Wilson Ties Offer of School Funds to Use of Phonics

Hoping to force changes in the way basic reading is taught in California, Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday offered to spend $127 million on textbooks and teacher retraining with the proviso that skills such as phonics and spelling be stressed.

The move reflects the Wilson administration’s frustration with the slow pace of an overhaul in reading instruction launched last year by state schools chief Delaine Eastin. That effort has bogged down in disagreements over the value of phonics and other fundamental skills and the importance of exposing students to “whole language” teaching methods.

“The bottom line is that instruction currently given to our children stinks,” said a senior Wilson administration official. “It is rare for an executive to get involved to this level of detail in education, but we’ve now seen two generations of failure with the old system, and the governor believes that we have to return to a basic teaching of core subjects, preeminently reading.”

Privately, state Department of Education officials were chagrined at the governor’s insistence on specifying that school districts may spend the money only on programs that emphasize reading fundamentals. But Eastin said Monday that she supports Wilson’s plan.

Eastin had raised the profile of the reading issue last year by declaring a crisis and appointing a task force to advise her on how to raise the state’s poor reading test scores. The task force recommended that basic skills such as phonics be balanced with opportunities to read and discuss compelling literature, as favored by advocates of the whole language philosophy.

National tests had found that six out of 10 of the state’s fourth-graders read at levels below basic understanding, tying California for last with Louisiana among the 39 participating states and ranking it just above the island of Guam.

The wide-ranging plan unveiled Monday by Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s top education advisor, would give school districts $78 million to purchase reading books for students up to the third grade. That amount could grow, officials said, and is in addition to money already allocated for purchasing textbooks.

If approved by the Legislature, Wilson’s proposal would set aside at least $80 per child in the primary grades for purchasing reading books, enough for every child in the state in kindergarten through third grade to receive a full set, , officials said.

The plan also seeks to ensure that all primary grade teachers receive specific training in the importance of letters and letter sounds. To receive a share of the $38 million or more that Wilson wants to spend on training, teachers would have to be instructed in “systematic explicit phonics instruction, phonemic awareness, sound-symbol relationships, decoding” and other elements of reading instruction, according to draft administration documents.

Another $8.5 million would be devoted to reforming university teacher training and school district staff development programs to reflect phonics-intensive methods and to hiring experts in Sacramento to assist school districts. School districts are spending millions of dollars on staff development programs that emphasize the state’s past fascination with whole language, a philosophy that California helped bring to nationwide popularity.

“The governor believes the research has spoken rather emphatically that children must have intensive skills development so that they can read high-quality literature and informational texts,” DiMarco said. “The reading curriculum can no longer be subject to political negotiation. It has to be based on solid research about how children learn and learn best.”

She said that “we’ve waited seven months since the reading task force report and there’s been no change. This has to happen now.”

Eastin attributed the delay after her task force report to an effort to ensure that the state’s new thrust on reading instruction would be accepted by teachers and experts.

She was set to release a policy statement today that emphasizes the importance of phonics and teaching children to understand that every word is a string of sounds, as new research suggests is essential for fluent reading.

That statement is to be considered Thursday for adoption by the State Board of Education and would be distributed to help school districts statewide shape their reading programs. On Wednesday, the Assembly Education Committee will conduct a special hearing at which nationally recognized experts will talk about how best to teach reading.

At Eastin’s urging, Wilson had included $100 million in his budget proposal in January to address the reading crisis. She had hoped to dole out most of it in local grants and use some to add reading experts to her staff, but she agreed Monday to Wilson’s new conditions.

Eastin downplayed the significance of Wilson making political marks on the reading issue.

“I’m just glad for the interest and the involvement,” said Eastin, a Democrat. “Better this than a proposal to cut $2.3 billion from schools,” she said, referring to the governor’s proposed 15% tax cut and its effect on education.

“Clearly, he wants to get some credit,” Eastin said. “And if the price of getting kids $100 million . . . is giving the governor some credit, then I’m willing to do that.”

She said Wilson’s proposal to emphasize basic skills instruction and phonics may be necessary to close a serious gap in teacher training programs that have de-emphasized phonics over the years. But, she vowed, “We’re going to keep this thing in balance.”

For Wilson, the plan marks a new level of involvement in education. He has decried the failures of public education in his State of the State speech the last two years, but has promoted giving local school districts greater freedom from state strictures as a way to encourage reform. Otherwise, he has rarely become deeply involved in the details of school policy issues. But in addition to the strings it wants to attach to the state funds, the Wilson administration disclosed Monday that it wants to require that $34 million from a controversial federal program called Goals 2000 be spent only on reading programs.

Wilson had objected to taking the federal money because he feared that it would give Washington too much control over local schools. He finally accepted it a few weeks ago, however, after winning guarantees that the state could spend it as it pleased. His plan to spend the money only on reading instruction means that districts will have to cancel their plans to use the money for a variety of purposes.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, had planned to spend the $2.6 million it expected to receive on substitute teachers, allowing regular teachers at 219 campuses to attend professional development sessions.

Wilson’s reading package also would require, for the first time, that all new teachers demonstrate that they are competent to teach phonics and to diagnose students’ reading difficulties.

The governor’s proposal passed its first test Monday without objection from the three-member Senate subcommittee.

Backers of whole language, which emphasizes discussing good literature and becoming fluent in sounds and letters in the process of writing and reading, will no doubt fear that its focus on teaching those skills explicitly and directly will bring about a return to boring drills. And the state university system may oppose, on grounds of academic freedom, the governor’s still sketchy idea of rewriting the course work for a teaching credential.

Barbara Kerr, a kindergarten and first-grade teacher who is secretary-treasurer of the California Teachers Assn. union, said the governor’s focus on teacher training is important and potentially valuable.

But, she said, “You shouldn’t mandate from Sacramento what every school and every school district needs in terms of reading.”