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| André Kertesz, Jardin du Luxembourg |
[40] To stay in business
despite the mounting research evidence and the near-unanimous opinions of
leading scientists, the look-and-say educators had to conduct a vigilant and
ceaseless coverup campaign.
For over fifty years,
whenever a new exposure of their ancient gimmick threatened, someone—usually a
professor on the payroll of a look-and-say textbook publisher—was sent into the
breach to defend the system. This has been going on year after year, until
today even some of the best minds in the field are confused or uninformed about
certain areas of their own profession.
It's impossible to trace,
incident by incident, the history of this gigantic coverup. In this chapter simply I’ll give some of the highlights.
I'll begin in 1928, with Professor Arthur I. Gates.
Professor Gates, of
Teachers College, Columbia University, was then at the point of starting the
Macmillan look-and-say series. But there were those studies clearly showing
that look-and-say was inferior to phonics. What to do? Professor Gates hit upon
the ingenious idea of "intrinsic" phonics. He'd start first graders
on look-and-say, then at the end of first grade give them a little bit of
phonics and run some tests to show that with this added ingredient look-and-say
came out ahead.
He tested children in four
New York City first-grade classrooms. Lo and behold, at the end of the year the
children who'd had "intrinsic" phonies came out with better comprehension
scores than those who had started with systematic phonics first. In his book Methods in Primary Reading (1928) Gates
proudly announced this result to the world. The way was open to drive phonics-first
out of American schools.
When I came upon Gates's
results in my research for Why [41] Johnny Can't Read, I wondered how he'd
done it. After all, by 1955 there were eleven studies that came out the other
way. I studied the Gates data and found that Gates's tests had all been timed,
which gave the quick-guessing look-and-say kids a clear advantage over the
accurate but slower phonics-first readers. Also, the teachers of
"intrinsic" or "incidental" phonics obviously treated the
phonics instruction as anything but incidental.
On the contrary, they did all they could to make Professor Gates's experiment
come out the way he wanted.
Twelve years after I wrote
my book, Dr. Jeanne Chall's Learning to
Read: The Great Debate came out. Dr. Chall was in full agreement with what
I'd said about Gates. The tests were timed, she wrote, which was unfair to the
phonics-first kids, and the teachers had paid
special attention to the teaching of "incidental" phonics. In a
footnote on page 112 of her book she quoted "recent correspondence"
with Professor Gates: "His intrinsic-phonics materials were extremely well
programmed, teaching the alphabet along with the words. Thus, both groups
probably received similar amounts of decoding practice."
In other words, forty
years after the event, Professor Gates admitted he'd manipulated the
experiment.
Let's go on to another
major event in the Great Coverup. In 1955 my book Why Johnny Can't Read became a national best-seller. The
educational journals answered in full cry, attacking me as an ignoramus, a
propagandist—they never said for whom or what—a crank, a menace to the cause of
good education. In December 1955, half a year after the publication of my book,
The Reading Teacher came out with a
special issue on phonics. It was filled with anti-Flesch outbursts, including a
lengthy piece elaborately analyzing the propaganda techniques I had supposedly
used in my book.
As to the eleven
scientific studies I had reviewed, old Professor William S. Gray, senior author
of the Dick-and-Jane, Scott, Foresman look-and-say readers, was called back
from retirement to rebut my data. His answer was rather feeble. He never said
that my account of the eleven studies was wrong or distorted. All he had to
offer in reply was a study by Buswell published in 1922 and a study of his own,
which he'd done in 1915 when he was in his twenties.
I read the Buswell study
and found that it was a study of [42] eye movements, which offered no
statistical data whatever. "The present investigation," Dr. Buswell
wrote, "does not yield the type of data necessary for a judgment of
methods, and consequently no attempt has been made to evaluate them."
It's true that Professor
Gray's forty-year-old experiment compared the then widely used Aldine method,
which was look-and-say, with the long-forgotten Ward method, which offered
somewhat diluted phonies. And what did Professor Gray find when he tested those
third graders long ago? "There was practically no difference in the
average scores."
Let me go on to the next
devastating review of phonics vs. look-and-say research, the one by Gurren and
Hughes in 1965. How did the look-and-say forces answer that one? By utter
silence. One article in an educational journal wasn't worth rolling out the big
guns.
