Untitled 0

THE CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF CERTAIN READING METHODOLOGIES BY PAUL KOELTZOW:

A good review source: http://textbookreviews.org/

This explanation of the problems with reading methodology, the causes and effects, and the underlying reasons for teaching reading in this manner were never better explained than by Paul L. Koeltzel in the following essay.

11/7/2000

Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #8

The History of “Progressive Education” From 1830 to 2000. (The Cause)

and Its Close Companion

The History of The Failure of the Texas/American Public Education System. (The Effect)

I. INTRODUCTION: There are some things that we learn by studying the history of a movement, and the “progressive education movement” is no exception. We may not learn exactly why the leaders of the movement took the actions that they took, but we will learn in fairly specific terms what they did, and we will know the end results of their actions. In the case of education we don’t know exactly what John Dewey had in mind when he became the philosophical leader of the progressive education movement in 1899. And, we don’t know exactly what John Dewey and William Scott Gray had in mind when they implemented their Look-Say “Dick and Jane” concept of reading in 1930, but the history of education has shown us that the educational results were disastrous. And, we know that the curriculums that have been adopted by the “progressive educators” under the leadership of Horace Mann, Col. Francis W. Parker, John Dewey, William Scott Gray (Look-Say, See-Say, Sight, Word) and then Kenneth S. Goodman (Word based Psycholinguistic and Whole-Word and sentence or statement based Whole-Language and Balanced-Approach) have resulted in a continuous degradation of America’s Public Education.

While the single word based Look-Say (See-Say, Sight, Psycholinguistic, Word, Whole-Word) concept was disastrous the sentence or statement based Whole-Language (Balanced-Approach) concept is even worse. (For more details on the reading concepts see my Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #1 dated 4/27/2000 entitled “LEARNING TO READ AMERICAN/ENGLISH IS DIFFICULT; READING ILLITERACY is The Most Serious Problem with Texas Public Education.; The Solution is EARLY INTENSIVE SYSTEMATIC PHONICS.” Also see my Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #3 dated 6/18/2000 entitled “Almost, EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN IN READING/SPELLING INSTRUCTION Except The Names Have Been Changed.” Also see my Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #4 dated 7/4/2000 entitled “THE REUTZEL-COOTER “BALANCED APPROACH” TO READING and: Why it failed as “The Dallas Reading Plan.””)

II. BACKGROUND: In the following brief history of Texas/American public education I ask that you look for SIX things. (1) Observe that prior to the leaders of “progressive education” implementing their Look-Say “Dick and Jane” readers Texas/American public education students were learning to read at about a 98% or better literacy rate. (2) That failure in reading literacy and an increase in mental and emotional problems were associated with the use of the Look-Say concept in Iowa in 1929, prior to the nation wide implementation of the Look-Say “Dick and Jane” readers by the “progressive educators” in 1930. (3) That massive educational problems began to occur in 1931 only one year after the 1930 implementation of the Look-Say concept and learning disability problems had already become an epidemic by 1935. (4) That the “progressive educators” in most cases did nothing other than blame the students for the failure and change the name of their reading concept. ( Look-Say, See-Say, Sight, Psycholinguistic, Word, Whole-Word are all the same concept.) (5) That they ignored everyone that found fault with their educational concepts Dr. Orton in 1929, Rudolf Flesch 1955, Jeanne Chall 1967, Project Follow Through 1968, Anderson et. al. 1984/85 etc. (6) And when they finally made a significant change they made matters worse by implementing the Whole-Language (Balanced-Approach) concept, based on children studying sentences rather than words. The Whole-Language concept had already failed in 1968 as part of Project Follow Through when it was known as the “Tucson Early Education Model.”

The question is not whether the “progressive educators” took those actions or not, because history proves that they did take those actions. The question is not whether the actions that the “progressive educators” took contributed significantly to the failure of Texas/American public education, because history proves the actions that they took did contribute significantly to the failure of Texas/American public education. THE ONLY QUESTION THAT IS NOT ANSWERED IS: WERE THOSE ACTIONS BY THE “PROGRESSIVE EDUCATORS” HONEST “TERRIBLE MISTAKES” OR WERE THOSE ACTIONS “UNCONSCIONABLE ACTS?”

