Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read (1981)
“Everything Is Hunky-Dory”
[59]
On February 13, 1979, Dr. Harold Howe II, Vice President for Education and
Research of the Ford Foundation and former U.S. Commissioner of Education,
appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities
to testify on the teaching and learning of basic academic skills in schools. He
started his testimony with the following statement: "The significance of
the much reported decline of learning in American schools is exaggerated and is
not as serious a matter as the popularization of it suggests."
This
is the most high-sounding version I've seen so far of the old standby Alibi No.
1—"Everything is hunky-dory."
There
is no need in this book to give you a lot of statistics to prove what's happening.
Like every other American, you know that our educational system is in very bad
shape and that we have a lot of illiterates in this country.
What
most people don't know is how
staggering the figures really are. Before I started this book, I made it my business
to find the exact size of the problem.
There
are no official statistics, I learned, but the nearest thing to them is the
data that came out of the Adult Performance Level study (APL), which was done
at the University of Texas in 1975. A recent survey, Adult Illiteracy in the United States (1979), sponsored by the Ford
Foundation, also refers to that APL study as a basic source.
I
asked the University of Texas to send me the report and the questionnaire that
was used. Here's what I found:
The
APL statistics were based on the findings of interviews with 7,500 U.S. adults,
conducted nationwide. Each interview lasted about an hour. The house-to-house
survey was done by [60] the Opinion Research Center of Princeton, New Jersey, a
well-known polling firm.
The
questionnaire consisted of forty items, dealing with what the researchers
called "functional competency"—the sum total of competencies
important to success as adults. One of those competencies, of course, is the
ability to read.
It
was found that 21.7 percent of U.S. adults between 18 and 65 couldn't correctly
answer such questions as these:
If the label on a medicine bottle says, "Take 2 pills twice a
day," how many pills should you take in 1 day?
A government brochure about termites says, "No matter what
protective measures you take, periodic inspection should be made at least
every six months if you live where termites are common." You live in such
an area. How often should you have your house inspected?
I
studied all the other items in the questionnaire and found that they were just
as clearcut. Obviously, a person who can't answer such simple questions is
functionally illiterate. Webster's New
Collegiate Dictionary (1973) defines a functional illiterate as "a
person having had some schooling but not meeting a minimum standard of literacy."
As
I said, the APL report said that 21.7 percent of U.S. adults between 18 and 65
fell into that category. This meant 23 million people.
This
number is a sweeping indictment of the U.S. school system and the reading
instruction method used in most schools. According to the APL data, 19 million
of those 23 million have had at least four years of schooling. Virtually all of
them were taught reading by the look-and-say method. How can this enormous
failure possibly be defended?
The
chief defender among the educators, the man who has made it his life's work to
prove that "everything is hunky-dory," is Professor Roger B. Farr of
Indiana University, senior author of the Laidlaw Brothers look-and-say readers.
In his article, "Is Johnny's / Mary's Reading Getting Worse?," which
appeared in the April 1977 issue of the magazine Educational Leadership, he wrote, "If we are concerned about
national [61] 'basic literacy,' we can forge
ahead seeking improvement confident that we are doing quite well."
How did he reach that conclusion in the face of the crushing facts
uncovered by the APL and other studies?
The number-one statistical 'proof' used by Professor Farr in his
article—and also when he appeared before the Senate subcommittee I mentioned
earlier—is the National Assessment of Educational Progress survey, published in
1976.
Here's the story behind that survey. In the early 1970s, when the
public clamor about American education got louder and louder, the look-and-say
educators—that is, the Education Commission of the United States—with $40
million in private and federal funds, set up the National Assessment of Educational
Progress in Denver, Colorado. The NAEP collected educational statistics on
school achievement in the 1970-1971 academic year. Four years later, in
1974-1975 it repeated the process. Then, on September 21, 1976, it published a
press release. It bore the following headline:
It's a Fact—Johnny,
Age 9, Is Reading Better
The first paragraph said, "Who says Johnny—and Mary—can't
read? Contrary to popular opinion, Johnny and Mary, at age 9 at least, are
reading better than their counterparts of a few years ago."
