This comment covered a lot of territory, and I took the liberty of reformatting it to make it easier to read on the screen - mostly, I just hit the [return] key a few times to break it up into smaller blocks.

Looking at the history of literacy reform as a reactionary movement is probably the most accurate way to get a grip on what we have now. Our experiences as youngsters in school is very similar, except that I didn’t have the “social justice” flavor to anything I learned because I was in a pre-Vatican II Catholic school. We were mostly concerned with bashing Protestants, then - and preparing for martyrdom. Now I’m a teacher. Not too far off the mark, I guess.

The acceptable success criteria for any program of learning tells us a lot about the politics of its supporters, doesn’t it?

You are so perceptive…..I really love to read your site…

Perhaps, and I offer this after a day of working with playdough, so keep this firmly in mind, the issue isn’t REALLY whether or not the “progressive” pedagogy of the last 50 years (and that’s a LONG TIME) created failure within schools. Not really. Because then at some point it’s worth noticing we created the most spectacular significant success in the process also…

Perhaps the issue in current literacy reform movements is that what the last 50 years did was create a way to develop critical thinkers around social notions.

And that is, as it has been since the New Deal, a sticky wicket. And an area for national division. Schools reflect really an argument that society hasn’t figured out and has pushed through politics into the school world (and here I really do recommend reading James Herndon’s later work) and at times I wonder what we are going to do with it.

So then concretely (we playdough people tend to get concrete) I would gather that if I was a member of a particular political party and I realized that teachers overwhelmingly belonged in another perspective with the ability to effect and affect students who become potential voters-wait a minute. NCLB is a great “wait a minute” from 2 Bushes that wanted to stop Federal Aid to schools and, it might be argued, took their desire to erode public education into any available crack and nook or cranny, from Vouchers to Charters, to testing and assessing, to force the country one way or another, to destabilize public education and our relationship to core citizenship right, and then that as a base in societal membership and function…..and they were better at what they did than those who held positions on another end of the spectrum, meaner, dogmatically driven. Way better, in part because they used your very rhetoric (literacy) against you, their boundaries were different.

I must now devise a methodology and a perspective to support essentially neutralizing their voice (as a teacher).

Now that’s a new job. I thought playdough was difficult.

And that’s something not well enough understood in my teacher ranks, and that feels a good bit different than going in and getting into a reading experience…. And that’s not exactly maybe a fact, it’s what is happening.

You know I was schooled in West Virginia in the 60’s. By some piece of fortune every teacher I had for my first umpteen years was well on the way to retirement or serving their final year. So I had a group of people teaching in “the really, really old school”, I’d place their collective training in the 1930’s. So I would call them “Depression era” teachers. And they were frugal, strict, socially oriented, and their conception of school was a place to “get ahead”. I call them American Dreamers.

The most influential was my third grade teacher Mrs. Gladys Peyton. She was teaching in Second Ward School after years of teaching on “White Avenue” working with the black students in our town, as a black teacher, in a small school removed from the main building. She actually took our class, due to overcrowding, up to “White Avenue,” where we were now a mixed group back in the “Negro School”. I rather think of this as the beginning of my “social justice strand.” She was the first person I really knew of color. And she was perhaps the best way to start thinking about the issue. Her integrity was so high you can’t get to that mountaintop today. She was a giant. (On seeing her later in my early teens she told me, as I fumbled to thank her for all she had done for me, “The best way to thank me is to give of yourself to others”)

Literacy in her room was based in reading groups, basals, workbooks. If we read books I do not recall it. We sounded and we practiced sight words and read Dick and Jane type stories. I never left my seat (ever) so if our reading group was reading we called out to her as she stood up front while the other groups quietly read. We made no noises. We had no problems. I don’t know why not, I was afraid of my father so that works for me. Her approach was, read when it is your turn. And she might ask questions about the story. Yellowbirds were less than Redbirds and Bluebirds were just plain dumb. In the lingo of class culture. I was a yellow bird. Almost but not quite dumb. I was always going to be a yellow bird (and I still have trouble with the color yellow) in my stay at Second Ward School, but my parents moving in fourth grade across town to an even more working class neighborhood propelled me into Redbird world.

