The Right Direction for Reading : Phonics funding proposal is welcome, but balance is needed

This much is true in California’s long, circular debate over reading instruction: First, our fourth-graders now rank at the bottom, with those of Louisiana and Guam, in national tests of reading comprehension. Second, not all children learn to read in the same way.

In the last decade, state education officials have swung far away from the kind of phonics instruction that had been used to teach reading across America for generations. California public school teachers have been pushed to use the so-called whole-language approach, emphasizing stories and discussion as opposed to letter and sound drills.

The whole-language focus is fine for some kids, but it has served many California schoolchildren poorly, as documented by the state’s dismal showing in nationwide testing and the findings of a task force commissioned last year by state schools Supt. Delaine Eastin.

The Eastin task force has recommended that basic skills such as phonics be balanced with the whole-language approach. That conclusion should have been a no-brainer. Unhappily, efforts to implement the panel’s recommendations have bogged down, and hundreds of thousands of students remain on a path to almost certain academic failure because they are not learning to read well.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s new proposal to spend $127 million for phonics instruction reflects his frustration with the slow change. We share that frustration. If the proposal, part of the governor’s 1996-97 budget package, is approved by the Legislature, the funds could provide phonics-based texts for every kindergartener and phonics training for primary-grade teachers.

So far so good. But in embracing traditional reading methods, Wilson and education officials ought to remember that no one method--whether phonics or something else--will work for all children. Phonics should be used along with whole-language techniques, which can be of value in a well-rounded program capable of teaching all young Californians to read.