That sounded fine, except for the awkward fact that it was totally
misleading. Dr. Richard L. Venezky wrote in the April 1977 Reading Teacher that the NAEP press release and report were
"inexcusable."
What did the report actually say? It said that three age groups of
students had been retested after the four-year interval—nine-year-olds,
thirteen-year-olds, and seventeen-year-olds. There were a number of different
tests, one of which was reading comprehension. The nine-year-olds, in this one test, did better in 1975 than in
1971. They answered on the average 65 percent of the questions correctly. In
1971 they'd gotten only 64 percent right. At the other two age levels and in all
other categories there was no progress, and in some cases there was some
further decline.
Why did those nine-year-olds make their 1 percent progress over
four years? Professor Farr's article gives us a clue. He [62] says progress
in the lower grades is "almost certainly due to federally funded
supplementary reading programs"—which means the recent slight inroads of
phonics-first.
Instead of focusing on the 1 percent progress of one group in one category, let's look at what the NAEP survey actually shows. It
says, in plain English, that in 1975, 35 percent of the nation's fourth graders
could not read. Of the eighth graders,
37 percent could not read. Of the
twelfth graders, 23 percent could not
read.
What does "could not read" mean? It means that they
couldn't answer correctly such items as this one: "The label on a cat food
can says 'Until they reach three months old, feed kittens Meow-Wow Dinner about
every four hours. Let them eat all they want.' How should you feed a
two-month-old kitten?"
Please note that the test was given only to students in school. It didn't cover children not in school, that is, dropouts.
(According to the New York Times of
October 17, 1979, the New York City Board of Education officially estimated the
high school dropout rate at 45 percent.) Which means that the percentage of
functionally illiterates among high school seniors and other
seventeen-year-olds was maybe as much as 40 percent or more—far higher than the
adult illiteracy rate reported by the University of Texas APL study. Clearly
the U.S. literacy rate, now down to that of Burma and Albania, will drop even
lower.
And what did Professor Farr have to say to all that? He was head
of the NAEP evaluation panel. He wrote, "I think all ages are doing
exceptionally well on the items that are straightforward, basic, literal."
Most of his colleagues on the evaluating panel were associated with the Ginn
& Company look-and-say series. One of them, Professor William Blanton, was
even more enthusiastic than Farr. He wrote, "Performance on the functional
literacy items, items that involve activities like reading a telephone bill or
following the directions on a container of cat food, is so high that it does
challenge a lot of what has been said in the last few years.
Seventeen-year-olds are definitely doing well—better than previously—on these
kinds of items."
[63]
Let me repeat: Among high school seniors attending school, 23
percent could not read simple directions. Specifically, 21 percent flunked the
cat food item. And this catastrophic result is what Professor William Blanton
of Ginn & Company proudly announced to the world as a sign of progress!
But all this—about one quarter of the nation sinking into
illiteracy—is just the tip of the iceberg. A mountainous tip, but still a tip. Underneath are all those millions,
students and adults, who can read but just barely. Look-and-say training has
enabled them to work their way slowly through a piece of simple prose and understand
it after a fashion, but that's about all. They've never developed the skill of
fluent reading. Their reading is slow, halting, and uncertain.
How many of those slow readers are there? Again the Adult
Performance Level survey has an answer. According to their statistics—and
remember, their findings were fully confirmed by the pro-Establishment National
Assessment survey—in 1975 there were 32.2 percent U.S. adults who could read
but were only just above the borderline. They could read a label on a medicine
bottle or a want ad in the paper, but nothing more complicated. These 32.2
percent, in 1975, added up to 34 million people. They were "minimally
proficient." Only the remaining 46.1 percent of the population between 18
and 65 were fully proficient and fluent readers. As you can see, the illiterates plus the slow readers are
now a majority of the US. population.