Many actions the leaders of “progressive education,” took contributed significantly to educational failure. If those actions were “honest terrible mistakes” their failure to take appropriate corrective action turned what might have been “honest terrible mistakes” into “unconscionable acts.” I think the following history of the “progressive education movement” fully supports that position. (For additional details see my Texas Public Education Information Bulletin Y2K #6 dated 9/7/2000 entitled “ “Progressive Education’s” TERRIBLE MISTAKES or UNCONSCIONABLE ACTS.”)

III. THE HISTORY OF THE LOOK-SAY (SIGHT, SEE-SAY, PSYCHOLINGUISTIC, WORD, WHOLE- WORD) METHOD OF TEACHING READING. Rather than teaching students the commonly accepted 44 phonic sounds for the 26 letters of American English the Look-Say concept has the children memorize the whole word as a unit similar to a Egyptian hieroglyphic or a Chinese pictograph. The children that have better than average linguistic skills, not necessarily related to IQ, develop their own intuitive phonics code by relating the sounds from the words they have memorized to other words and in this way become independent readers. Millions of other children being taught by the Look-Say concept have not been able to develop their own intuitive phonics code and are unable to read, intuitively decode, words that they have not memorized.

A. The Look-Say (Sight, See-Say, Psycholinguistic, Word, Whole-Word) method was invented in the 1830’s by Thomas H. Gallaudet, the founder of the Hartford Asylum for The Deaf and Dumb, as a method of teaching the deaf to read.

B. In 1836 the Boston Primary School Committee decided to try Gallaudet’s primer on an experimental basis.

In 1844 a group of Boston schoolmasters published a blistering attack on Horace Mann and his reforms. Included in the attack was a thorough critique of the Look-Say method, to my knowledge, the first of its kind ever written.

C. In 1839 Horace Mann and his fellow reformers established the first state-owned and operated school for teacher training-the Normal School at Lexington, Massachusetts. In the very first year of the very first state teachers college in America, the Look-Say method of teaching reading was taught to its students as the preferred and superior method of instruction.

NOTE: County Normal: I had the opportunity of attending Tuscola County Normal during the 1948/1949 school year. The county normal system took high school graduates, gave them one year of training in education, including practice teaching, and awarded them with a three year teaching certificate. It was designed to provide teachers for the rural schools in that county. During the 1948/1949 school year the Look-Say method was being taught. There was absolutely no reference to the early intensive systematic phonics method of teaching reading.

D. As early as 1881 the McGuffey’s readers were recognizing the Word Method (Look-Say, See-Say, Sight, Psycholinguistic, Word, Whole-Word) as an alternative to the phonics method. In the Preface; page (iii), of McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer; Copyright 1881 we find: “The plan of the book enables the teacher to pursue the Phonic Method, the Word Method, the Alphabet Method or any combination of these methods.” The most commonly used concept at that time was the phonics method.

E. The man who did more than anyone else to keep the Look-Say method alive when McGuffey’s Readers and other phonics primers dominated was Col. Francis W. Parker. In 1873 Col. Parker, whom John Dewey called the father of progressive education, became superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts. There he made progressive reforms which brought him attention and fame. From 1899 to 1901 he was principal at the University of Chicago School of Education.

F. When John Dewey came to the University of Chicago in 1894, Parker was his neighbor and he got to know him well. Dewey used many of Parker’s ideas in creating Dewey’s Laboratory School where reading was taught via the Sight, or Look-Say method. It was Dewey’s book about the Laboratory School experiment, “School and Society”, published in 1899, that catapulted him to leadership in the progressive movement. With this book Dewey provided the movement with a blueprint for restructuring American education, and when Parker died in 1902 Dewey became the undisputed philosophical leader of the progressive education movement.

Dewey’s aim was to create among the students a spirit of social cooperation. The socialization that Dewey envisioned demanded a strong sense of interdependence and, in Dewey’s school, cooperative activities were emphasized. (For additional information on John Dewey’s “progressive education philosophy” see my Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #2 “PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: John Dewey’s Dream; PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: The Reality; PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: The Failing Remnants”)

G. In 1908 one of G. Stanley Hall’s students Edmund Burke Huey had a book published entitled, “The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading “. Because Huey’s book supported the Look-Say concept of reading it instantly became the bible of progressive educators on the matter of reading instruction.

H. After the publication of Huey’s book in 1908, G. Stanley Hall, Huey’s mentor, went so far as to extol the virtues of illiteracy.

