[Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about readi

[Ken Goodman]

That statement is wrong factually, historically and about every which way.
The reading wars were a fiction created by right wing think tanks in a 
campaign to  use reading to discredit public education.
    California never adopted whole language. There were such things as 
the California literature intitiate. In 1994 after the election a 
campaign began claiming that scores had plummeted and in fact they had 
not. I documented that the NAEP data shhowed in 94 and 96 that 
clasrrooms that used aspects of whole language did substantially better 
than those that used phonics. I was getting several calls a month from 
national media. What they wanted was a short quote from me used in an 
otherwise totally biased depiction of the socalled reading wars.That led 
to the federal law The reading exccellence act passed in a 1998 that 
established phonics as a national curriculum. Many states adopted laws 
with bepartisan support. Two panels used the National Science Foundation 
and the NICHD to make it appear that direct instruction ofphonics was 
scientific and all else was whole language and unscientific'

I document all this in two books I edited : In Defense of Good Teaching 
and  and Saving our Schools. A number of other books also explicated the 
political nature of the so-called reading wars.
This was not a conspiracy it was a political campaign directed by the 
neo con think tanks and funded handsomely by the National Business 
Council among others. Though the Obama adminstration is moving away from 
the more ridiculous parts of NCLB they are keeping the basic policies 
and still taking their advice from the right wing think tanks.
Ken Goodman

David Olson wrote:
> Dear Colleagues:
>
> Can anyone help refute the claim in S. Duhaene's "Reading in the 
> Brain" that "the reading wars culminated in 1987 when the state of 
> Californa... pass bills favoring the whole-language apprroach... and 
> reading scores plummeted" in 1993 and 1994.  Hence, they went back to 
> phonics training.  Perhaps it is true but I would be surprised if the 
> case were that clear.
>
> No doubt children must learn letter-sound correspondence; need they 
> always be "taught explicitly"?  Perhaps they can be taught on a JIT 
> (just in time) basis, ie. when they are needed.  I suppose this was 
> what drove the combattants into the trenches (I hope not again).  
>
> David Olson
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Reading-hall-of-fame mailing list
> Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
> http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/reading-hall-of-fame
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/private/reading-hall-of-fame/attachments/20100201/ef6aef7a/attachment.html