Workbook pages were really grammar exercises, we diagrammed sentences, we wrote in handwriting books from the state for an hour each day, copying the finest documents America ever produced. My hand got hit everyday by her ruler for being messy, but somehow I don’t hold an angry thought-I just regret my handwriting. I never wrote a real sentence “by myself” until 7th grade when I had to write “You Are A Paperclip,” my first excursion into creative or any form of writing. Actually I’m incorrect. In fourth I wrote, “Dolly Madison,” a piece of plagiarism from our 1946 encyclopedia set. And did my first illustration. Her head. It was seen as “very promising”.

Weekly, we memorized a poem to recite in front of the class on “our turn”. I can still recite Phillip Larkin’s “First Spring” and Stevenson’s “Block City” and a litany of others. Third grade was, for me, a literature rich experience. Whether or not it was a behavioral model, I doubt it. Many kids at that time including my husband and my Aunt teaching in Tennessee were entering schools “without walls,” and doing SRA reading cards “at their Level,” and working in programs that, like mine, fall now through the cracks of memories and rhymes gone mostly away and with reasons faded into the foam of the wave that crested, hit the beach, then went back out to reform again and reinvent, and wash up……

You might head scratch here, and ask what’s the point, SARAH? Well let’s look at the classroom today……first there are books. Or there should be, and basals again, altho frankly, they hold a much higher level of content than mine did “back then”. There are pieces in journals, writing by a student occurs much earlier, there are language expression pieces in some form, examples of sound and spelling programs with various levels of phonics roots, you have workbooks inevitably, shared books, at times guided reading books, or at least let’s say likely books “at student reading level”. You have grammar pieces integrated into the programmatic pieces and in very good rooms technological connects as varied as web-site building and writing, and a host of word processing skills, research skills and a dynamic world to sort in the new literacy. Beyond this you have instructors competent to chose and arrange stories and pieces in their literature cycles to address deeper issues such as compassion, self-discovery, cultural understanding, artistic interpretation.

I’m not saying this was not in the fabric of 50 years ago, what I’m saying is the layers within classrooms are now richer, deeper, fuller. Full of time and space (think Einstein, and I believe you can hear my intent). We can’t even go back if we try….We don’t yellow, red and blue so much as flexibly move students into groups to address their reading. Some of us trained in many programs that came through all these literature approaches in the 50 year “progressive” cycle and use a multiplicity of pieces. So why then any failure in any place?

What’s that about?

In part the answer is varied. It would be very hard for me to picture students back in Mrs. Peyton’s room, today. We had failure there-plenty of it. It was just seen as related to parent and child. YOUR FAULT. Or perhaps an example of why one family made it over another-the answer she saw was “effort”.

In my husband’s “open” elementary, the failure was “these kids are influenced by outside forces,” -you know…peace, drugs, rock and roll. And in my early career failure was described as a result of the poverty and violence in Watts, and the conditions in the fields, too, bringing very impoverished 2nd language learners into the literacy picture, in large part coming to USA, there from the Third World. Societal fault.

Meanwhile, lots of success was occurring nationally, even way back in my time. Of course. I’m here, aren’t I? But somehow what happened in schools really was just a reflection of what is happening societally.

There is at present a giant fissure through this country. (oh really) It divides those that are affluent and have access to opportunity from those who want to pursue the American Dream, but by virtue of birth start in a much lower rung. It isn’t that this hasn’t always been an issue-look in Depression times where my teachers making $500 a year began careers to “help their fellow man”. What happened was populations grew tremendously, and in part from other places, coming in to work and once again, at least here in California, taxpayers resented paying a dime to educate the “less fortunate”.

One need only look at Prop. 13 and the recent votes against universal PreSchool to see in CA, vote for less…we do that no matter if it’s wrong. We talk the talk and we vote both ways. So we had a segment voting at one point in time, that all community college would be free, school would be fully funded (not like in WV where I paid text fees and supply fees), slammed vouchers, and then voted through the biggest , most devastating ballot initiative to cut the schools and eliminate anything remotely like music, art and so much more (13). Voted again, and drop kicked bilingual education.

You don’t see a great deal of literacy development, knowledge and understanding in voting around money. You see knees jerking….Division in the country…because it costs money, resources, takes leadership, vision and lots of creative ability to run schools based in applying all we know and CAN do. Especially in the so called Progressive approach….you need lots of books.