When the book Learning to Read: The Great Debate by
Dr. Jeanne Chall came out in 1967, it couldn't be dealt with as easily. The
research evidence was too massive and too detailed. So the look-and-say
educators did the next best thing: they reviewed the book to death. There was
an orgy of nitpicking, making it seem that Dr. Chall's monumental work was
flawed, partly wrong, still controversial and unproven.
I checked through most of
the two dozen reading-instruction textbooks—the books used in teachers' college
courses to teach future reading teachers how to do their job. Typically, they
mentioned Dr. Chall's book, but immediately proceeded to put it in a dubious
light. For instance, Reading in the
Elementary School by George D. and Evelyn B. Spache (fourth edition, 1977)
gives Chall's book a brief paragraph and then says, "Many reviewers of
this book did not feel that Chall had proved her theory, particularly when she
depended so strongly upon studies over a long period of time from a wide
variety of sources which often differ in their instructional practices from
Chall's definition." (As you see, Dr. Chall's thoroughness is neatly used
as a weapon against her.)
Or take another example.
The book Reading Instruction: Diagnostic
Teaching in the Classroom by Larry Harris and Carl B. Smith (second
edition, 1976) also gives Chall's book a paragraph and follows it up with the
sentence "The research evidence is not strong enough to convince every
reading authority [43] that intensive decoding is the way to begin instruction in
reading."
The latest
reading instruction textbook is Developmental
Reading: A Psycholinguistic Perspective by Daniel R. Hittleman (1978). As
you can see from the title, Hittleman is a follower of Frank Smith and Kenneth
and Yetta Goodman. What does he have to say about Chall's book? Nothing at all.
Neither the book nor "the Great Debate" is mentioned. As to
phonics-first or decoding, there's a brief explanation of why it is useless.
In spite of all
this, Professor Chall's book had some effect. In the years after it appeared,
the look-and-say publishers decided that the Great Coverup had to be
intensified and injected increasing amounts of token phonic window dressing
into their basal readers. In 1977 they were rewarded for their efforts by a
brochure written by Professor Chall, entitled Reading 1967-1977: A Decade of Change and Promise. It contained the
following two sentences:
By the middle 1970s most of the published
beginning reading programs had a code emphasis (Popp, 1975). Even those that
were classified as meaning emphasis had earlier and heavier decoding programs
in the first grade—an emphasis on phonics found only in the strongest
code-emphasis programs of the early 1960s.
Houghton Mifflin
and Ginn & Company were quick to quote these two sentences in their sales
materials and have used them to sell more of their look-and-say basal readers.
Since this
quotation from Professor Chall plays a large part in the present phase of the
Great Coverup, let's look at it a little more closely. The first sentence,
saying that "most of the published beginning reading programs had a code
emphasis" is plainly wrong. I checked the reference to Dr. Helen M. Popp's
1975 article, "Current Practices in the Teaching of Beginning
Reading." It says no such thing.
The second
sentence is trickier. It says that basal readers "classified as meaning
emphasis"—that is, look-and-say readers—had "an emphasis on phonics
found only in the strongest code-emphasis programs of the early 1960s."
What does that mean? It does not mean
that the phonics content in the look-and-say readers now matches that of the
phonics-first readers.
[44] It says only that the
phonics you now find in the look-and-say basals is "found only" in
the phonics-first readers of the early 1960s.
Now if you stay with me
for another minute, I'll explain what this really means. In the early 1960s,
there were just a few phonics-first programs, like Economy, Lippincott, and
Open Court. By definition they taught all
of phonics right at the start. The look-and-say readers in those days had
virtually no phonics—maybe a smidgen of 1 percent or less.
After 1967, Houghton Mifflin,
Ginn, and the rest, spurred by Professor Chall's book, put in more phonics. How
much? Professor William K. Durr, senior author of the Houghton Mifflin series,
obligingly explained in a letter:
Houghton Mifflin is not a look-and-say series and has, in
fact, been a phonics-first program for many years. The facts, easily verified
by an examination of the Houghton Mifflin
Reading Series, show that children are taught the twenty-two most
consistent and reliable phonic elements (b,
c, d, f, g, h,
j, k, l, m, n,
p, r, s, t, y,
w, y, ch, sh, th, and wh) before they begin to read stories in
their first pre-primer. The facts are that children are taught a decoding
technique that uses these letter-sounds together with an understanding of the
meaning of the material being read.
What percentage of phonics
does this amount to? The reading instruction textbook Teaching Reading by Walcutt, Lamport, and McCracken contains a
phonic inventory, listing all the items normally taught to children in a
phonics-first series as they learn to read. The inventory adds up to 181 items,
including all the letters and sounds plus such spelling patterns as ng, scr,
oi, ight, etc.
