Decades Later, Frustrated Father Is Phonics Guru

Alarmed by his son’s insipid textbooks, an electrical engineer named Blouke Carus sat down at his kitchen table in 1962 and transformed the way children would one day learn to read.

With a stack of reference books at his side, he cobbled the skills of phonics with classic children’s literature--and peddled his program to schools.

For decades, this frustrated father from Peru, Ill., was ignored, even ridiculed.

Now he has become the darling of California’s phonics revolution, with schools spending millions for the word drills and writings he compiled.

Carus may not be a household name, but the program he created--Open Court--is becoming a fixture in the state’s classrooms. His evolution from pariah to savior is a lesson in persistence and California’s ever changing educational currents.

“People didn’t take us seriously in the beginning,” said Carus, a 72-year-old Caltech graduate, “but we knew we were on the right track.”

Open Court can now be found in one of every eight elementary schools in the state. That’s up from one in every 100 schools just five years ago.

Los Angeles Unified is the latest convert: 92% of the district’s low-performing campuses--372 elementary schools--recently picked Open Court when given three options.

Yet the program that inspires so much faith also offends many teachers. Some object to its heavy emphasis on phonics exercises, saying its approach doesn’t work for all students. Others chafe at the thick instruction manuals that dictate every detail of the daily lesson, even telling teachers when to praise a student’s work. Privately, skeptics call it “Open Cult,” a reference to the way teachers fawn over the textbooks as if they are a cure-all for academic failure.

“Learning doesn’t need to be smashed down your throat,” said one kindergarten teacher from Northern California who asked that her name not be used. “There is no one program that will fit all children.”

Nonetheless, momentum is building as schools from Santa Ana to Sacramento report substantial gains in test scores among students using the curriculum. And it’s being championed by a variety of leaders among the state’s educational elite.

David Packard, son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, has invested $40 million from a family foundation in 27 school districts that use Open Court. The money pays for training teachers who use the program.

State’s Poor Scores Spark Call for Change

Open Court’s fortunes began to change in 1995, after California learned that its fourth-graders ranked dead last in a national test of reading skills. State leaders launched billions of dollars worth of reforms, including a return to step-by-step phonics instruction in the primary grades.

New textbooks were required to feature explicit lessons on breaking down words into their sounds and letters. Open Court fit the bill.

Meanwhile, Carus and his son, Andre, sold their struggling textbook operation--for a loss--in 1996 to The McGraw-Hill Cos. The publishing giant began to flex the kind of marketing muscle that Carus could only dream about.

Suddenly, the obscure textbooks that had been collecting dust for years began to attract a broader following, surprising both Carus and McGraw-Hill, which had bought Open Court simply to fill a phonics niche in its portfolio.

“I doubt that anybody knew what was going to happen,” said Chet Foraker, national vice president of sales for SRA/McGraw-Hill, the division that markets the program.

Open Court, which sold about $22 million worth of textbooks when the Caruses sold it, now generates about three times that amount, with California driving the increase, Blouke Carus said. SRA/McGraw-Hill will not confirm sales figures.

Those who monitor schools in California also attribute Open Court’s growing influence to the tendency of educators to jump on a bandwagon.

“I think Open Court exemplifies the trendiness that oftentimes marks education reform,” said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley education professor who co-directs the think tank Policy Analysis for California Education.

“Public educators in California tend to jump at the most brightly colored curriculum packets that pop up on the market,” he said.

School districts say they have embraced Open Court because it can raise test scores.

Several of the 27 districts in the Packard project have reported improved test results. In Sacramento City Unified, for example, second-graders jumped 15 percentile points in reading on last year’s Stanford 9 exam over the previous year, compared with a 4-point increase among second-graders statewide.

But administrators in Sacramento and other districts point out that Open Court is only part of a promising formula. Schools, they say, must also provide intensive teacher training in the new curriculum and use test results to shape their instruction.

“There are a lot of pieces that need to be in place,” said Kathy Cooper, an administrator in charge of instruction in Sacramento. “But without a good solid program, you can’t be sure you’re doing the right thing.”

