Some Professors Resist State’s Reform Formula

Professor Margaret Moustafa strides into a roomful of novice teachers at Cal State L.A. and takes aim at California’s formula for reading instruction.

Her message is simple: Children should learn to read by identifying parts of words after memorizing stories with teachers. State law says the opposite: Children should learn to read by breaking words into sounds before turning to stories.

“I am not in good conscience going to tell new teachers something works when I know it doesn’t work,” Moustafa says.

The professor sounds like a rebel. She is not alone.

Caught between the dictates of Sacramento and their own convictions, many university instructors are quietly resisting the state’s drive for reform and, critics say, undermining efforts to change the way children learn to read. As advocates of whole-language teaching methods, they are reluctant soldiers in the state’s push toward intensive phonics instruction.

While the feud simmers, policymakers in Sacramento fear that billions of dollars the state is spending on class-size reduction, textbooks and teacher training--all aimed at improving youngsters’ reading--could go to waste unless educators get on board.

“K-12 classrooms are not free-speech zones where anyone can teach what they please,” said Assemblyman Steve Baldwin (R-El Cajon), who wrote the law that requires aspiring teachers to study phonics. “We have a set of standards that people have to follow.”

To ensure that the new standards are followed, the state now requires colleges to certify that they are teaching phonics, and their students must pass a test proving that they understand the approach.

State’s Role Draws Protests

The state’s strong hand in college classrooms has provoked anger at the highest levels of the California State University system, which produces nearly 60% of the state’s teachers.

Cal State’s Academic Senate--the voice for nearly 19,000 instructors--condemned the Legislature earlier this year for threatening academic freedom and ignoring contrary research on early literacy.

Chancellor Charles B. Reed, meanwhile, has publicly chastised the state for legislating a “single prescription” for reading.

“We’re going to follow the law, but we are going to be broader, more comprehensive,” Reed said. “I have a lot of confidence in our faculty. They are the experts.”

Reed’s comments pale next to the pronouncements coming from college campuses.

“It’s unrealistic to expect that classroom instruction will radically change because legislators pass a new bill,” said Jeff McQuillan, a Cal State Fullerton education professor. “No matter how many laws you pass, you can’t shut a professor up.”

The controversy is rooted in competing philosophies over how children learn to read--whether it is a natural act or a skill that must be learned.

There is research to support both sides, but the state has decided that reading is a skill that must be taught through phonics.

Lawmakers have relied on the findings of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and other research centers. Their research indicates that the key to reading lies in the ability to break words into bits of sound--a skill known as “phonemic awareness.”

By mastering sound-letter relationships in an orderly sequence of lessons, children learn to “decode” words automatically, making it easier to concentrate on the meaning of text.

Those theories contrast with the belief that children learn to read by drawing on their own backgrounds and the context of stories--breaking unfamiliar words into their parts after literature is repeatedly read.

That method is aligned with whole language, the approach to reading instruction that is largely blamed for California’s dismal reading test scores of recent years.

Such “whole to part” advocates fear that phonics alone will turn children into “word callers” who can only recognize print without attaching meaning.

“Just because you can decode doesn’t mean you can understand,” said Cynthia McDermott, reading course chairwoman at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

On at least one point, virtually all agree: Children need phonics and literature to become proficient readers. Indeed, the state does not ban the teaching of whole-language methods. But disagreements arise over which step should come first, and on how much phonics instruction is necessary.

The result is a gray area of teacher training that is producing a hodgepodge of lessons rather than the uniform strategy envisioned by lawmakers.

Future teachers are getting more of what the state wants in some classes but are encountering lessons drawn from whole language in others. And, in many classrooms, explicit phonics is presented as an alternative rather than a necessity.

“Nobody argues about the value of phonics,” said Moustafa, the Cal State L.A. professor. “The question is, how you teach it?”

To demonstrate her method, Moustafa recently asked her students to pretend they were 5- and 6-year-olds. She projected a story, “Dan the Flying Man,” on a classroom wall. The tale was written in Arabic script and featured big pictures of Dan flying over a bridge, a train, a house and other objects. Arabic was used to represent how the unfamiliar code of written words would appear to children who cannot yet read.

Moustafa pointed to each word with her index finger as she read in English and again as the students read along with her three more times.

The students split into pairs and repeated the story until each student had memorized it.

“I am Dan the Flying Man. Catch me, catch me, if you can,” they read.

Then came the test.

Moustafa pointed to the word “the” projected on the wall and asked if anyone recognized it. Just four students out of 32 raised hands.