If the 100 percent figure
is 181, then the 22 phonic elements taught by Houghton Mifflin amount to 12
percent. Most other look-and-say series offer even less.
So it turns out that the
vaunted switch to phonics after the publication of Professor Chall's book has
brought an increase of token phonics window dressing from less than 1 percent
to about 12 percent. This is still a small fraction of the total [45] phonics
children must be taught at the start in order to become fluent readers. And it
doesn't take into account the fact that those look-and-say first graders are
being trained to guess words from context, and are never told about the secret alphabetic code.
I hope this explains the
true meaning of Professor Chall's two sentences and their place in the scheme
of the Great Coverup.
Let's go back to the
research review by Dr. Dykstra in 1973. His main added evidence was the U.S.
Office of Education study of twenty-seven first-grade programs, of which he was
the director. Dykstra's report pointed out that phonics-first, particularly the
Lippincott readers, had won a complete victory. The look-and-say educators
concealed and misrepresented these findings. In an editorial in the October
1966 Reading Teacher, Dr. Russell
Stauffer, senior author of the Holt, Rinehart & Winston look-and-say
readers, wrote:
There is no one method of teaching reading.. . . Every
method described used words, and phonics, and pictures, and comprehension, and
teachers. . . . There was no one phonic method that was pure. . . . And where
does all this leave us? All the maligning that reading instruction has endured
for the past decade has not led to the golden era. No approach has overcome
individual differences or eliminated reading failure. . . . Now that we have
slashed around wildly in the mire of accusations let us remember that reading
without comprehension is not reading.
Eleven years later, in
1977, Dr. Dykstra reported sadly:
Many of my colleagues in the field of reading have made
and continue to make misleading and inaccurate statements concerning the major
conclusions of the first-grade studies . . . . The popular view among
professionals in the field of reading is that the first-grade studies found the
teacher to be the most important variable in beginning reading instruction. . .
. We came to no such conclusion. . . .
We found that programs did differ in effectiveness. . . .
[46] Children who learned to read in instructional
programs emphasizing early and intensive teaching of phonetics demonstrated
superior ability.
Dr. Dykstra has corrected
misstatements about the outcome of the twenty-seven first-grade studies many
times and in many places. But he has never caught up with the solid mass of commonly
accepted untruths. To this day, almost all educators firmly believe that the
twenty-seven studies showed that the teacher made the most important difference
in how children learned to read and that no method proved to be superior.
Finally, we come to the
monumental Follow Through project of the mid-seventies—programs for ex-Head
Start children. That time it was the Distar phonics method that ran away with all
honors. The Ford Foundation financed a thirty-three-page critique by a team of
four researchers that appeared in a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review in the summer of 1978. Faulting the
report on Follow Through on a dozen or more technical points, the team
concluded that Distar's victory was spurious.
The outcome measures [they wrote], strongly favor models
that concentrate on teaching mechanical skills. . . . Follow Through was to be an
investigation of models of comprehensive early childhood education—not just
reading, not just arithmetic, not just language usage. . . . Although who did
best on the Metropolitan Achievement Test [of reading and math] might be a
valid question, it would be wrong to confuse that question with the one that
was actually asked.
In other words, now that
Distar showed up strongest in all the achievement tests, let's pretend that
wasn't the point of the studies.
This was answered by three
U.S. Office of Education experts who had supervised the project.
"Compensatory education can work," they wrote. ". . . Though not
successful everywhere and not uniformly successful in all its outcomes, that
model [Distar] showed the best pattern of success."
And that's where the
matter stands now. After almost seventy years of research, after 124 studies
leaving look-and-say without [47] a shred of scientific respectability, it is
still used in 85 percent of our classrooms, poisoning the minds and crippling
the educational growth of tens of millions of children. The federal government,
carrying out its Congressional mandate, has poured billions of dollars into the
twenty-seven cooperative first-grade studies and compensatory education
projects like Head Start and Follow Through. Those projects proved without any
doubt that phonics-first is superior to look-and-say.
The educators have ignored
this mountain of solid evidence and continued their programmed retardation in
our schools.
How did they do it? Mainly
by turning the competition for textbook sales to the schools into an annual
beauty contest. Almost every other year, each of the competitors comes out with
"new, improved" models, renamed, refurbished, and, if possible, newly
and more gaudily illustrated. There's no other country in the world where
children learn to read from such handsome books.
