State Embraces Phonics in Approving New Texts

With hundreds of millions of dollars for publishing companies at stake--along with how a generation of California children will learn to read--the State Board of Education on Thursday adopted a new list of approved textbooks, leaving off two widely used programs that embrace the “whole language” teaching method that has come to dominate California schools over the last eight years.

The decision is a milestone in a nearly two-year campaign by state officials to improve students’ reading performance, which tests have found to be among the worst in the nation. And it demonstrates the state’s willingness to throw its financial weight behind the call for restoring “systematic, explicit” phonics lessons to classrooms.

After hearing two dozen speakers, most endorsing such an approach, the board voted unanimously--with one abstention--to approve 16 instructional programs for use through eighth grade.

From the Bible to McGuffey’s readers to Dick and Jane, the books used to teach reading have always had a profound influence on reading instruction. Those adopted Thursday reintroduce the idea that children’s grasp of phonics should not be left to chance.

Critics had complained that the whole language approach, which became the rage in recent years, failed to teach not only the sounds within words but such basics as spelling.

The whole language approach gained ascendancy in California the last time the state approved a list of textbooks, in 1988. Districts were urged then to purchase those that placed the greatest emphasis on high-quality literature as an antidote to earlier books that had bastardized classic stories to simplify them for younger children.

The books emphasizing literature were pushed hard by the state Department of Education and university curriculum experts, and some zealous principals yanked phonics-based books out of classrooms--often over teachers’ objections.

This time, the approved books include a mix of children’s literature and the frequent writing assignments that characterize whole language, as well as lessons in letters and their sounds that have long been a building block of traditional lessons. Only those books that critics said were entirely lacking in traditional spelling and phonics lessons were excluded.

The approved materials include not only anthologies of stories, but also child-size picture books of only a few pages, classics of children’s literature such as “Stone Soup,” traditional flash cards and--reflecting the growing importance of multimedia computers in classrooms--CD-ROMs. Also on the list are reading series published in Spanish that for the first time are designed to parallel the English-language books day by day.

At the urging of Gov. Pete Wilson, however, board members excluded the works of two publishing companies whose specialty is producing colorfully illustrated “little books” of only a few pages that allow beginning readers to rely on pictures, rather than letters, to figure out words.

Officials from both companies--the Wright Group of Bothell, Wash., and Rigby Education Inc. of Crystal Lake, Ill.--complained that their books had unfairly been made scapegoats for the state’s decline in reading scores.

Rigby books are now used in some fashion in virtually every school in the state and, reflecting that widespread acceptance, more than 700 teachers, administrators and reading specialists sent board members cards and letters in the days leading up to Thursday’s decision, urging that the materials be included on the state’s list.

Publishing executives estimate that the state’s schools could spend nearly $600 million on reading books over the next eight years--and publishers on the list have a leg up in getting some of that money.

Schools can still purchase books not on the list. But they have to get special permission from the state to use more than 30% of their textbook money for that purpose.

Executives for Rigby and Wright would not estimate how much the board’s decision would cost them. But lawyers for both said they will consider going to court to challenge the action.

“We are being denied access to a substantial amount of revenue,” said Steve Korte, Rigby’s president. “California is the No. 1 market for Rigby products.”

He said the company had written the reading program that was rejected specifically to qualify for adoption in California, making sure it included lessons to teach children letters and their sounds. Korte would not say how much the company spent on the enterprise, but publishing executives say developing a reading program can cost $50 million or more.

Thomas C. Wright, the founder of the Wright Group, also declined to estimate the financial impact of the decision. But he said: “I don’t think we should take it lying down because we have been misquoted and misrepresented by unnamed sources. It’s been a very carefully orchestrated opposition campaign and we don’t know by whom.”

But some officials said openly that the materials did not deserve approval. Marian Bergeson, recently appointed by Gov. Wilson as secretary of child development and education, urged the board to resist pressure to “support fancy trends and unproven methodologies.”

Wilson sent the board a letter saying that legislation he signed last year required it to approve books “based on scientifically proven and phonics- and skills-based methods” in order to improve the state’s reading test scores, which in 1995 were among the lowest in the nation.

The process that concluded Thursday began 30 months ago, when the state specified what it wanted from publishers.

Later, after a task force concluded that the state had steered too far from providing children with letter and sound skills essential for fluent reading, the state advised publishers to revamp their products.

Eventually, 18 programs survived scrutiny by two advisory panels. But some board members recommended that the Rigby and Wright materials be dropped, setting off feverish lobbying. The Wright Group even had former Gov. George Deukmejian, now a partner in a Los Angeles law firm, make calls on its behalf.

Although all of the approved books include phonics to some degree, some are such an amalgam of approaches that critics worry that teachers will be confused.

Former state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, now a professor at San Francisco State who specializes in reading instruction, said that most of the publishers “can show you all the bells and whistles in the world, but it’s not an organized system that lays it out for kids, and as a result, most kids won’t put it together.”

Critics cite the first-grade anthology in a textbook series published by Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich that features an award-winning version of the child’s finger play “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as imagined by author Iza Trapani.

In this rendition, the spider is undaunted by being flushed out of the downspout and keeps seeking shelter until it spins its web in a safe perch in a tree branch.

The lesson plans for the rhyme cover 41 pages of the teachers’ manual and include writing exercises, spelling drills, phonics reviews, art, “kinesthenics”--asking children to move as a spider might--and even moral education.

“Children will learn, as the little spider does, that in order to succeed in their world, they too may have to try, try again,” the teachers’ guide says.

* BABY TALK: Infants are able to distinguish words far earlier than believed, researchers contend. A26

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Teaching Methods

Proponents of whole language and phonics-based instruction both agree that teaching children letters and their sounds is important. But they differ on how best to do it.

* WHOLE LANGUAGE: Children start out with simple books and rely heavily on pictures to figure out the words. They are encouraged to notice the first and last letters of words and to guess at those they cannot figure out. By reading simple books repeatedly, students come to memorize a large body of words and then, with the encouragement and guidance of their teacher, begin to notice which letters make which sounds.

* PHONICS: “Systematic, explicit” phonics, which is what state law now requires textbooks to include, starts with teaching children to understand that words can be broken up into sounds and that letters combine to represent those sounds. Lessons are organized so that children learn all of the letter sounds and how they are spelled in an orderly sequence. They are then given chances to practice the phonics knowledge they have gained in so-called decodable books.