Few schools jumped at Open Court when Carus introduced his curriculum nearly four decades ago. At the time, most American educators were wedded to the popular “Dick and Jane” books. Under the prevailing method of the time, students would memorize words as they read and reread simple stories about the two all-American kids. “Go, Dick, go,” one story begins. “Look Dick, look Jane, look here.”

Carus and his wife, Marianne, discovered the books when their son Andre entered first grade in 1959. The couple were shocked to find that the texts did not teach the phonetic skills that enable children to break down unfamiliar words, the technique that Carus had learned as a child in the public schools of La Salle, about 100 miles southwest of Chicago.

“The books were deadly boring,” he recalled. “The limited vocabulary was total nonsense. We almost had a heart attack.”

Carus set out to design his own reading program that would merge phonics, spelling, comprehension, writing and quality children’s literature.

Carus’ background had hardly prepared him for the task. He had devoted his professional life to science, working in his family’s chemical business and obtaining seven patents for the process of manufacturing potassium permanganate, an oxidizing agent that purifies water.

And so he scoured the Chicago Public Library and read every book he could find--30 in all--on methods of reading instruction.

He also enlisted experts, persuading an English professor named Arther S. Trace Jr. to edit the collection of children’s literature, which would include Mother Goose rhymes, Aesop’s fables and the poetry of John Keats.

For the phonics, he worked with a family friend, Priscilla McQueen, who had spent nearly 20 years teaching reading to dyslexic children and those with speech impairments.

In the summer of 1963, Carus sent news releases to 200 newspapers, announcing his new first-grade program and asking them to review it. Four responded. That year, seven schools in the entire nation bought the textbooks. “It was a time in the wilderness,” Carus recalled.

Textbooks for kindergarten and grades two through six followed over the next several years, each undergoing several revisions from new experts Carus had found. Carus’ wife, who studied English and German literature, also served as editor of the series.

Largely Ignored for Decades

Open Court gained a modest following, but the program remained largely ignored through the 1980s and 1990s as California and much of the nation embraced the philosophy that children learned to read through exposure to good literature.

Although Open Court featured anthologies of children’s literature, it gained a reputation instead as a program that stressed skills over good reading.

Despite Open Court’s fringe status, the Caruses managed to woo several respected figures in the field of literacy scholarship. Among the best known was Marilyn Jager Adams, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Although Adams was courted by several of the nation’s largest publishers after the release of her own book on reading, she chose Open Court in 1991.

“Everybody I talked to said I was nuts to go with Open Court, that they were going to go out of business in the next 10 minutes,” said Adams, who revised the kindergarten and first-grade books to reflect the latest research. “But it was my chance to take all those things from writing my book and give them to teachers and kids.”

Despite many revisions, Open Court remains essentially what Carus originally conceived.

The curriculum has found supporters in the Culver City Unified School District, which adopted it in 1998, bringing consistency to a system that had left reading instruction up to individual teachers.

At Farragut Elementary School, instructors say Open Court’s structure ensures that all children learn the same skills at about the same pace.

Patty Eskridge, who has seen six reading programs come and go during her 24 years in the classroom, is a fan. Like many of her colleagues, Eskridge treats the scripted teacher’s manual with the reverence of a Bible.

What other teachers find repellent, she finds reassuring.

Seated at the front of her first-grade classroom, she peeks into it repeatedly for examples to write on an overhead projector during a lesson on blending long vowels. A few minutes later, as she walks around the room teaching about synonyms, Eskridge again holds the manual at her side.

“If this is the program that teaches kids to read,” Eskridge says, “then this is the program that should stay.”

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Step-by-Step Lessons

A phonics teaching program from the 1960s called Open Court has gained popularity in California schools. But many teachers complain that its heavily scripted lessons don’t allow them to respond to the needs of all their students. Here are two Open Court lesson plans for beginning first graders.

* Source: Open Court Reading Level 1-A