Phonics: It Is a Legitimate Teaching Method,
Not a Right-Wing Conspiracy
By Lynne Cheney

When the Texas State Board of Education recently required that elementary textbooks be more phonics-friendly, antiphonics forces ran true to form. Employing a tactic they have used not just in Texas but across the nation, they portrayed phonics as something right wingers want to impose upon schools in order to keep kids from thinking for themselves. Conservatives "have a paranoia about teaching children to think critically," said a representative of the Texas Freedom Network, a group established to counter conservative influence.

Marian Joseph finds this charge bizarre. A Californian, she is probably the most influential grassroots phonics advocate in the country—and a liberal Democrat. As she sees it, teaching kids to read words, which is the aim of phonics instruction, is crucial if they are to become critical thinkers. "Unless they can decode the words on the page, it's very difficult for them to think about the concepts," she observes. In 1990, Ms. Joseph discovered that her grandson's teachers were expecting him to figure out reading for himself. California schools had enthusiastically embraced whole language thinking, which maintains that reading comes as naturally to children as talking does. The teachers in charge of Joseph's grandson believed that showing him how to sound out words would only interfere with his learning to read.

Concerned, Ms. Joseph started checking with teachers and parents across the state. When she heard repeatedly that whole language wasn't working, she began an effort to get phonics programs into schools. Her crusade picked up momentum in the mid-nineties when the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed California's fourth-graders tied for last in rankings of reading achievement. Lawmakers passed a series of laws-the "ABC laws," as they've come to be known, mandating "systematic, explicit phonics" in the schools. The laws were passed, Joseph likes to note, with overwhelming support from Democrats as well as Republicans.

After almost a decade of working for phonics instruction, Ms. Joseph says there is still more to do. Schools don't necessarily pay attention to legislators, so she's working to make sure that the ABC laws are actually implemented in California's classrooms.

Phonics foes aren't inclined to cite Marian Joseph. Nor are they likely to point to the mountain of evidence supporting phonics instruction. In 1967, Jeanne Chall, in Learning to Read: The Great Debate, reported that a survey of the research then available showed systematic phonics instruction to be of decided advantage for beginning readers. In 1990, Marilyn Jager Adams, a cognitive psychologist, reported in Beginning to Read that a survey of research available at that time showed "instruction on individual letter-sound correspondences and phonics generalizations" to be "critically important." For thirty years the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health has been conducting scientific research that points to the same conclusion.

Just last year, a committee of the National Research Council reported that "converging evidence" showed the importance of exposing children to "frequent, regular spelling sound relationships." The NRC report also expressed concern that reading textbooks in early grades often fail to provide students sufficient opportunities to practice their developing knowledge of phonics-exactly the situation that the Texas State Board of Education acted last week to remedy.

If confronted with the hundreds of studies supporting phonics instruction, opponents of phonics sometimes whip out eight or ten experiments that they say favor their side, but most of these turn out to be off-point. As a second line of defense, they condemn the idea of objective research, claiming that it only shows what researchers want it to show. People who talk about "empirical validation," writes Indiana University professor Ellen Brantlinger, are only trying to impose their own "regime or politics of truth."

When all else fails, phonics opponents try to link phonics to a demonized version of conservative thinking. Western Michigan University Professor Carolyn Weaver is one of the chief practitioners of this trade. Conservatives push for phonics, she writes, because they see such instruction as "a way of keeping children's attention on doing what they're told and keeping them from thinking for themselves." What is really at issue in the reading debate, however, is not a conservative view of the world, but what might be called an ed school view.

Since the 1930s, education professors have by and large been wedded to the notion that adults shouldn't teach; they should simply free students to learn in their own time and in their own way. Thus, no matter what the evidence shows to be effective, ed school ideology condemns any teaching technique that requires students to drill or memorize, as phonics instruction does. The impact of this way of thinking can be seen in many math classes, where multiplication tables have become passe and kids are encouraged to create their own ways of doing long division. Science teaching, too, has been affected. Instead of learning scientific principles, students are encouraged to discover them on their own. But the greatest influence has been in reading. "Whole language has expanded farther and faster than anything since Christianity," says Marian Joseph. She thinks that part of the reason is that whole language requires relatively little effort. "Their way is so easy," she says. "Phonics is hard work." And getting phonics into the schools can also be pretty difficult. Nonetheless, people of good sense all across the political spectrum have taken on the task.

Lynne Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, 202-862-5800 or visit their web-site at www.aei.org.

Source—Dallas Morning News, Sunday, November 14, 1999.