How can you tell a slow reader from a fast one? In the Journal of Learning Disabilities for May
1972 a Canadian physician, Dr. Carl L. Kline, gave a good description:
A common prototype of reading disabilities seen
in adolescents is the bright high school student who reads at or near grade
level, but who has a spelling disability, is a slow reader, who misreads some
words, omits words, substitutes words, and occasionally reverses (reads words
from right to left instead of left to right).. . . In working with [those
students] one must anticipate that there will be a residual spelling problem,
even after the reading problem is largely overcome. Once the reading problem [64] is alleviated, one is faced with a student who knows how to read,
at last, but who doesn't know how to study. Having avoided reading for years
because of the reading problem, a considerable gap often exists in terms of
general knowledge, vocabulary and ability to scan material in order to pick out
the important facts from an assignment.
The most obvious sign of a slow reader, brought up on
look-and-say, is his or her bizarre spelling. As Dr. Kline says, even if such a
student learns how to read fluently, he'll probably stay a poor speller all his
life. In the November 1974 issue of the Bulletin
of the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. R. Arthur Gindin, Associate Professor
of Neurosurgery at the Medical College of Georgia, writes of common spelling
errors of freshmen in medical school. Here is a partial list of the misspellings
he found in their papers:
accomidation ecessive
amblitory extention
analized nausia
apperent occassions
apethetic occular
assending occurance
bilatterally refered
cinammon subtrat
develope tremmor
These millions of slow readers and bizarre spellers also account
for the decline in recent years of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores.
As I mentioned in the first chapter, the average scores on these college
entrance tests have been steadily going down since 1963. The average on the
verbal part of the test was 478 in 1963 and fell to 424 in 1980. Since the full
range of scores is from 200 to 800, this means a 9 percent drop in seventeen
years—an enormous decline in the verbal capacities of high school students who
want to go to college. (Their math scores dropped almost as much.)
In 1977 a group of educators formed a twenty-one-member panel,
chaired by Willard Wirtz, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, to study the reasons
for this alarming decline. The panel found a number of possible reasons but
couldn't pinpoint a [65] specific source of the trouble. It specifically excluded the post—World War II influx of
less-qualified applicants.
I am convinced that the main reason for the decline is the
look-and-say method. Let me explain why. According to the Wirtz report, one of
the typical vocabulary questions follows this pattern:
The question below consists of a word in capital
letters, followed by five lettered words or phrases. Choose the word or phrase
that is most nearly opposite in
meaning to the word in capital letters.. . .
RECTITUDE: (A) deliberation (B) laziness (C)
prejudice (D) laxity of morals (E) weakness of intellect
The correct answer to this sample question is D. Only 23 percent
of typical students making a score of 450 had the right answer. That's only 3 percent above the pure chance
score of 20 percent.
Now let me show you how a student's answer to this type of
question depends on how he was taught to read in first grade. Suppose he was
taught by the phonics-first method. If so, he was taught the complete
alphabetic code so he could sound out any unfamiliar word he came across.
The word rectitude is a
rather rare word. According to the Thorndike-Lorge frequency list, it occurs
about once in a million words of general reading matter.
Suppose our phonics-trained student comes across the word for the
first time while he is in fourth grade. He'll look at it, silently sound it
out, and decide from the hint of "correct" that it must mean
something like righteousness. He'll store this tentative meaning in his memory.
Next time he comes upon rectitude—a year
later, maybe—he recalls this stored memory and confirms it in this new context.
He does the same thing the third, fourth, and fifth time he encounters the
word, until its meaning is fixed in his mind. Maybe he hears it spoken or tries
it out as an item in his own speaking vocabulary.
This, in essence, is how a phonics-trained child learns the
meaning of words and builds his vocabulary.
Now consider the look-and-say trained reader. The word rectitude is of course not among the 1,500 or 3,000 words he
learns to recognize by sight during his first three or four school [66] years. By the time he's in fourth grade, he's never seen the
word in print.
Suppose
he comes across the word while he's in the fourth or fifth grade. This is
unlikely to occur in one of his school textbooks, since they've been carefully
cleansed of all but the simplest words. But suppose he comes across rectitude elsewhere—if he does any reading beyond what he has to.
