Flesch devoted an entire chapter to pitting systematic phonics against the whole word method and examining their respective results in every relevant test conducted up to that time. In every test, students trained in phonics read better than students trained using variants of the whole word method.
Additionally, in 1961, the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned Jeanne Chall of the Harvard Graduate School of Education to research the issue and finally resolve the dispute. In her 1967 book Learning to Read: The Great Debate, she concluded, “For a beginning reader … knowledge of letter and sounds had more influence on reading achievement than the child’s tested ‘mental ability’ or IQ.”
Ravitch writes, “Flesch’s polemic set off a national debate about literacy… . Because of its popularity, Flesch’s book had a swift and large effect on the teaching of reading.” As a result, “Several publishers issued new reading textbooks that featured phonics.”
Nonetheless, the educational establishment clung to the whole word method; and, by the 1980s, in a new form, it made a sweeping comeback. Its new iteration was known as “whole language.” Whole language retained the whole word approach and thus the obdurate refusal to teach phonics.
Some advocates of this approach, to their credit, recognize that children introduced to great literary works are impelled by their natural curiosity to read interesting stories. However, whole language advocates continue crippling children’s minds with stultifying guessing games—rather than enlightening them with the proven method of phonics.
One critic of this horror observed the frustration of students during the 1980s and early 1990s and reflected that “in whole language, millions of youngsters nationwide were surrounded by ‘beautiful pieces of literature that (they) can’t read.’”
Unfortunately for California children, the state became a testing ground for whole language during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1992, after the whole language method had been the modus operandi in schools for several years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted statewide reading tests.
A jaw-dropping 52 percent of California fourth graders were reading below the baseline established for that grade. When the same test was conducted again in 1994, the number of semiliterate children in California had risen to 56 percent. One teacher in the Los Angeles area gave a heartbreaking report of first graders asked to read. “The children were in tears… . They look at you with three paragraphs on a page and they say, ‘What do we do with this?’”
When some schools course-corrected and reintroduced phonics, the results were telling. After students taught with whole language repeatedly tested poorly, their elementary school in Texas switched to intensive phonics training. On a subsequent statewide reading test, 98 percent of students from the school scored at or above grade level.
The continued commitment to the whole word method on the part of education professionals would be unfathomable without a grasp of their basic motives. But once we apprehend that their aim is to create “well-socialized” future citizens obedient to commands for “the good of humanity,” the Progressive repudiation of phonics becomes readily understandable, even predictable. If you want children to read well, you embrace phonics. If you do not want children to read well—or at all—you reject it. If you want students to master academic subjects, you embrace phonics. If you do not want students to master academic subjects, you reject it.
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