State Board OKs Reading Policy Based on Phonics

SACRAMENTO —  The State Board of Education on Friday approved a detailed new policy on reading meant to ensure that all beginning readers receive a steady diet of lessons in letters, letter sounds and other basic elements of language, beginning in kindergarten.

The policy is not binding on schools, but along with pending legislation and other changes it will guide how teachers are trained and licensed and how school districts spend nearly a billion dollars in state and federal money. As a result, the policy is sure to have an impact on students and classrooms.

“I really think we’ve turned the approach to reading around,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who a year ago appointed a task force to examine the state’s reading methods in reaction to test scores that showed California lagging behind the rest of the country.

The policy reflects five months of sometimes contentious negotiation between Eastin, the state board, reading researchers and members of her own task force, which criticized the state education department’s failure over the past nine years to stress the importance of phonics in beginning reading.

Eastin compared the state’s previous approach to reading to learning to ride a bicycle by trial and error. Young students were encouraged to read what interested them and got help when they encountered snags--like heading off down the sidewalk and being helped back up when they fell. The new policy, she said, is “more like learning to drive a car or fly an airplane--you don’t just leave it to gravity and balance.”

For most children, she said, “systematic instruction has to occur if they are going to read.”

That perspective is clear in the policy memorandum, which Eastin vowed would go out as early as next week to every teacher, principal and superintendent in the state.

The document describes step-by-step a pathway that, it is hoped, will enable most children to learn to read capably by the third grade. Test scores issued a year ago indicated that only four in 10 California children could read proficiently by the fourth grade.

The journey starts with recognizing that words are made up of a sequence of sounds, called phonemes. It continues with the beginning reader learning to relate those sounds to specific letters and letter combinations. The next step is reading common sight words--essential but irregularly spelled words such as “the” and “of” and “you” that must be memorized--and phonetically regular words, such as “sit” and “pit” and “pat.”

Finishing the process requires practice and reading enough books to build up a large vocabulary.

Anticipating criticism of the policy’s prescription, the document states that “effective phonics instruction is not about rote drill of . . . phonics rules.”

Rather, the role of phonics is to “help children understand, apply and learn the alphabetic principle and conventions of written language.”

To help parents and teachers make sure children are headed in the right direction, the document provides some milestones. In preschool, for example, children should be able to recognize the letters in their name and be able to clap out the number of syllables in words. By first grade they ought to be spelling words correctly and using phonics to figure out words they haven’t read before.

Simultaneously with the process of learning those skills, teachers should be reading extensively to pupils, talking to them about the meaning of the stories and expecting students to retell the stories in their own words.

Board member Kathryn Dronenburg of El Cajon said Friday that she was “thrilled and emotional” about the new policy.

“I have a child with a severe disability, a low IQ, and she was taught to read using this method. And if it can work for her it can work for every child,” she said.

She even predicted that the new policy might reduce the growth in the state’s burgeoning prison population. “Ninety percent of the people who are incarcerated have a literacy problem,” she said.

Adria Klein, the president of the California Reading Assn. and one of the writers of the new policy, said it will be valuable for teachers. “As a teacher educator and a teacher, I can teach and learn from this document.”

But supporters of “whole language” have been critical. Twenty professors and teachers who support whole language sent a letter criticizing reading reform efforts to the Assembly Education Committee, which this week held an eight-hour special hearing to examine the state’s problems with reading.

The new policy, according to the letter, is a “clear case of a rush to judgment.” The letter said reading problems were caused by a lack of funding for education and the deficiencies of school and public libraries.

“There seems to be an assumption that if children are taught with systematic phonics that that is going to guarantee that they are going to be able to read,” said Jean Fennacy, a professor at Fresno Pacific College who signed the letter and who helps train new teachers. “The trouble with that is that phonics is only part of reading.”

She also predicted that the new policy would do little to change how teachers teach.

Assembly Education Committee chair Steve Baldwin (R-La Mesa) vowed that he would use his power over the education portion of the state budget and other legislation to make sure that phonics is taught according to the new policy.

Language requiring phonics will be inserted into virtually every bill, he vowed, and programs that do not comply will lose their funding. “We know phonics is the way, let’s go for it,” he said.