He
looks at rectitude and does what he's been trained to do. He tries to guess its
meaning from the context and the first letter r. Maybe he also uses the second letter e as the basis of his guess. He may come up with reserve, reputation,
resistance, religion, reticence, reluctance, regularity or some other re word he knows. Or he may stop cold. He may decide that the word
must be reticence or reserve, or reluctance, or he may simply skip it
and go on. In any case, since he has no way of deciphering rectitude, he does not learn its meaning from this first encounter.
Next
time he comes upon rectitude while he's, say, in fifth grade. He still doesn't know what it
means and goes through the same futile approach he used the first time. The
same happens whenever he sees rectitude again in his reading. (This won't be often, since a look-and-say
trained reader avoids reading as much as he can.)
Finally,
as a high school junior or senior, he takes the Scholastic Aptitude Test. One
of the questions deals with the word rectitude. With his background of
repeated guessing, he can't possibly tell whether it means the opposite of prejudice or laziness. So he guesses. Four
times out of five, he guesses wrong.
I
went into all this detail because I know from experience that people who were
taught reading by phonics or have discovered the secret of the alphabetic code
by themselves don't understand the reading habits of those who were taught by
look-and-say. It's almost impossible for them to imagine the difficulties of
someone who doesn't know the alphabetic code. Since you, as a reader of a
serious nonfiction book, are probably among that minority of Americans who do
know the code, I'll illustrate this important point by two case histories.
The first is a letter I got from a woman called Karen Field.
I'll reprint it here with all the original spelling errors (including my name):
[67]
November 23, 1979
Rudolf Flech
Harper & Row
10 E. 53rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10022
Attention Mr. Flech:
After reading your article in the November 1,
1979 Family Circle magazine, Why Johnny Still Can't Read made me feel a little
better about my self. For a while I thought it was all my fault I couldn't read
or spell better. I would like to know if you could help me learn phonics and
how to break the words into syllables.
I am a 34 year old female. I graduated from high
school June 1963. I have always had problems in reading and spelling. It all
started in my early years of schooling. I was one of the victim of look and say
or sight reading not by phonics or syllables. I remember, the childern in my
class all had books with pictures and words in them. We could look at the
pictures, for example an apple. The teacher would tell us to remember the word
apple because it had two P's in it. This meant every time I saw a word with two
P's in it, I thought it said apple.
As the years went by I had to study very hard
and longer periods of time then someone else because I had to memorize the
spelling of words to pass my test. When I went to junior high school, I ask if
I could take a special reading course but the class was full. I was not alone
my girl friends had the same problem.
After graduting from high school, I still have
spelling and reading problems. Sometimes it has been very up setting to me. I
sometime don't understand my problem. I can read the every day newspaper but
get stuck on spelling and reading of names. When I'm finished reading an
article in the newspaper and someone ask me to spell a word I just read, I
can't spell it. I guess I'm still trying to memorize the words. I saw an ad in
the newspaper for a tutor for reading and spelling but when I called, the lady
only would teach childern.
[68] I would like to get a better job but I feel very insecure because
of my spelling and reading problem. I do not like to play any spelling games
for fear I will not be able to spell the words. I keep telling myself that
their are probably some people worse off then me. I guess you are wondering how
I spelled some of the words in this letter. All I can say is Thank God for the
Websters Dictionary.
I would appreciate it very much if you would
please respond to my problem by sending me Free Information. Enclosed is a self
address envelope with postage.
Very truly yours,
Karen Field
I leave it to you to find all the errors in spelling, grammar and
usage. Please note that Miss Field is a high school graduate and has a job,
although not a good one. She is obviously an intelligent woman. As Dr. Kline
says in his article, even if she learns to read better by a program in
phonics-first, she'll probably never be a good speller.
Remember that Miss Field and her
fellow victims of look-and-say are now the majority of the U.S. adult
population.
Now let's move to my second case history. This is an excerpt from
an unpublished article by Mrs. Margaret Bishop, who runs a reading tutoring
program for ex-offenders at The Fortune Society in New York City. Mrs. Bishop
was taught by the look-and-say method and retaught herself to read by phonics-first
at the age of thirty-six. This is her story:
I was never a functional illiterate, exactly. I
could read well enough to get by, if I bluffed energetically all along the way.
