He only did that after a major study showing California high school grads had a functional illiteracy rate of 60%. Too hard to ignore.
Agreed; a plummet down to a 60% literacy rate after replacing phonics with whole language guessing methods is a hard sell to keep promoting it as an effective method of instruction.
Those High-School grads didn't learn to read (or not learn to read, as the case may be) when Davis was Governor. No party is clean on this front.
There's evidence for and against either method. I wonder if maybe SOME kids learn better one way and SOME kids learn better the other way? Perhaps the real task is figuring out which group a kid falls into.
I'm not a big fan of one-size-fits-all in almost ANY area, and I really don't like it in education.