Fighting Words

An even bigger problem than obstruction and obfuscation by schools is that most teachers have never been trained in phonics themselves. Lynne Cheney, a tough critic of the education establishment, notes, "The war is over at the teachers' colleges and whole language won." Most ed- school textbooks promote whole language and denigrate phonics; a small few are merely neutral between them. Professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English help exert peer pressure for whole language.

From their trenches in the ed schools, whole-language theorists have attempted to counter the political tide now running in favor of phonics. A common tack is to reject quantitative research altogether for research that is "not replicable" because it "focuses on a reader in a certain context." With the notion of objective evidence and thus the possibility of accountability out of the picture, the theorists are then free to concentrate on the motives of their opponents.

Opposition to whole language is cast as a plot by the "far right"-the phrase is omnipresent in In Defense of Good Teaching, a collection edited by Goodman and released last year-to exploit the fundamentalist fanaticism and "overwhelming fear of change" of Christian conservatives. Proof of their zealotry is that they say it's important to be able to read in order to have access to the Bible.

The far right's purpose in "frightening and politicizing rural and working-class parents," according to Goodman, is to reduce confidence in the public schools and, ultimately, to privatize them. The paranoia cannot be overstated. He writes, "It is the visible success of whole language, not its weaknesses, that has made it the target of a powerful coalition of forces." Reporters who attack whole language are encouraged in advance and rewarded afterward by the CEOs of their parent publishers. "Efforts are highly coordinated; often one sees identical wording in bills in states far apart geographically." Call the police!

Why have so many moderate, non-fundamentalist parents been joined this far-right crusade? Three whole-language theorists, writing in the March 1 Phi Delta Kappan, suggest that "some parents are unconsciously terrified of their children's dawning independence, as symbolized by their learning to read and write. . . . As long as a child spends most of her time enunciating t's and d's and decoding only synthetic, denatured texts, she will never encounter troubling or dangerous ideas, or begin to think and read for herself."

Such rhetoric is evidence of desperation in the whole-language ranks. As Sandra Stotsky, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, succinctly puts it, "They're going off the cliff." The most recent example: In a remarkable article in the latest issue of Reading Research Quarterly, a publication of the International Reading Association, Mark Dressman strives mightily to insinuate that respected scholarly critics of whole language are promoting a racist and capitalist agenda.