But believe me, that's not the life-style anyone would choose, given the
choice.
As a pre-schooler, I was bright, gay and
outgoing, full of life and full of questions. I was a faculty child, my father
a university dean, and our home was full of books and the love of books. My
parents read to me regularly, and I listened eagerly. The last thing anybody
anticipated was reading difficulty.
But after a few months of public school, things
had changed. I had become sober and timid. My eyes hurt [69] all the time. And my progress in reading was very
slow. My mother was upset by this development. But my father persuaded her to
give the school more time. You see, they had a new system of teaching reading
in the school, and he felt sure I would be all right by the end of the year.
Any difficulty I was having could be explained by my poor eyesight, which had
made it necessary for me to begin wearing glasses at the age of three and a
half.
Things went the same during my second and third years in
school. Then, on returning from my last day in third grade, I asked my mother,
"What is the skip of your teeth?" The teacher had told me that I had
passed by that margin. So ended my mother's patience with the public schools. I
was transferred to a local Protestant school. They had me repeat third grade,
partly to give me a fair chance with French, which began in third grade there,
and continued through the upper grades.
I did moderately well at the new school, especially in
French, and my reading and writing in English seemed to improve, though they
were still "weak." In seventh grade, we started Latin, and again I
did very well with it. Again, my reading in English seemed to improve a little.
But my spelling was still quite poor, and I was a "reluctant" reader.
Despite the eye doctor's best efforts, my eyes still bothered me, and I never
read any more than absolutely necessary.
. . . I don't have any memory of personal worry over my
reading disability while I was a child. But when I entered the middle teens, I
began to find it a burden. A young person who reads well reads widely in
fiction and non-fiction, picking up a varied assortment of general information,
which supplements the material presented at school. I was completely lacking in
this fund of casual information. I began to be embarrassed by the way my ignorance
contrasted with my friends' knowledge of the world. Moreover, my parents, who
had never made me feel bad about my deficiencies in earlier years, could not
conceal their shock and disappointment when they encountered examples of my
lack of general knowledge. Even my father began to doubt my potential, in spite
of my good school record. But my Latin teacher had been [70] for many years my
mother's best friend. She insisted that my intelligence was unusually high, and
persuaded my parents to send me to a good college.
Accordingly, I went to Barnard, where I majored in
French, and took courses in Spanish, German, and Russian, as well. Again, I
used my old tricks to get by. The lecture system was still in force, and I
handled all courses given in English by listening to the lecturer and doing a
minimum of reading. The foreign language courses were so little problem that I
made an average of 3.5 there, whereas my average in courses given in English
was only 2.8. (A straight A average works out to 4.0.)
On campus, I was, as usual, constantly embarrassed by my
general ignorance. I kept feeling that if only I had the gumption to try
harder, I could read as widely and know as much as my peers. But my eyes would
not permit that. It never occurred to me then to wonder why I could spend a
whole evening devouring a French novel without eye-strain. That fact never penetrated
until much later. . .
. . . I never faced the fact of my reading deficiency
until my son Peter was almost through second grade. My husband and I were beginning
to be concerned over Peter's reading by then. He still wanted us to read his
comic books to him after almost two years of "satisfactory progress"
in school. At the spring parent conferences, his teacher told me she was trying
one of the books recommended by Rudolf Flesch in his famous book, Why Johnny Can't Read. I had heard much
about this book, but, true to my deficiency, had never "had time" to
read it. Since it appeared to be having a direct impact on Peter, however, I
heaved a sigh and buckled down to find out what Flesch was up to.
. . . For me, all this was a weird mixture of news and
old story. I knew all about phonics and how to sound out in French, Latin,
Spanish, German, and Russian. That's why reading in those languages came so easy.
But it was news of the most startling and illuminating sort that phonics could
work in English. A detailed reading of the word lists at the back of the book
convinced me that English phonics was only slightly more complicated [71] than
French, and French is no problem at all, when you know the French
letter-sounds.