She had the students match the word on the wall to its place in the story by seeing the unfamiliar word in the “flow of the language.” Nearly everyone got it.

“If you teach phonics in isolation, you have no clues to help you out,” she told the class. “This is whole to part. First you understand the whole story. Then you understand the individual words.”

Teaching by Example

Moustafa’s students greeted the lesson enthusiastically.

One of them, Mario Alcocer, applied it a few days later in his own classroom at Park Avenue Elementary in Cudahy--reading a story with his third- and fourth-graders several times, asking them to recall favorite words and then breaking down words.

“As a practitioner, it feels right,” said Alcocer, who is working under an emergency credential. “It makes sense.”

Moustafa did not use the traditional method favored by the state for breaking down words. Her students broke the word “pin” into its consonant and vowel parts, P-IN. In traditional phonics, they would have broken it into each letter sound, P-I-N.

Nonetheless, Moustafa said, her lessons meet the state’s guidelines because she teaches students to break down words into their parts in an explicit, systematic way.

Teacher credentialing officials in Sacramento aren’t so sure.

As a result of inquiries from The Times, state officials have asked the Cal State L.A. program to ensure that its instructors follow the guidelines in its certification document, which calls for aspiring teachers to get explicit phonics and phonemic awareness.

“If there’s been a misunderstanding, it needs to be corrected,” said Linda Bond, director of government relations for the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

State education officials once embraced the type of lessons Moustafa offers.

In 1987, the state turned abruptly from phonics to whole-language reading instruction that emphasized the importance of children acquiring skills through exposure to literature.

But test scores a few years later showed California schoolchildren struggling with reading. In 1994, the state’s fourth-graders ranked below Mississippi and Louisiana on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The scores alarmed state education officials and lawmakers, and led to a spate of new laws aimed at returning phonics and spelling to classrooms.

Millions of dollars were budgeted for new textbooks, reduced class sizes and a statewide test to gauge progress. Millions more went to train teachers in the explicit phonics methods championed by the state.

Testing for Phonics

Seeking to ensure that colleges of education got on board, lawmakers took the unprecedented step of requiring campuses to certify that they were teaching phonics, and having teacher candidates take tests to prove they understood the method.

As of this month, aspiring teachers are required to pass the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment--RICA--to get a teaching credential. About 18,000 teaching candidates will take the test over the next year.

So far, 80% of the 1,428 people who took the first rounds of the test passed. Some lawmakers and education officials wonder if the high pass rate is a sign that the test is too easy. Education professors see it as vindication that they are preparing students in the basics.

But the assemblyman who wrote the law creating the test is disturbed by the number of students flunking the exam.

“A 1-in-5 failure rate is not something to brag about for colleges of education,” said Assemblyman Jim Cunneen (R-San Jose). “It concerns me when we are ramping up the hiring of new teachers.”

Many professors object to the test and the certification altogether, calling them intrusions by the state in the classroom.

“It has been personally insulting to have people who are not as studied in my field prescribe how I will practice my professional work,” said McDermott, the Cal State Dominguez Hills professor. A colleague who asked to remain anonymous added: “What we have in the state right now is McCarthyism.”

Policymakers say the phonics initiative is not censorship but an attempt to get colleges and elementary schools on the same page.

“Is it academic freedom for professors to continue doing what is not in the best interest of children?” asked Marion Joseph, a member of the State Board of Education and an outspoken advocate of phonics. “My heart is broken for children, but my heart is also broken for teachers who are not prepared.”

Students Divided Also

The debate is alive and well in professor Cara Garcia’s class. Garcia is busy arming her Pepperdine University students with an arsenal of reading methods.

First she plays a video sanctioned by the state that shows an explicit phonics lesson, fast-forwarding through some classroom segments. “Get the picture?” she asks.

Then she demonstrates what she calls the “language experience approach” in which children read stories or sing songs with their teachers and talk about the experience as instructors jot down the comments and then teach the children to read their own dictation.

Her students are left to figure out which of the very different approaches is best. As Garcia’s lesson draws to a close, a debate erupts.

“This language experience approach is not connecting with me at all as a way to learn to read,” one student says. “I want to teach the rules.”

Garcia seeks to reassure the student.

“It’s not like the whole-language approach is going to do away with all those rules,” she says.

A second student joins in.

“For children to understand something, they need to relate it to prior experiences and background information.”

Garcia gives her opinion.

“I personally don’t think you can drill skills into a person,” she says. “It’s so arbitrary.”

But a third student wants those very skills and drills.

“I learned through phonics and I’m fine,” the young woman says. “There are certain things that need to be spit out.”