Re:Underground History of American Education
by tokenadult on Thursday April 02, 2009 @11:05PM
(#544430)
because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction
How does he back up that claim? I encountered quite a few school districts that claimed to be providing "whole language" reading instruction (including my alma mater school district, then, where I had been taught to read with phonics three decades earlier) in the 1990s. I'm going to check what the current vogue is here, but I know it's not working well.
Re:Underground History of American Education
by Alex3917 on Thursday April 02, 2009 @11:22PM
(#544447)
I don't remember offhand, but it comes from a chapter in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve. There is a whole chapter devoted to whole language, so the cite would be pretty easy to find.
I haven't done much research on teaching literacy, so I'm really just relaying his argument.
That's exactly his point, that because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction it is numerically impossible for whole language to be responsible for the decline in reading comprehension.