Article

Nine Reading Experts Explain the Sad State of Reading
Bruce Deitrick Price
October 14, 2009
The Reading Wars continue to rage. Flawed methods continue to cause illiteracy and dyslexia. It´s a huge tragedy. But why has it happened? And how do you keep your child from being damaged?

I asked nine of the world´s foremost reading experts for their personal "take" on reading and reading instruction today. I assure you that these are our best authorities--smart, vastly experienced, and trustworthy. (I say "world´s foremost" because two are Canadian and one is British.)

This fairly terrifying article is intended to be a wake-up call for parents, especially those with young children. Please protect them from the wrong-headed methods (Whole Word, etc.) used in many public schools.

1) Don Potter, phonics expert: "The situation across the US is dramatically worse than anyone can possibly imagine. When I ask the teachers why they teach sight-words, they inevitably tell me that it is because their students are going to be assessed on them. They are totally unaware that sight-words are positively harmful. They consider sight-word memorization part of a good reading program that includes some phonics, not realizing that sight-words create a reflex that interferes with later phonics instruction. Sight-words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid." (donpotter.net)

2) Mona McNee, author of "The Great Reading Disaster" and creator of "Step by Step": "Before 1939 the UK had almost universal literacy. Teacher training was minimal. The common sense of parents and teachers got children reading with the simple c-a-t: cat. Sixty years of mistraining, without the old-fashioned synthetic phonics, has wrecked education throughout the English-speaking world. The experts have advised a method of teaching children to read that is a denial of every rational principle of education. By now our society has collapsed. Half the children in juvenile court are dyslexic; many prisoners cannot read. We should take education out of government at once. As for learning to read, parents should teach their own child. Why miss out on the best fun in the world?"

3) Wanda Sanseri, literacy teacher and creator of the Spell to Write and Read program: "I remember as a child admiring a tall building that won national honors for architectural design. A few years later the same structure had to be condemned as a public hazard. Short cuts had been taken on the land study and foundation work. Similarly, many approaches to reading instruction today are colorful and creative but neglect foundational truths of the language. McKinsey and Company, management consultants, recently reported, ´The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers." (Wanda Sanseri gave a famous speech to the State Senate of Oregon about phonics: swrtraining.com)

4) Samuel Blumenfeld, arguably the country´s most eminent authority on reading: "To understand what is going on in reading, you have to start at the beginning of the conspiracy to dumb down the nation. It starts with John Dewey's 1898 essay, 'The Primary Education Fetich.' Those who set the course took power over the education system by promoting their own disciples and excluding all others. They took control of the major colleges of education: Columbia, Chicago, Palo Alto, etc. They commissioned books to be written promoting whole-word instruction. And they got publishers to publish the new programs because the professors were in a position to get these new primers purchased by virtually every public school system in the country. Many whole-language advocates are simply the latest of the socialists who are willing to destroy this country in order to change it. I put a lot of this in my books 'The New Illiterates' and 'The Whole Language/OBE Fraud.' Evil is a force in this world, and it manifests itself in many different ways. Including deliberately dumbing down a nation." (samblumenfeld.com)

5) Kim Latta, Canadian reading instructor and founder of Exceeding Reading Learning Systems: "The state of reading instruction in 2009 is dismal to say the least. Instead of teaching our children to read by phonics, a rather simple, logical process, we make learning to read a difficult, overwhelming obstacle many children never conquer. I consider this totally reckless especially when the research shows overwhelmingly that phonics is the best way to teach beginning reading to children." (ExceedingReading.com)

6) Siegfried Engelmann, prophet of Direct Instruction and author of "Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons": "Where is education today? About a hair´s width above where it was when I first worked in education, in the 1960s. At that time there were a couple of phonics programs that were not great but that worked reasonably well with most middle performers. That era ended when the New Math failed and the spotlight focused on 'humanism,' not schoolwork, and on recognizing the individual strengths of learners. Language experience was the big vogue. Finally, the weight of these failures led to a replay of the 1960s, with phonics revisited and bolstered by 'phonemic awareness' and other 'research-based' components. The problem is that the logic of the field is still around the same primitive level it was in the ´60s. The field hasn´t learned that categories like 'phonics' are far too broad to let the potential consumer know whether or not the phonics program will work with lower performers. In other words, a skilled technician who understood the actual variables that make reading programs successful with low performers could design a program that met all the requirements of 'research based' and that would not work with a very large percentage of beginning readers. So here we are still pretty far from the bull´s eye." (zigsite.com)


7) Malkin Dare, famed founder of Society for Quality Education: "Here's my take on how reading is being taught in Ontario's schools. Ontario continues to ignore the overwhelming research evidence in favour of systematic phonics. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Ontario's whole language/balance literacy gurus are still leading the province's trusting teachers in the wrong direction. The result is massive illiteracy and misery." (societyforqualityeducation.org)

8) Geraldine Rodgers, author of "The Born Yesterday World of the Reading Experts": "My sabbatical research in 1977-1978 tested the oral reading accuracy and comprehension of some 900 second-grade children. My unexpected finding was that different kinds of readers, or mixtures of the kinds, result from different beginning reading emphases, from sight-word "meaning" (which I label Code 1) to pure phonic emphasis (Code 10). The most surprising finding was that the ´meaning´ emphasis permanently damages so-called ´reading comprehension´ (besides producing highly inaccurate readers). I later found that Oskar Messmer in Germany in 1903 had already discovered the existence of the two kinds of readers, which he labeled subjective (for sight-words) and objective (for phonic sound). Brain research confirms the existence of the two types. Those learning initially by ´sound´ read with the left ´language´ side of the brain, but those learning by ´meaning´ read initially with the soundless right ´picture´ side. Most ´meaning´ readers do then switch from the right to the left, but, as Sally Shaywitz's research with such so-called ´good´ readers unwittingly showed, they remain hampered in reading by sound."

9) Elizabeth Brown, literacy tutor and phonics advocate: "I have given out hundreds of reading grade level tests. Since we´re a military family that moves often, I´ve seen results from many different schools and school districts throughout the United States. When I started tutoring in 1994, many schools were still using whole word methods, and I found that about 60% of students in these schools had reading problems. Currently, most schools teach with a mixture of phonics and Dolch sight words--30 to 40% of students I've tested from these schools have problems. In the few schools that teach with only a few sight words and good phonics programs, I have not yet found a student with reading difficulties. Unfortunately, sight words and balanced literacy only seem to be getting more popular, so, while I would love to see a pure phonics resurgence, it doesn't seem likely in the near future." (thephonicspage.org)

I so tremendously admire these experts for their conscientious efforts on behalf of intelligent education. They have all had to be warriors, because there is so much entrenched nonsense. I urge parents to pick several names and learn more about what they have to say.

Please tell other parents about this article. And tell teachers--most do not realize they have been lied to.

My personal conclusion is that the flawed methods used in many public schools are not only a national tragedy but child abuse. I want to remind everyone of Rudolph Flesch´s "Why Johnny STILL Can´t Read" (1981). Chapter 7 is titled "We Do Teach Phonics," which is the official lie that many teachers are still told to use. Caveat emptor.

The USA is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates and 1,000,000 dyslexics. They are victims of educational malpractice. This article is dedicated to them.