by David Safier
This morning's Star has a letter by Ken and Yetta Goodman, professors emeritus and emeritra who live in Tucson.
(I had no idea "emeritus" had a feminine form: "emeritra." I'll add that to my store of who-cares-but-English-teachers word facts, like the singular of "data" is "datum," and the singular of "criteria" is "criterion." [When I hear someone say "There is only one criteria for . . ." it's like fingernails scraping on a chalk board. Which confirms the 19th century historian Henry Adams' statement, "No man, however strong, can serve ten years as
schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else."] But I digress.)
schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else."] But I digress.)
The Goodmans are none too fond of No Child Left Behind. Like me, they're disturbed by the idea that educators closest to the ideas held by the Bush administration are labeled "reformers."
NCLB is not a reform. It turns kindergartens into sweat shops where 5-year-olds are labeled failures if they fail DIBELS ( a mandated test in Arizona). NCLB makes the school curriculum test preparation. The arts, social studies and everything except skill drills in reading and math are gone. Even recess has disappeared. High-school students are being forced out and dedicated teachers quit or retire early.
Amen.
Ken Goodman is credited as the scholar who developed the theory of language acquisition which led to the Whole Language movement. I had the pleasure of talking with him over dinner at a mutual friends' home. I've written a few times about the travesty that is Bush's $6 billion dollar Reading First program, which used only one program, a drill-and-kill phonics approach to reading instruction. The Dept of Ed's own studies showed it had no effect on students' reading comprehension. (The previous post is my most recent rant.) Ken and Yetta were the ones who confirmed my misgivings about the program, adding heaps of understanding and scholarship to my semi-educated dislike of the use of letter-syllable-word recognition as the sole method of teaching reading.
Reading is language. Language isn't simply reading (or listening to) words. It's a complicated comprehension process involving skills that go far beyond word recognition. I suppose you can disregard the human portions of language acquisition if you're teaching a parrot to, well, parrot words. But when you're dealing with those marvelously creative, flexible minds children possess, you need to do much, much more than teach them decoding skills.
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