I. The January 30, 1915 issue of School and Society provided the US Bureau of Education statistics for 1910. “Statistics compiled by the Bureau of Education for use at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, show that of children from 10 to 14 years of age there were in 1910 only 22 out of every 1,000 who could not read nor write. In 1900 there were of the same class 42 out of 1000....The following states report that only 1 child in 1000 between the ages of 10 and 14 as illiterate: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington... It is evident that the public schools will in a short time practically eliminate illiteracy.”

J. 1929, The first use of look-say method on a large scale in public schools took place in Iowa. It wasn’t long before the schools there were plagued by “reading problems”. The problems were so serious that they came to the attention of Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a professor of psychiatry at Iowa State University. Orton, a neuropathologist who specialized in speech disorders, was so alarmed by what he saw that he wrote an article entitled “The “Sight Reading” Method of Teaching Reading, As A Source of Reading Disability” for the Feb. 1929 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology.

This was the first article, to my knowledge, that a trained neuropathologist stated in no uncertain terms that “the sight method of teaching reading” could cause reading disability and be “an actual obstacle to reading progress” rather than a help. He also made it clear that these “faulty teaching methods may not only prevent acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.”

NOTE: Those of you who have studied different reading methods may be interested in knowing that Dr. Orton’s concepts have been instrumental in the development of Spaulding and Spaulding (1957), Traub (1977), Slingerland (1977) and Pollack (1979) reading methods.

K. By 1930, completely disregarding Orton’s warnings, the progressives were ready to launch their drive to get Look-Say textbooks into every primary classroom in the nation. In December 1930, the NEA Journal began publishing a series of articles on reading instruction by William Scott Gray whom it described as “the most eminent authority in the field of reading.” The final article appeared in June 1931. No other educator had ever been given so much space in the NEA Journal. For Gray and his publisher it was free advertising, for in 1930 Scott Foresman had just published the first edition of Gray’s “Dick and Jane” primers. In a few short years they would become the dominant reading text books in America’s primary schools. Both publisher and author would make millions while at the same time causing a national epidemic of reading disabilities.

L. The problems began almost immediately. In his May 1931 article in the NEA Journal entitled “Remedial Reading Cases in Class,” Gray wrote: “The types of poor readers may be classified roughly into several groups, namely: non- readers, including those who encounter unusual difficulty in learning to read; those who can read to some extent but who are notably deficient in all phases of reading; those who encounter difficulty primarily in recognition, in comprehension, in rate of reading, or in oral interpretation; and those who are not interested in reading or who have narrow rather than diverse reading interests or who exhibit undesirable tastes in reading.”

NOTE: Nowhere in the article did Gray use the term dyslexia, or any other exotic medical term to describe the cause of poor reading.

M. In April 1935, only five years after “Dick and Jane” was introduced, Gray, in an article in the Elementary English Review described a whole new group of problems that were causing reading disability: mental deficiency or retardation, defective vision, auditory deficiencies, congenital word blindness, developmental alexia, congenital aphasia, dyslexia, congenital alexia, strephosymbilia, cerebral dominance, handedness, eyedness, ambidexterity and emotional instability.

Dr. Orton had been right. The sight Look-Say method would indeed cause reading disabilities and far reaching damage to students emotional life, and on a massive scale.

N. The October 1936 NEA Journal began publishing a series of articles on reading problems by Arthur I. Gates and Guy L. Bond in which it pointed out “That there are probably nearly a half million children in the first four grades of American schools whose educational career is blocked by serious disabilities in reading.” The articles were entitled “Failure in Reading and Social Adjustment” (October 1936), “Reading Disabilities” (November 1936), “Prevention of Disabilities in Reading” (December 1936 and January 1937).

What was the diagnosis as causing all the trouble? According to Gates the new look-say primers introduced too many sight words too soon and repeated them too few times.

(For additional information on how ineffective reading concepts contribute to “educationally induced learning disabilities,” and how effective corrective reading concepts significantly reduce and in many cases eliminate the clinically diagnosed symtoms of dyslexia and ADD see my: “DYSLEXIA / ADHD (ADD) CAUSES READING FAILURE or READING FAILURE CAUSES DYSLEXIA / ADHD (ADD)” dated 5/4/97; my “ADD/ADHD/ADD-WO CHARACTERISTICS, IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES, CAN BE EDUCATIONALLY AVOIDED OR EDUCATIONALLY CORRECTED” dated 10/18/97; my “What is ADD/ADHD/ADD-WO? Where did ADD/ADHD/ADD-WO come from? What is the main cause of the ADD/ADHD/ADD-WO diagnosis? How can we drastrically reduce the occurance of ADD/ADDHD/ADD-WO?” dated 12/10/97 and “Why don’t we teach ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER (ADD) children to PAY ATTENTION?” DATED 1/08/98.)

