Unpublished column, June 11, 1997

If there were ever any doubt the "whole language" method of teaching reading/language arts skills is an utter failure, you need merely to read "Students' spelling gets an F," a story by Los Angeles Times writer Elaine Woo which appeared in the May 30 Houston Chronicle.

Woo tells the story of 8th-grade students in Middleton, Calif. who responded to an outbreak of vandalism in their school by writing some two dozen Letters to the Editor to their local newspaper. The local paper ran the letters verbatim, because the students' spelling was so utterly atrocious.

The letters prompted a wave of outcry in the little agricultural community north of San Francisco as residents realized how badly they'd been fooled by 10 years' worth of "holistic" teaching in California. "Creativity" became more important than "accuracy," since accuracy could be easily achieved by using a computer spell-checker in this technologically-advanced age.

"Sales of spelling books began to plummet, and workshops on nurturing creativity in young writers flourished," as California adopted Whole Language wholesale, Woo wrote.

Woo's story is a chilling echo of statements made here in Katy last Oct. 12 by California Secretary of Child Development and Education Maureen DiMarco, warning Texans not to move forward with the touchy-feely "vegematic curriculum" which had doomed five and one-half million children in her state to functional illiteracy.

"Instead of following what clear research has proven for years, we kept following fads, whims and gimmicks," DiMarco said. "California kept looking for the 'vegematic' curriculum ... We discovered (the California Education Department) had lied."

There are very real parallels between what happened in California and what is now happening in Texas — although the Lone Star State does appear, at least, to be paying a little bit of attention to DiMarco's warning.

A conservative minority on the State Board of Education has successfully called attention to the glaring deficiencies in the English/Language Arts Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), which as originally written was effectively an outright embrasure of Whole Language.

Although the far-superior Alternative Document Draft will not be implemented instead of the TEKS, it does appear to have at least influenced the latest draft of the TEKS. It's taken months of hard wrangling, but elements promoting phonological awareness and good ol' phonics have been woven into the document.

That in itself is amazing, considering the fact that every move toward a "back-to-basics" approach makes a significant hit in the pocketbooks of the education administrators and marketers whose livelihood depends on coming up with "new" ways to learn. What too many school boards refuse to admit is the fact that old-fashioned rote learning — no matter how boring it can be — is the most effective way to teach the basics, especially in the early grades.

You can get creative later; first you have to have the tools to work with. And if you can't spell — or read, write or do math — all that creativity becomes simple gibberish.