Does that improve their
reading skill? It wasn't until 1967 that a researcher, Dr. S. Jay Samuels, got
curious as to the answer to that question.
It turned out that
pictures not only don't help kids to learn whole words by look-and-say, but are
an actual hindrance. Somewhat surprised, Dr. Samuels repeated his original
experiment in another, more classroomlike setting. The result was the same. The
simple truth was that a child, when confronted by a word and a picture, will
look at the picture first. The more
attractive the picture, the more it will interfere with word learning.
After Samuels's innovative
research, nineteen—yes, nine-teen—more researchers followed in his footsteps.
Eventually Samuels summarized the whole series of studies in an article in the Review of Educational Research.
Dr. Samuels's summary was
devastating. He wrote:
1. The bulk of the research findings on the effect of pictures
on acquisition of a sight-vocabulary was that pictures interfere with learning
to read.
2. There was almost unanimous agreement that pictures
when used as adjuncts to the printed text, do not facilitate comprehension.
REFERENCES
Page
40 Gates, Arthur I. Methods in
Primary Reading. New York, Teachers
College, 1928.
41 Flesch, Why Johnny
Can't Read (see Chapter 1).
41 Chall, Learning to
Read (see Chapter 3), p. 112.
41 "Phonics in Reading
Instruction." Reading Teacher, December 1955.
41 Lamkin, F. Duane.
"An Analysis of Propaganda Techniques Used in Why Johnny Can't
Read—Flesch." Reading Teacher (see above), pp. 107-118.
41 Gray, William S.
"Phonic versus Other Methods of Teaching Reading." Reading Teacher
(see above), pp. 102106.
41 Buswell, Guy T. Fundamental
Reading Habits: A Study of Their Development. Supplementary Educational Mono-graphs, no. 21. University of
Chicago Press, 1922.
41 Gray, William S. Studies of
Elementary School Reading Through Standardized Tests. Supplementary Educational Monographs, no. 1. University of Chicago
Press, 1917, pp. 127-128.
42 Gurren, Louise, and
Hughes, Ann. "Intensive Phonies vs. Gradual Phonics in Beginning Reading:
A Review." Journal of Educational Research, vol. 58, no. 8, April 1965, pp. 339-346.
42 Spache, George D. and
Evelyn B. Reading in the Elementary School (4th ed.). Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1977.
42 Harris, Larry A., and
Smith, Carl B. Reading Instruction: Diagnostic Teaching in the
Classroom (2d ed.). New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1976.
43 Hittleman, Daniel R. Developmental
Reading: A Psycholinguistic Perspective. Chicago, Rand McNally, 1978.
43 Chan, Jeanne S. Reading
1967-1977:• A Decade of Change and Promise. Phi Delta Kappa Fastbacks, 1977, no. 97, pp. 5-38.
43 Popp, Helen M.
"Current Practices in the Teaching of Beginning Reading." In Carroll,
John B., and Chall, J. S. (eds.), Toward a Literate Society. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975, pp. 101-146.
44 Durr, William K. Letter
to the editor of Family Circle, November 5, 1979.
44 Walcutt et al. Teaching
Reading (see Chapter 3). Chapters by Dykstra.
45 Stauffer, Russell.
"Some Tidy Generalization" (editorial). Reading Teacher, October 1966, p. 4.
45 Dykstra, Robert.
"What the 27 Studies Said." Reading Informer, November 1977, pp. 11-12, 24.
46 House, Ernest R.; Glass,
Gene V.; McLean, Leslie D.; and
Walker, Decker F. "No Simple Answer: Critique of the Follow Through
Evaluation." Harvard Educational Re-view, vol. 48, no. 2, 1978, pp. 128-160.
46 Wisler, Carl E.; Burns,
Gerald P., Jr.; and Imamoto, David. "Follow Through Redux: A Response to
the 'Critique by House, Glass, McLean and Walker." Harvard Educational
Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 1978, pp. 171-185.
47 Samuels, S. Jay.
"Effects of Pictures on Learning to Read, Comprehension and
Attitudes." Review of Educational Research, vol. 40, no. 1, 1967, pp. 397-407.
Chapter
5: The Ten Alibis
Page
48 Flesch, Rudolf.
"Why Johnny Still Can't
Read." Family Circle, November 1, 1979.
57 International Reading
Association. "Position Statement. 'There's More to Reading than Some Folks
Say.' " Reading Teacher, May 1980, p. 901.
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