State Poised to Lead U.S. in Reading Reform

A decade after following California’s lead into the treacherous waters of education reform, the nation is keeping close watch as the state rethinks the way it teaches basic reading.

On Wednesday, a special hearing before the Assembly Education Committee delved into the complex issues, and the Capitol hearing room was jammed with textbook publishers, national television networks and some of the top experts in the country eager to see where the state is headed.

“California has always had disproportionate influence in literacy, no matter what direction it was pointed in,” said Richard C. Anderson, a University of Illinois professor who chaired an influential national commission that in 1985 led a call for greater emphasis on helping children comprehend and analyze what they read.

In the 1980s, California was ahead of the nation in responding to that message--that many kids were bored with drills, hated reading and could not discuss the meaning of stories. To fix things, the state’s reading experts declared that repetitive exercises would be discouraged in favor of the best children’s literature. They urged teachers to engage their students in thoughtful discussions of values and to downplay “mechanical” skills such as spelling.

But in emphasizing those elements, the state failed to tell teachers that it also was essential to explicitly teach children about the letters, sounds, syllables and other building blocks of language.

“It was a sin of omission, not a sin of commission,” former state schools chief Bill Honig told the committee. Honig was at the helm when California’s reading programs began to go off-course in the late 1980s. “I was wrong. It was my fault for not being clear enough. We’re not going to make that mistake again.”

Stung by reading test scores that have made them the butt of jokes on late night television shows, California educators have been working for the past year to update their approach, trying to respond to widely accepted research showing that it also is essential to explicitly teach children about the building blocks of language.

Reid Lyon, who directs clinical trials in reading research at 12 sites across the country for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said that 13 years of research prove that unless readers can use sounds and letters to automatically identify words, they will not be able to read fluently.

“If you are a slow, labored reader, about 98% of the time, you’re not going to get a thing out of what you have read,” Lyon said.

In an interview, Lyon said the debate in California over those issues is reverberating nationally. The state’s large size, its $250-million budget this year for new reading textbooks and “California’s traditional role . . . as being on the cutting edge” combine to ensure the state’s influence, he said.

“I think whatever happens here is massively important” for American education and, fortunately, he said, the outcome seems to be based on good research.

Barbara Foorman, a reading researcher at the University of Houston, told the committee her research shows that children need direct instruction in skills to be able to read. Without it, she said, “we can create a curricular disability” that holds kids back.

Other states, including Ohio and Texas, are mounting efforts to restore skills instruction to classrooms. Other states are sure to follow.

The reforms in California gathered steam this week with the announcement of a detailed plan supported by Gov. Pete Wilson to spend what could amount to as much as $175 million to buy textbooks, train teachers and certify that new teachers are familiar with the latest in beginning reading research.

Several witnesses, however, said that many new teachers are still being trained to ignore that research and that schools rarely use it to shape programs.

Although experts nationwide remain divided on how best to teach children to read, that division was not apparent at the hearing, which was called by Assemblyman Steve Baldwin (R-El Cajon), the committee’s chairman, and Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, (D-Novato), the committee’s vice chairwoman.

That consensus is now shared by the governor’s office and the Legislature, which last year unanimously approved a law requiring the approval of books for school districts that include basic spelling and phonics lessons.

“It is the opinion of the committee that the research is very sound and overwhelming that phonics is a superior method of instruction,” Baldwin said.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who a year ago created a task force that raised the state’s awareness of the reading crisis, today plans to set forth a detailed new approach to reading. She will ask the State Board of Education to approve a program that outlines for teachers the best information available about how to teach reading.

Deputy Supt. Ruth McKenna on Wednesday told the committee that the memorandum will “give significant information to teachers” and is “specific enough to give direction but not so specific that they won’t read it.”

The next step, she said, must be the adoption of statewide standards to measure how school districts are doing. Standards are “absolutely necessary if we are going to do the job of teaching children to read.”

Merely going back to what was done before--before recent discoveries of the importance of helping children learn to distinguish the sounds of words--will not improve things, said John Shefelbine, a Cal State Sacramento professor who helps prepare prospective classroom teachers.

“Current programs in phonics vary dramatically and using a poor program in phonics would be worse than not using one at all,” said Shefelbine, who trains his students to teach phonics effectively.