The question really isn’t is phonics better or neglected by those who don’t “understand” how language works. The actual truth is it’s easier, cheaper, produces less likelihood of citizenship with empowerment from poorer special interests, than might go forward with content and comprehension (Socratic dare I say) literacy skills. It’s apparent to a segment of the population, and they say it right out of their “Hooked on Phonics” mouths, [who] feel that schools can become business, schools can become places to sell technology, tests, data, programs, consultation, and all the rest and within a redesign a new set of “friends,” to paraphrase our current President, can become friendly and argue that this is all about “fixing” literacy.

School and children can become commodities. That’s new territory. We haven’t ventured there before. And run in that model, lots of people can get fired, hired, demoted, promoted and lots of children can be assessed, pathologized. It just so happens that earlier behavioral, phonics methodology was very good at patholgizing, proscribing, and top down fixing. Time to get it out once more. Wow. The answer.

I really like Susan Ohanian because she looks at the issue of “is it really broke” concerning the basic premise of the argument today. Certainly literacy is complicated.

In areas of 2nd language, we struggle to do the job and compete on tests with students speaking in their Native Language, especially if factors of urban poverty are added. And they made us have to score the same, thanks. We struggle in ghetto’s, we struggle in inner-cities.

We seem to need a few things consistently, leadership with integrity, stable teachers that dedicate lives, resources, understanding, and I think on top of that, more programmatic literacy design and training to enable a teacher to present curriculum for the individual needs she is teaching. It’s rough to teach kids so needy. Who knew? With of course the ever present…..” are we working both where they need to be and anywhere close to where their affluent peers are?” Oh yes, and a love for doing the job well, and a system to recognize it when you do it. Someday I could write about that.

I somehow can’t see this answer contained in the behavioral models, they were abjectly unable to meet the needs in simpler times…but it appears NCLB is going to give us a reminder as those folks, those Anita Archer folks of old, with their “expert me as teacher” genius top-down chanting, anti-bird walking, directed, all knowledge poured in the head, and all students as pigeons parroting the scripts-here we come…..oh boy….motivational theory, see you later..Again.

But I’d suggest this divide in our country I spoke of earlier is different than it was in my day. In my day a trip around America led you into most rooms looking about the same. We kind of all rode the wave together for good or bad. SAME. Give or take a few decorative elements like wooden versus plastic desks. Now a trip around the country or even the county is something to see. In Underperforming Schools we are rigidly doing it “all the same,” every teacher aligned everyday to deliver the same content in the same way, to please the Federal NCLB desire to see that “consistency” and that ritual of basal, phonics, textbook design culture and that stamped, approved, not yet proven curricular design….just what our NCLB driven leaders want. They are fueled by a mighty desire to rectify the teacher now as the “fault”.

And to hear them tell it, it’s a better education than ever.

And then drive right across town to the Charter that’s only doing Project Based Learning or technology, where the children of EVERY SINGLE NCLB PERSON AND POLITICAL LEADER HAS THEIR CHILD.. to the schools with art/drama/music/ focus or that reads literature in lit. circles….and here you find kids designing puppets, plays, having school camp out reading night, maybe the basal is in the room, but the site is consumed in the love of learning, free of literacy police because it’s free of test failure because it’s free of poverty.

Did you know the largest growing population of people putting kids into Charters and private Ed. are TEACHERS in PUBLIC SCHOOL? There is a confidence builder.

Once, tongue in cheek, I thought the best solution to the reading wars, or these different theoretical positions, was to give every family a million dollars. Maybe in today’s world it might take ten. It sure seems to fix a whole lot of what hangs us up…..barring that, my own particular response is, given I have a child that scores almost perfect scores, I think my students deserve no less than what she got…the accumulated wisdom of the twentieth century in the literacy training of her parents and teachers. And when a better approach actually is developed, I’ll be first in line at the trough.

But for me it makes sense to give children from either side of the divide the “richest” public school experience possible and the fullest most technologically based literature program. LIKE THE NCLB folk get for their own…And then I think these poor kids I teach will grow up and use their skills to figure out why their parent’s generation got so hung up on sounds and letters or so blind about seeing that opportunity was necessary for every person. Cause I don’t think kids miss we are dividing in order to conquer…..