrator in the elementary division for Santa Ana Unified, which is spending $38 per elementary student on anthologies.

“We want kids to love to read--that’s the bottom line,” Despenas said. “In order to do that, they have to learn to appreciate literature. We want to make them lifelong readers.”

‘Wanting More’

Irvine Unified’s Gibbs said the materials used in school should leave the students wanting more.

“We won’t even pass out the books (on) the first day of school. We want to explain to them what they’re getting, because we want them to get excited,” he said. “We want parents to say, ‘My child is dying to get that book and start reading.’ Maybe this will be the first time in recent memory where that is happening.”

Gibbs said they hope to “encourage children to listen, to speak, to write and to think when they are interacting with literature.”

“The intent is to make reading and this whole process come alive--to make it as exciting for children as it is for people who are avid readers when they enjoy reading a good piece of literature,” he said.

In Capistrano Unified schools, teachers will be reading from 3-by-3-foot versions of books such as “Amelia Bedelia” for second-graders or “Horton Hatches the Egg” for first-graders, while students follow in their own, smaller versions of the same book.

Afterward, they might listen to tape recordings that explore some of the phonics used in the stories, or work on computers to compose stories, with first-graders using phonetic spellings where they have to, said Bill Eller, assistant superintendent in charge of instruction.

‘Risk-Free Environment’

“We want to teach them to write in a risk-free environment,” he said, explaining that spelling will be emphasized more in second grade and beyond. “They (first-graders) can read their own stories beautifully, even if we can’t understand them, and children can read each other’s stories, and they make absolutely perfect sense.”

In Eller’s view, it’s time that teaching methods for reading and writing caught up with the complex world of fast-paced communication in which today’s children live.

“Many teachers have taught reading or learned to read the way you and I did--’See Dick Run.’ But if you think about that concept for a moment, it’s very simplistic way to look at the world, in three-word sentences,” he said.

“There is this complex world out there and these kids can absorb it. Kids can communicate in the sophisticated world and they operate quite nicely. But somehow, with the (old style textbooks), we restrict them.”

ENROLLMENT IN ORANGE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS Unified School Districts (grades K-12)

%Increase/ District Last Year Projected Decrease Placentia 18,021 19,772 9.7% Capistrano 23,391 25,272 8.0% Irvine 19,778 20,643 4.4% Orange 24,357 25,172 3.3% Brea-Olinda 4,482 4,595 2.5% Santa Ana 40,029 40,797 1.9% Tustin 10,012 10,200 1.9% Los Alamitos 6,050 6,140 1.5% Saddleback Valley 23,487 23,640 0.7% Garden Grove 36,164 36,177 0.0% Newport-Mesa 16,042 15,977 -0.4% Laguna Beach 2,094 2,078 -0.8%

Union High School Districts (grades 6-12 or 8-12)

%Increase/ District Last Year Projected Decrease Fullerton Joint Union 12,130 12,038 -0.8% Anaheim Union 21,863 21,500 -1.7% Huntington Beach Union 14,067 13,435 -4.5%

Elementary School Districts (grades K-6 or K-8)

%Increase/ District Last Year Projected Decrease Magnolia 4,499 4,641 3.2% Savanna 1,831 1,880 2.7% Cypress 3,530 3,616 2.4% Westminster 7,426 7,574 2.0% Fullerton 10,221 10,400 1.8% Anaheim City 13,133 13,325 1.5% Buena Park 3,954 4,008 1.4% Habra City 4,382 4,435 1.2% Lowell Joint 2,472 2,500 1.1% Centralia 4,224 4,260 0.9% Huntington Beach City 5,514 5,514 0.0% Ocean View 8,400 8,244 -1.9% Fountain Valley 5,964 5,689 -4.6% TOTAL 347,517 353,522 1.8%

Source: Individual School Districts BACK TO SCHOOL IN ORANGE COUNTY

School begins on the following days for Orange County public schools:

Tuesday in: Orange Unified; Santa Ana Unified; Fullerton Joint Union High School District; Huntington Beach Union High School District; Buena Park City School District; Fountain Valley School District; Fullerton School District; Huntington Beach City School District; La Habra City School District; Ocean View School District, and Lowell Joint School District.

Wednesday in: Brea-Olinda Unified, and high schools in Tustin Unified.

Thursday in: Capistrano Unified, Garden Grove Unified, Irvine Unified, Laguna Beach Unified, Los Alamitos Unified, Saddleback Valley Unified, and elementary and middle schools in Tustin Unified.

Monday, Sept. 11, in: Placentia Unified; Newport-Mesa Unified; Anaheim Union High School District; Anaheim City School District; Centralia School District; Cypress School District; Magnolia School District; Savanna School District, and Westminster School District.

Source: Individual school districts