Reading Blues

Their teachers’ lesson plans say the students are getting the high school classics--Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea,” Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and, of course, Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

That’s the theory.

The reality is that in schools across the state, from white-collar suburbs of San Francisco to inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, high school teachers say those are books that many of their students simply cannot read.

“We find that these kids are just not keeping up, and since we don’t have reading specialists anymore, we can’t give them the help they need,” said Anastasia Condas, an English teacher in the affluent San Ramon Valley east of Oakland.

Nationally, reading levels have remained stable. Nationwide tests conducted in 1996 show that, on average, 17-year-olds are reading no worse than they did 25 years ago. African American and Latino high school seniors, in particular, are reading significantly better today than in the past, the test scores show.

But in California, the picture appears to be notably different--and worse. California has had no statewide tests--they began this spring after a decade-long absence. But according to many middle and high school teachers, reading levels have declined sharply in the state in recent years.

A Los Angeles Times poll of California teachers found 45% of high school teachers saying that no more than half their students are able to read the normally assigned books. An even higher percentage of middle school teachers, 53%, said the same thing.

The result, teachers say, is that they now have to choose between sapping the academic rigor of their lessons by dumbing them down, or writing off those students--often a majority--who are far behind.

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It’s a choice that angers high school teachers who are trained to deal with the subtleties of motivation in “Macbeth” or the causes of the American Revolution, but not the intricacies of phonics and breaking words into syllables.

“It isn’t our job in high school to teach reading, it’s to teach thought,” said Camille Konigsberg, who chairs the English department at Manual Arts High School, southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

But her colleague Linda Caillet says that although her students are smart, they just can’t read. So, instead of having them write essays, she often lets them draw pictures.

“They love to draw, so sometimes what they miss in reading, they get in a different way,” she said.

Larry Klinkhammer, who teaches 10th-grade English at Katella High School in Anaheim, said he noticed the reading skills of his students beginning to slide about 10 years ago. And one of the biggest problems, he said, is the limited range of students’ vocabularies.

On a quiz, one student writes that an illegitimate baby is one that cannot read. Another said “articulate” means to do something well, as in: “My mom was told she’s very articulate because of the neat sweatshirts she designs.”

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Why is California falling behind?

Some attack TV and video games for distracting students. Others talk about the destruction of the two-parent family.

Rising rates of child poverty are widely mentioned as a culprit. So is the dramatic increase in students whose native language is not English and the ineffectiveness of the state’s bilingual education methods.

But underlying all those problems, many reading experts now blame the state’s plunge in the late 1980s into an instructional philosophy called “whole language.”

That philosophy downplayed explicit lessons in phonics--the sounds of letters--in favor of lots of writing exercises and repeated exposure to books. The idea was that most students would pick up the “code” of the alphabet more or less naturally.

For many students, it didn’t happen.

Two years ago, after the state’s fourth-graders came out at the bottom of a 39-state assessment of reading skills, state lawmakers pulled the plug on “whole language” and passed bills requiring lessons, textbooks and teacher training focusing on phonics.

But it was too late for the current crop of middle and high school students.

Even if students are able to read the words, teachers say, they have trouble picking up the main idea of what they’re reading. They have particular trouble gleaning information from nonfiction books, which have been downplayed in the past decade in favor of literature.

“It’s not that they can’t laboriously get through a line,” said Marion Joseph, a State Board of Education member who has been a key force in addressing the reading problems of younger children.

“But you have to be able to read well. You have to be fluent. You have to be fast. That is the point.”

Experienced teachers say that most children who are likely to have reading difficulties are identifiable in kindergarten. They come to school not knowing the alphabet, cannot associate the sound of “a” with “apple” and, crucially, lack what experts call “phonemic awareness.” That is the understanding that, for example, changing the “c” in “cot” to “r” produces “rot.”

Taught well, most of those pupils can overcome those obstacles. But they need to be addressed early on. Children who do not read at least moderately well by the end of third grade, long-term studies show, have a very poor chance of even graduating from high school.

John Shefelbine, a Cal State Sacramento reading expert, said poor readers fall behind rapidly beginning in fourth grade.

“These books in the fourth grade on up are written with a kind of academic language that is quite different from conversational language,” Shefelbine said. “Students who don’t read much find themselves faced with learning . . . in what is almost like a second language to them.”

Until recently, high schools have largely avoided dealing with the reading problem, passing it along, in turn, to community colleges and Cal State campuses, where statistics show that well over half the entering students require remedial reading courses.

Now, however, high schools are starting to recognize that the problem will not go away and that it undermines all aspects of their academic programs.

The state last year set aside money to train middle school teachers to teach reading. This year, Gov. Pete Wilson is proposing to invest more than $30 million for addressing the needs of high school teachers as well.

Reading consultant Sheila Mandel is already busy training high school teachers up and down the state to use a curriculum that includes basic phonics, grammar, punctuation and spelling.

The lessons go all the way back to the beginning, meaning that high schoolers are doing activities common to preschoolers, such as spelling out “B-A-T” and “R-A-T” using plastic letters.

Spending valuable time on such basic skills bothers some teachers. But Mandel said nothing else matters unless high school graduates can read well enough to get a job or gain job skills.

“We’re finally convincing schools that it’s more important to make them literate than to pretend that they are actually learning anything,” Mandel said.