Ken Goodman, who most educators think of as the father of the Whole
Language movement, is among the many who believe that the No Child Left
Behind Act, which is up for renewal before year's end, was written as
an anti-Whole Language document. No Child Left Behind "defines reading
in the context of the law and asks people to use methods only approved
by people who believe in that approach to teaching," said Goodman,
professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, in a phone interview
from his home. "It's a very strange notion."
It's an especially strange notion if one subscribes to Goodman's
theory, based on research he did in the 1960s, about how people make
sense of print. His oft-cited paper published in 1967, "Reading: A
Psycholinguistic Guessing Game," suggests that when reading, people use
all of the systems of language--not in a sequential way (letter to word
to sentence to paragraph), but instead by inference and prediction and
sampling of text.
Goodman's research progressed from how people make sense of print, to
how people learn to read and then how to use that research to teach
reading. His book What's Whole in Whole Language?, published initially
by Scholastic's Canada division and in the U.S. in 1986 by Heinemann,
has 250,000 copies in print and is available in eight languages. It was
the catalyst that gave tens of thousands of teachers the substantive
research they needed to confirm what they had already observed in their
own classrooms. They believed that children became better readers by
reading authentic texts--literature that students often chose
themselves--rather than formulaic chapters from a basal textbook.
A grass roots movement, Whole Language spread from teacher to teacher,
school to school, district to district. Educators credit Goodman's book
with the movement's groundswell of support. "It was certainly something
that influenced how people explained Whole Language to each other,"
Goodman said. "Because Whole Language was very bottom up, teachers were
bringing it into schools and their school districts." Publishers and
booksellers began to feel the impact in book sales as teachers
purchased class sets of titles and bought classroom libraries out of
their own pocketbooks.
If Whole Language was bottom up, No Child Left Behind is top down. NCLB
measures success or failure with tests that stress a rigidly defined
approach to learning. Patricia Enciso, associate professor of literacy,
literature and equity studies at Ohio State University, who co-edits
Language Arts (whose May 2007 issue was devoted to NCLB), said,
"Teachers have to have all children successfully completing these
tests, [which] are given every three years. If [the students] don't
achieve, their school can become a failing school. If it becomes a
failing school, teachers are asked to resign." Even if the children are
improving, but they're not passing, teachers can lose their jobs, and
those schools can also lose their federal funding--and the options open
to parents with children in failing schools are few. "The notion that a
parent can transfer a child from one school to another if the school is
failing makes no sense if all the schools around them are failing. And
parents want to keep children within their own community," Goodman
said. "The irony is that the promise of NCLB was that it would
eliminate the disparity between the rich and poor, but it's increased
the disparity."
Shelley Harwayne, former superintendent of Manhattan's District #2, who
also co-directed the Teachers College Writing Project at Columbia
University with Lucy Calkins, echoed Goodman's concerns: "Suburban kids
and the good schools are getting literature, but the kids in the poor
schools, the ones that don't test well, get the skills and drills. I
think No Child Left Behind has taken [literature] away from the kids
who need it the most." In many cases, Harwayne said districts use the
term "balanced literacy" to describe their approach to teaching--and
wind up using literature only as a means to improve children's
performance on tests. "So Llama, Llama, Mad at Mama [by Anne Dewdney]
becomes a lesson in short A sounds," Harwayne explained. She said she
believes "balanced literacy" was coined to answer the critics of Whole
Language, who felt that students weren't learning phonics. "But they
did learn phonics, widely and well, within a context, when a child
needed it. It was investment-driven, it was child-centered and it
required a smart teacher," said Harwayne. "You can't have shortcuts in
professional development."
One of those shortcuts may be attributed to the way teacher education
has evolved, according to Barbara Keifer, the Charlotte Huck professor
at Ohio State University and also a co-editor of Language Arts, who
points to the founding of the Holmes Group in 1987. (This group of 96
universities with education programs formed in response to some
"disturbing trends" in the aftermath of the Nation at Risk report.) "It
was an attempt to raise the status of teachers," Keifer explained.
"Teachers used to be trained as undergrads with majors in elementary
education and do their student teaching and go into the classroom. The
Holmes Group said they need a liberal education first and then they can
get their master's degree. Children's literature was not a separate
requirement in a lot of courses of study."
Keifer pointed out that because teachers are teaching to the tests,
they overemphasize reading and math. "At its best, [Whole Language]
trained children to think, and it went beyond learning to read and
write, to engaging them in inquiry, and major questions in social
studies and science," Keifer said. "That's the other thing about NCLB,
with the emphasis on reading and math, who's learning social studies or
science?"
Perhaps the most alarming fallout from NCLB is the pressure it creates
on earlier grade levels. Cynthia McCallister, associate professor in
New York University's Department of Teaching and Learning, who has
worked with classrooms from Staten Island to Brooklyn, talked about
research such as Vivian Paley's that stresses the importance of
play--which is being overlooked in early childhood classrooms today.
"European education is less politicized, and they've realized the
importance of play in academic development. Here, it's been the
opposite," McCallister said. "There's a push for accountability, and
it's really depressing what it does to the kids."
Goodman made a similar point, saying, "For the first time in our
history, it's possible for a child to fail a test the first week of
Kindergarten," referring to the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills (DIBELS) test, the subject of his recent book, The Truth
about DIBELS: What It Is, What It Does. "It's turned Kindergarten into
a pressure cooker, and caused many parents to pull children out of
[school]."
As NCLB comes up for renewal, what alternative solutions are there for
educators? A fairer means of testing children on reading, for one.
Keifer suggests that one such test already exists and that it be used
as the national standard: the National Assessment of Educational
Progress. "It's a pretty fair test that looks at reading in
terms of strategies rather than multiple choice, and the kinds of
things readers need to be doing."
Drafting parents into the cause is another--advocated by both Harwayne
and Goodman. "We should put the smartest thinking out there and dazzle
the parents. Invented spelling dazzled parents," Harwayne said,
referring to one of the celebrated hallmarks of the writing process
approach, which also grew out of the Whole Language movement.
"First-graders were writing these incredible things, and the parents
understood [that]. They knew that in the end [the children] were going
to learn to spell well. If we'd had a good P.R. firm working for us, we
would have been better off. Even today, I think parents could be our
best advocates."
Despite (or perhaps because of) his work with politicians, Goodman said
he also believes that parents are key to changing the approach to
education in this country. "I've been working with our local
congressman on the house education committee, but I'm not optimistic,"
he said. "But I'm hopeful that parents and educators will say, 'That's
enough.' Teachers have not been able to make the changes themselves,
and I blame some of the unions and professional organizations who've
not supported them a lot. No Child Left Behind is beginning to affect
large numbers of middle class kids, and those parents may make a
difference."--Jennifer M. Brown