I was fascinated by English phonics, and began to play
with it in every spare moment. I didn't have too many of those, since my
daughter Molly was four at the time. But I made every one of them count. My
game was to take any handy bit of print and sound out every word strictly by
the spelling, noticing all the regular spellings and all the irregular ones,
and seeing where context was really needed to help identify a word.
I enjoyed this game for about three weeks. Then suddenly,
I couldn't play it properly any more. The meaning of what I was sounding out
kept coming through so strongly that it distracted my attention from the game.
Well, no toy remains shiny forever. I decided to stop fooling around and start
catching up on my neglected reading.
I was in the habit of grabbing one solid half-hour for
myself during Molly's morning at nursery school. On this occasion I got a cup
of coffee and a stack of reading material, more than enough to last me; set the
kitchen timer, and sat down at my ease. That morning, I finished my whole supply
of reading matter, and the timer had not rung. I thought it was broken. But my
watch said only 15 minutes had passed. Was my watch broken, too? I found the
timer still purring away, and agreeing with my industriously ticking watch. It
was my own internal time-sense that was out of kilter. In 15 minutes, I had
read what would normally have taken me more than twice that time. What's more,
I was sure of what all of it had said, an entirely novel experience. I had
finally learned, at the age of 36, to read my native language!
Ever since then, I have read well and rapidly, and with
the comprehension and recall that were so lacking before. I now read ten times
as much as I used to, and enjoy every minute of it. Better still, my eyes never
hurt anymore, because now I know how to use them for reading. Best of all, I no
longer feel guilty and baffled by my general ignorance. Much of it has been
overcome, and I know that what remains is not my fault, but the fault of those
who introduced the word method, that "new reading system," into the
school I attended for the first three grades.
Page
59 Howe, Harold II.
Testimony before Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities,
February 13, 1979.
59 Final Report on the APL Study (see
Chapter 1).
59 Adult APL Survey (American College
Testing Program). University of Texas at Austin, 1976.
59 Hunter,
Carmen St. John, and Harman, David. Adult
Illiteracy in the United States. A Report to the Ford Foundation. New York,
McGraw-Hill, 1979.
60 Farr, Roger.
"Is Johnny's/Mary's Reading Getting Worse?" Educational Leadership, April 1977, pp. 521-527.
61 National
Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading
in America: A Perspective on Two Assessments (Reading Report No. 06-R-01).
Denver, Colo., October 1976.
61 Venezky,
Richard L. "NAEP—the Messenger Who Brings Bad News?" Reading Teacher, April 1977, pp. 750755.
62 Chambers,
Marcia. "High School Dropout Rate at 45%, Macchiarola Reports to City
Board." New York Times, October
17, 1979, pp. Al, Al2.
63 Kline, Carl
L. "The Adolescents with Learning Problems: How Long Must They Wait?"
Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol.
5, no. 5, May 1972, pp. 14-36.
64 Gindin, R.
Arthur. "Spelling Performance of Medical Stu-dents." Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine,
vol. 50, no. 10, November 1974, pp. 1120-1121.
64 On Further Examination (see Chapter 1).
68 Bishop,
Margaret. "Case History of a Reluctant Reader" (unpublished article).
Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read (1981)
Brune, du blog Grandir près du châtaignier, commence ainsi son article sur l'observation : "Ce qui me frappe dans les différents manuels anciens est la constance avec laquelle on demande aux enfants d’observer. C’est l’un des maîtres-mots qui revient dans les nombreuses consignes à lire. Dans toutes les matières du primaire, on demande aux enfants d’abord d’observer. Ainsi, l’enfant doit essayer à travers ce qu’il observe d’apprendre et de comprendre le monde qui l’entoure. Je trouve cela très intéressant ! L’enseignement d’aujourd’hui est dans une dynamique totalement inversée ! Il est parfois suggéré d’observer pour ensuite déduire, ce qui est bon en soi, mais la plupart du temps, l’enfant doit partir de lui-même : « Que ressens-tu ? Qu’en penses-tu ? Comment terminerais-tu cette histoire ? Quelle est ton opinion ? »
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