The conceptual and data base for GLOBAL WARMING (so important it must be in caps) is crumbling like halvah in the fingers of an orangutan. Interesting that the term was popularized by the collective, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, and is being destroyed by individuals.
from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Truth:
The California Whole Language Experience–The Perfect Example of a Polgram
"I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in America.", Theodor Geisel, aka, Dr. Seuss.
Educational authorities in California were proud of being pioneers in Whole Language implementation. Whole Language is favored in many other states and all ten Canadian provinces have adopted Whole Language as a method to teach reading. Many school districts will not "allow" phonics instruction. British Columbia operated on the basis of an educational program called "Year 2000" founded on the works of developmental and popular psychologists who are data-shy and have not taught children successfully. These efforts are bound for failure. They will, in their efforts to enhance-self-esteem, make many students hate school. They will produce reading and mathematics behavior which is well below the national norms of forty years ago. These disasters come about because the educational authorities have no DOES IT WORK (DIW) filter or no "nonsense filter", as one writer calls it.
The California experience showed the same process as other polgrams. Something strikes resonance with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, of a social sciences profession, and is then adopted by a few authorities. The movement, like religious revivals, absorbs and creates true believers. Others count numbers of adopting agencies when they should be weighing the evidence and counting the number of successful outcomes. The movement reaches critical mass and dozens of other authorities rush to adopt. A few years later, those who always knew better demonstrate that the revolutionary technique has been a tragedy and the whole vox populi exercise begins again with authorities rushing to another socially appealing vacuum and forget that democracy and science are opposites. Given the recent history of education in North America, one can formulate the following rule: "If most education authorities are using a method, it will not only be the wrong one, but will be worse than what it replaces."
Whole Language–Data-Free, Data-Immune, But Still Used: The Largest Polgram in the Social Sciences
Attacking Whole Language is as unsporting as shooting dead squirrels in the living room, but it must be done. Whole Language is an example of a data-free educational theory based on romantic notions of how children learn. Its teaching methods, relying on pictures, guessing and "integration", are a good example of theory without results.
Some of these things happened in California where reading scores in 1994 were higher than only Louisiana and Guam. These results are not attributable to California’s high proportion of non-English speaking students because the scores for California’s white students were the lowest in the nation. The next phase for Whole Language proponents is quite predictable. They maintain that Whole Language training imparts skills which are so subtle and powerful–note the paradox, powerful skills which cannot be measured–that ordinary tests cannot show them. This is always the last-ditch attempt of those who cannot do something. "We’re doing really important things. You’re just not sophisticated enough to measure them." Parents in California, who are more attuned to results than theory, demanded the reading programs be changed and the state brought in the very experts which the terminally trendy had excoriated in the late 1980s. The students not taught reading are now in high schools, colleges and universities which must either teach remedial reading or lower their academic standards.
How It Came To Be
In 1987, educational authorities in California were concerned about its middle placing in nation-wide tests of the reading ability of its grade school students. California wanted to become "world class" and "prepare for the 21st century", two phrases, in governmental parlance, which should send shivers down the spine. What followed was the classic example of how to make things worse by "postmodern reform", another shudder-inducing concept.
There was no evidence to support the route that California took. The Follow Through data indicated that the Language Experience method was one of the worst for teaching students to read. Many real experts in education, those who understood data, warned against implementation. They were ignored as reactionary (note the leftist rhetoric) or anti-progressive ( again, a damning label from the left) or old-fashioned or phonicators (those who favored phonics).
The Whole Language process is a classic example of an ideologically-based, data-free methodoloy being imposed upon a profession, education, which has no DIW filter in place. A method is accepted with great enthusiasm, but without supporting data. A few scientists insist on measuring the impact of the "new" method. When it is found to be worse than what it supplants, the enthusiastic supporters, who are really believers, discount the results. They maintain that if the right questions were asked, their technique would show huge superiority. Some political or judicial event intervenes and the technique is discarded. The social sciences are brought into well-deserved disrepute yet again. The public seems to have a very short memory, because the cycle gets repeated again and again. With the majority of educational jurisdictions in North America mandated to use Whole Language, this is a polgram which has negatively affected tens of millions of students. Whole Language, I predict, will be regarded as one of the classic cases of a polgram. It has all the ingredients, supreme arrogance of the originators, lack of data, enthusiastic acceptance by those whose knowledge about education would better suit them to be carnival pitchmen. Then follows clarion calls of "don’t do it" by those who know something, a massive repudiation by the data, frantic attempts to put a positive light on damaging outcomes and a final capitulation of the true believers who were disciplined by lawsuits, arrival of a new fad or public opinion and not by loss of jobs, pensions or pay.
One of the instigators of the Whole Language movement in California, Bill Honig, says, "I don’t mind saying it has been a disaster, as long as it’s clear to everyone that it was done with the best of intentions by a lot of really committed people." Those of us who know we should pay attention to data, are sorry they weren’t committed much earlier.
Honig, who presided over California’s implementation of Whole Language stated, "…it is the curse of all progressives, who control much of what happens in the field of education, that we are anti-research and anti-science, and we never seem to grasp how irrational that attitude is. This is probably our deepest failure." Since people respond to incentives in predictable ways, the deepest failure in the situation is the contingencies under which public employees operate.
He also said, "People didn’t know how important automaticity (the ability to decode words quickly and effortlessly) was before. But all that information is in now." Of course, evidence for the importance of automaticity had been "in" for at least three decades before California’s institution of Whole Language. The Social Sciences are filled with experts who don’t know anything because there is no consequence for not knowing. Honig should get credit for admitting blame. The typical government worker is like the little boy with pie crust crumbs around his mouth sitting beside a half-eaten apple pie taking refuge in the passive voice by saying, "The pie got eaten."
Whole Language is sometimes contrasted with the mindless "Dick and Jane" series filled with pictures and inane dialogue. The Dick and Jane readers were a kind of Whole Language, stemming from the "reading in context–with pictures" silliness from a number of sources which had been popular in North American education from the early part of the twentieth century. Strangely enough, the teaching techniques were more effective than those currently used. There are those who correlate the dramatic decline of literacy in the U.S. with the advent of Whole Language. They are probably right. The illiteracy rate for potential Army inductees was rising dramatically from World War 1 to the Vietnamese war and is now declining.
"California goes through a very careful process of approving materials for adoption…." Ken Goodman. Careful means looking at materials from the IS side, not the DOES, and careful doesn’t have to be correct if the person has no economic stake in outcomes.
The Direct Instruction reading program was rejected by the California state authority in 1988 because the reading passages for the early grades had "no literary merit". As someone who has taught hundreds of "learning disabled" children to read, I can say, without doubt, that children are so thrilled to be reading, they don’t care about "literary merit". "Literary merit" is one of the intellectually empty phrases the silly use to muddy the waters. As in many educational matters, what seems reasonable, necessary and desirable to an adult has absolutely no effect on the child.
One Whole Language assumption is that children learn reading the way they learn spoken language. A child’s spoken language utterances are corrected thousands of times while he is learning. If we taught speaking as the Whole Language theorists believe we should teach reading, we would regard all babbling as delightfully creative and the child, at eight, would be saying, "Momma go store" and we would be bound to believe this was delightfully innovative.
"When the art of education becomes a science (no comma in original), we will then have the luxury of making changes after research has identified those which are best." Barry McGhan, Education Week, February 17, 1993. There are many rigorous scientific findings in education. The luxury that teachers have is that they can ignore them because there are no consequences for failure.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