O. 1941-1945: When the military recruited its personnel for WW II 99.6% of the recruits that had received four years or more of reading were able to read at the fourth grade level or better. Almost all of these recruits were taught to read by the phonics based concept. (See Sept. 14, 1992 National Review article entitled “That’s Right-They’re Wrong” by Regna Lee Wood.)

P. 1949-1951: When the military recruited its personnel for the Korean conflict 17% of the recruits failed to pass the 4th grade reading level AFQT. Part of these recruits had received their reading training using the Look-Say concept which was introduced in 1930. (Ibid.)

Q. During the 1950 census, the last one that included a literacy test, 98% of the adult population over the age of 25 was found to be literate. Almost all of the adults over the age of 25 had been taught to read by the phonics based concept. (Ibid.)

R. In 1951, fifteen years after Gates and Bond had supposedly diagnosed the problem, Dr. Gray revised his “Dick and Jane” pre-primers. He introduced fewer words and repeated them more often. “The New Illiterates” published in 1973 compared the 1930 and 1951 versions of “Dick and Jane”.

In 1930 the “Dick and Jane” pre-primers taught 68 sight words in 39 pages of text, with an illustration per page, a total of 565 words and a Teachers Guide of 87 pages. In 1951 the same pre-primers had been expanded to 172 pages, divided into three separate pre-primers, with 184 illustrations, a total of 2,613 words, and a Teachers Guide of 182 pages to teach a sight vocabulary of only 58 words.

NOTE: Did the revision do any good? Apparently not, for the reading problems continued to grow in scope and complexity.

S. In 1955 Rudolf Flesch wrote a book called “Why Johnny Can’t Read”. The book was important because it identified the cause of the reading problem: The Look-Say method of reading. Other writings in popular and educational magazines had told about the problem, but none had identified and pinpointed the cause.

Flesch also pointed out how the progressive educators could implement the look-say method with so little public awareness about what was going on. “It’s a foolproof system all right. Every grade-school teacher in the country has to go to a teacher’s college or school of education; every teachers’ college gives at least one course on how to teach reading; every course on how to teach reading is based on a textbook; every one of those textbooks is written by one of the high priests of the word method. In the old days it was impossible to keep a good teacher from following her own common sense and practical knowledge; today the phonetic system of teaching reading is kept out of our schools as effectively as if we had a dictatorship with an all-powerful Ministry of Education.”

T. In 1967 Dr. Jeanne S. Chall wrote “Learning to Read: The Great Debate”. She was a respected member of the International Reading Association and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After several years of intensive research into a mountain of studies done on beginning reading instruction, Chall came to the conclusion that the phonics, or code approach, produced better readers than the look-say method. The results of Chall’s research has been almost completely disregarded.

U. By 1967 the progressive educators now led by Gray’s replacement Dr. Kenneth S. Goodman had changed the name of look-say to “psycholinguistics”. He stated in the May 1967 Journal of Reading Specialist: “More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Goodman gained public notoriety when he told a New York Times Reporter (July 9,1975) that it is all right if a youngster read “pony” for “horse”, because it meant that the youngster had gotten the meaning.

V. In 1968 the world’s largest educational experiment, the 1 billion dollar US Office of Education Follow Through Project was initiated. The idea was to have sponsors of the various educational concepts take sample schools in different environments to prove that their methods could be used universally across the whole United States. The competition included 12 major sponsors and a number of self sponsored sites.

The winning competitor, that took first place in every measured category including self esteem was the phonics based DISTAR (Direct Instruction) program. Because the progressive educators were not and are not in favor of the phonics based reading program the results of this one billion dollar study were ignored by the “progressive educators.”

NOTE: The Whole-Language concept currently advocated by the “progressive educators” was known at the time of the 1968 competition as the ‘Tucson Early Education Model” and it performed very poorly.

W. In the September 1969 NEA Journal, Donna Connel, a teacher from California defended Dr. Chall’s position on the use of phonics in teaching children to read.

