Why Reading Skills Are Declining

Q. Despite all the money we're investing in our schools, it seems as though children's reading ability is getting worse, not better. What is wrong?

It's a combination of factors: parents spending less quality time with young children, too much exposure to TV and video games, an explosion of other leisure-time activities that steal time away from solitary reading, and most of all, schools that seek to teach reading with the wrong instructional philosophy and methods.

The vast majority of teachers and schools believe that whole language is the way to teach reading, not phonics. In the "whole word" or "holistic" philosophy, children are exposed to lots of illustrated books and taught sight-reading skills and various "context cues," with only a smattering of phonics skills taught on the side.

The problem is, it doesn't work. There isn't a shred of solid, empirical evidence that kids learn to read by inference and intuition. In fact the research shows that phonics is best. But school boards allow Whole Language programs, anyway, and the poor reading comprehension, bad spelling, illegible handwriting and weak writing that come with it, through the K-12 system and into the workplace.

Most teachers don't even realize what's wrong, because the vast majority of them have never had so much as a minute's training in the proper way to teach reading, which is systematic, intensive, explicit phonics. They can't teach what they don't know.

There may not be a single teachers' college in the nation which even offers a class on systematic, intensive, explicit phonics, although training is available through groups such as the Riggs Institute (www.riggsinst.org) or Spalding Phonics teachers (www.spalding.org) associated with the Writing Road to Reading.

Training a teacher in proper phonics instruction takes about 40 hours, plus a year or two of mentoring to put the skills in place in the classroom. That's the key to fighting the national reading crisis. It wouldn't cost much. But oh, would it help.

Homework: The classic book, "Why Johnny Can't Read" by Rudolf Flesch