January 9, 2002
Education Bill Urges New Emphasis on Phonics
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
ASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — The education bill President Bush signed into law today includes an ambitious federal commitment to teaching reading, which is expected to emphasize phonics over other methods of early reading instruction.
In two separate initiatives, the administration is requiring schools to adopt "scientifically based" ways to teach reading, a phrase that education officials interpret as referring to systematic phonics in contrast to other approaches. While not explicitly requiring phonics instruction, the administration has sent educators throughout the country some 328,000 booklets summarizing the findings of a Congressional National Reading Panel that in 2000 highlighted the success of phonics in giving children the building blocks for reading.
The effort is expected to heat up a debate between educators who emphasize teaching children to read through immersion in good books, an approach known as whole language, and those who believe in phonics, which drills children in sounding out letter combinations and words. Most teachers try to balance the two approaches, but the Bush administration has contended that the balance has shifted too greatly away from phonics.
While educators contend that the bill allows for a certain latitude in defining research-based approaches to teaching reading, the administration's promotion of the main findings of the National Reading Panel report is controversial.
The report concludes that systematically teaching children phonics contributes to enduring growth in reading skills. It also found that children's ability to connect sounds with letters when they enter kindergarten is a strong indicator of whether they will do well at reading.
Critics complain that the 500-page initial report examined only reading studies based on laboratory models, thereby ignoring the vast majority of more qualitative studies on whole language approaches to reading, and that government summaries of the report are simplifying its conclusions to the point of distortion.
Alan Farstrup, executive director of the International Reading Association, said: "We are not against phonics, but the danger is that a superficial reading of National Reading Panel report and superficial interpretation could lead to a narrow and superficial program of instruction. And we don't want to see that."
The administration has pledged at least $900 million a year over six years to the effort to teach reading, and will award the grants on a competitive basis to needy schools. Some $75 million will be awarded directly from Washington for reaching pre- kindergarten reading initiatives.
"I want to change the face of reading instruction across the United States, from an art to a science," said Susan B. Neuman, the assistant secretary of education for elementary and secondary education. "From a science it becomes a mission."
This July, the Department of Education will send education officials around the country guides that will "carefully content analyze all core reading programs to see whether or not they are scientifically based," on the National Reading Panel's findings, Dr. Neuman said. Poor school districts that do not use a standardized reading curriculum "would have to provide evidence they work," she said, adding, "I suggest they purchase a core reading program."
She said the administration was not pressing schools to adopt phonics programs, per se, so much as programs with proven track records, and would insist on strict accountability.
She said the report would play an "essential" role in determining what works in reading.
An article by Elaine M. Garan in Phi Delta Kappan, an educational journal, faulted the report, which claimed to be an overarching analysis of all the research on education, for basing conclusions on phonics on only 38 studies that met its criteria.
While the report emphasizes that reading text and understanding it is the ultimate measure of a technique's effectiveness, Dr. Garan noted, most studies of phonics examined only isolated skills like word recognition, rather than comprehension or fluency. Dr. Garan found that "phonics had no statistically significant impact on tasks requiring authentic application."
She detailed inconsistencies between the original reports of the panel's subcommittees, and the executive and other summaries. For example, she noted that the subcommittee report found that among children over 6, "Phonics instruction appears to contribute only weakly, if at all, in helping poor readers" to "read text and spell words."
"There were insufficient data to draw any conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above 1st grade," the report said.
Dr. Garan and others also note that studies on reading that met the Congressional requirement for scientific rigor were largely done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and focused heavily on children with learning disabilities.
Despite the limitations, she noted, the National Reading Panel's summary describes its analysis as "indicative of what can be accomplished when explicit, systematic phonics programs are implemented in today's classrooms."
Dr. Newman rejected the criticism, saying that studying isolated results from phonics instruction, such as word recognition, constituted a valid approach to research.
Jerry Sroufe, director of governmental relations at the American Education Research Association, said the studies on phonics appeared to him almost self-fulfilling. "If you emphasize phonics, children are better at alphabetics," he said. "But how does that translate into better reading?"