The research is overwhelmingly in favor of a decoding emphasis in beginning reading...Without decoding skills, early sight readers are completely dependent upon the teacher...

Auditory discrimination is at its peak in early childhood, when children all over the world effortlessly learn their native language. Postponing decoding, the bridge between sound and sight, until this peak of neurological readiness has passed (about age five and a half) is imposing unnecessary handicap.

All my kindergarten children, regardless of IQ or economic background, read, some up to middle second grade level on the Stanford Achievement Test. Decoding may be dull and difficult for older children but it is a fascinating experience for the younger ones.”

X. In April 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its report, “A Nation At Risk” in which it said: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.” Then it added the following comment: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an ACT OF WAR. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

Note: I feel that the National Commission on Excellence in Education was remiss in not placing the blame where it really belongs, and that is on the “progressive educators” and their failed educational philosophy. The we in the above statement is not specific enough.

Y. During 1984-1985 The National Academy of Education; US Dept. of Education met and Richard C. Anderson et. all. prepared the report entitled “Becoming A Nation of Readers.” On Page 43 of that report we find: “In summary, the purpose of phonics is to teach children the alphabetic principle. The goal is for this to become the operating principle so that young readers consistently use information about the relationship between letters and sounds and letters and meaning to assist in the identification of known words and to independently figure out unfamiliar words. Research evidence tends to favor explicit phonics.”

Z. The May 1987, US News and World Report stated: “Nationwide, nearly a million students graduate each year unable to read and write, and 1 in 4 never graduate at all.”

In October of that year, David Kearns, chairman of Xerox Corporation, denounced the public school as “a failed monopoly,” producing workers “with a 50 percent defect rate.” Businesses must hire workers “who can’t read, write or count,” he said- then spend $25 billion a year to train them. (USA Today 10-27-87)

Note: In 1988 the State of California mandated the use of the Whole-Language concept of teaching reading. This was the beginning of the end of the emphasis on the terribly ineffective Whole-Word (Look-Say, See-Say, Sight, Psycholinguistic, Word) concept of teaching reading. The Whole-Language (Balanced-Approach) with its emphasis on the sentence or statement rather than the word has ushered in an even less effective reading method.

IV. THE HISTORY OF THE WHOLE-LANGUAGE (BALANCED-APPROACH) METHOD OF TEACHING READING. And, the parallel history of the growth of illiteracy in the United States. The Look-Say (See-Say, Sight, Word, Psycholinguistic, Whole-Word) concept teaches children to memorize individual words. With the Whole-Language (Balanced-Approach) concept the emphasis is placed on the entire sentence or statement. It further complicates the learning process in that the primary methods of word identification are semantics (the meaning of the word in the sentence), and syntax (the part of speech that should be used i.e.; noun, pronoun, adverb, adjective etc.) phonics is used as a last resort and in a disorganized way.

A. 1988, Even though the Tucson Early Education model had failed in 1968 as part of “Project Follow Through,” Kenneth S. Goodman, the current leader of “progressive education,” changed its name to Whole-Language. This renamed “Tucson Early Education Model” now called “Whole-Language” was implemented state wide in California in 1988. Four years later the California fourth grade students were the poorest readers in the continental US. Even after the massive California failure the “progressive educators” have continued to implement the Whole-Language concept across the nation until it is currently the most commonly used reading concept in the US.

B. On (5-3-89), Secretary of Education Dr. Lauro Cavazos told the American people that the education reform movement, which began in 1983 with the famous A Nation At Risk report, “had lost its momentum,” that test scores were still far below their 1960’s peak, that we were still “wallowing in a tide of mediocrity” and “spending more and getting less for our dollar.”

C. On the 1992 test of The National Assessment of Educational Progress only 18 percent of Texas eighth graders demonstrated math. proficiency. On the 1994 test only 26 percent of Texas fourth graders were proficient readers. States “slide the bar” on achievement tests such as TAAS, Mr. Wolk said. The Passing rates on TAAS are at least twice as large as those on the federal test

D. In September 1993, The US Education Department released the results of its 14 million dollar “Adult Literacy in America” study. The study found that nearly half of all adults Americans, 47%, read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job. That equates to an estimated 80,000,000 adult Americans. The American Education System is adding an estimated 2,300,000 additional functional illiterate adults to that figure each year.

