Reading at risk

Back to School: Many in Congress want to kill a highly successful phonics program | Robert L. Jackson

Associated Press/Photo by Mike Hutmacher (The Wichita Eagle)

Never say that Congress cannot cut spending: This summer House and Senate committees zeroed out the Reading First portion of No Child Left Behind. Reading First has been, in the words of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, "the most effective and successful reading initiative in the nation's history"—but it is also phonics-based, and that has made it unpopular among many education professionals. To understand what's at stake when the full House and Senate vote this fall on whether to kill the program, walk through a history of battles over the teaching of reading—the equivalent in American education of the Hundred Years' War.

The war began early in the 20th century, when progressive educators such as John Dewey attacked the traditional approach—embodied in Noah Webster's dictionaries and spellers and William McGuffey's readers—of explicitly teaching English sounds (phonemes) and their relationship to the alphabet. Dewey and company criticized "the 3 R's" from a base in Enlightenment philosophy, which deified natural processes and claimed that reading was instinctive. The naturalistic doctrine of reading came to dominate teacher training in the new schools of education.