E. In 1997 one of the authors of the Reutzel/Cooter “Balanced-Approach” was hired by the DISD as their reading Czar. Dr. Cooter implemented The Dallas Reading Plan using the “Balanced-Approach.” Three years later “among third-graders, the plan’s major target, more than half still cannot read books meant for their age group.” (For more details see my Texas Public Education Bulletin Y2K #4 dated 7/4/2000 entitled “THE REUTZEL-COOTER “BALANCED-APPROACH” TO READING and: Why it failed as “The Dallas Reading Plan.”)

F. In 1999 the Texas Legislature amended the Texas Education Code to provide for a Master Reading Teacher Certification. Texas A&M-Commerce has chosen to use the Reutzel-Cooter “Balanced-Approach” method that has already failed in Dallas as their text book to teach reading concepts in their Master Reading Teacher Certification program. (For additional information see my Texas Public Education Information Bulletin Y2K #5 dated 8/27/2000 entitled “In many, and possibly most, instances THE MASTER READING TEACHER PROGRAM IS USING THE WRONG CURRICULUM.”)

V. SUMMARY: Why I know that John Dewey, John Dewey’s “progressive education philosophy, and the advocates of that philosophy at all levels of Texas/American Education are the primary cause of the failure of Texas/American Public Education System.

A. First, we in America had an effective public education system that was teaching about 98% of the students that attended school how to read prior to nation wide implementation of the Look-Say concept in 1930. This is supported by the fact that in 1910 about 98% of the children between the age of 10 and 14 in the public schools could read. This is supported by the fact that between 1941 and 1945 99.6% of the recruits of WW2 that had received a fourth grade education or higher were able to read at the fourth grade level or better. This is supported by the fact that on the 1950 census, the last one with a reading test, 98% of adults over the age of 25 were literate.

B. Second, the educational failure began to occur immediately after the nation wide introduction of the Look-Say concept and has continued unabated ever since. In 1931, only one year after the 1930 introduction of the Look-Say “Dick and Jane” readers Gray was already blaming the students for the reading failure. By 1935 Gray was already blaming the students for a number of reading disabilities. During the Korean Conflict, 1949-1951, the number of young enlisties failing the reading portion of the enlistment test jumped from .4% during WW2 to 17% during the Korean conflict.

C. Third, the even worse Whole-Language concept was mandated in California in 1988. Four years later California fourth grade students were the worst readers in the continental United States. Rather than stopping the spread of the failed Whole-Language concept the “progressive educators” have spread the concept very rapidly to where it is the most commonly used concept in the American Public Education System.

D. Fourth, in 1997 an updated version of the Whole-Language concept now called Balanced-Approach was introduced as The Dallas Reading Plan. Three years later about 50% of the third grade students under that plan could still not read a book at grade level.

E. Fifth, in 1999 the Texas State Legislature passed a bill providing for a Master Reading Teacher Program. Texas A&M Commerce adopted the failed Reutzel/Cooter “Balanced-Approach as the method to be used to teach reading for the Master Reading Teacher Certification.

F. Sixth, it is my personal opinion that John Dewey’s emphasis on socialization at the expense of education has resulted in the “progressive educators” committing a large number of “UNCONSCIONABLE ACTS” against the children of this nation. It is further my opinion that the above brief history of the progressive education movement and its very close companion the failure of the Texas/American Public Education System adequately proves that point.

VI: RECOMMENDATIONS:

That the Texas Legislature during the 2001 session of the legislature mandate the use of “scientific research based reading, spelling and mathematics curriculums” to replace the failed “progressive education curriculums” that currently exist in most Texas public schools. That they further put in place effective controls to ensure that those scientific research based curriculums are effectively implemented. (For details on the definition of “scientific research based curriculums” see my Texas Public Education-Information Bulletin #22 dated 4/21/99 entitled “HB 1129 House Public Education Committee Hearing 4/19/99 “SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH BASED CURRICULUMS.”)

Paul F. Koeltzow

10318 Ferndale RD

Dallas TX 75238; (214)341-5373; e-mail: koeltzowp@compuserve.com

(NOTE: All referenced bulletins were hand delivered to the offices of Gov. Bush, Lt. Gov Perry, Speaker Laney and Comptroller Rylander. Copies were either hand delivered or distributed through the senate and house mail rooms to all members of the Texas legislature. If you do not have access to a copy of the referenced bulletins please contact Mr. Koeltzow by email and he will send a copy to you.)