Texas educators split over teaching English basics

[Harold Schiffman]

April 20, 2008, 11:15PM
Texas educators split over teaching English basics


By GARY SCHARRER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — The inability of many Texas students to write and speak good
English is like a dreadful disease requiring aggressive treatment, say
some education advocates who want to use different teaching
approaches. Social conservatives on the State Board of Education,
influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a new curriculum
that increases the focus on basics, including grammar.
They've met fierce resistance from teachers and educators who warn
this emphasis will prepare students for the 1950s, not the 21st
century, and embarrass Texas in the process.

They fear the state's proposed new standards for reading and English
language arts contradict established research and will only make
things worse. "The results will be bloody," predicted one of those
language experts, former English professor Joyce Armstrong Carroll. A
fight over the board's perceived exclusion of Hispanic experts from
development of the curriculum has overshadowed this larger struggle. A
public comment period on the proposed curriculum will end May 18, and
the 15-member board is to take final action on May 22. If approved, it
will guide how the state's 4.7 million public schoolchildren learn
English and reading over the next decade.

Much of the debate focuses on grammar and reading comprehension. The
controversy is being fanned, in part, by Donna Garner, a retired
English and Spanish teacher in Hewitt. Garner writes education-related
e-mails and contributes to My StudyHall.com. Students must learn
precise communication skills, and grammar requirements must be spelled
out with explicit language, she argues. "We have a disease in Texas —
our students do not know how to write and speak English well," Garner
said. "We need to treat the disease aggressively.

"The skills need to build upon each other as the student progresses
from one grade level to the next. Learning the basics of the English
language will provide students with a strong foundation upon which to
write sophisticated papers and upon which to base clear
communication," she said. The integration of grammar with writing has
been taught in Texas for the past 15 years without much success,
Garner said, citing statistics showing half of Texas college freshmen
are in need of remedial education, compared to only 28 percent
nationally. Teachers, parents and employers are appalled by the lack
of speaking and writing skills, she said.


Ignoring research

But some experts warn of dire consequences of teaching grammar
separately from writing and skimping on reading comprehension.
Standardized tests like TAKS and the SAT don't examine grammar skills
in isolation — they test comprehension, said Carroll, a former
professor of English and writing at McMurry University, author and
co-director of Abydos Learning International in Texas.
Carroll was part of a professional educators' coalition that offered
input during the three-year process of writing standards for the
state's proposed English curriculum.

Some coalition members take a dim view of State Board of Education
Chairman Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist, and board member David Bradley
of Beaumont, who have helped lead the push for a back-to-basics
approach. "Would anyone believe that the coalition's research is
bogus, but a dentist from Bryan is right ... and a man without a
degree from Beaumont is right?" Carroll said.Bradley says he and
McLeroy "are eminently qualified because, first of all, we're parents,
we're businesspeople and we're taxpayers."

Many parents, he said, complain that the current curriculum standards
are "so confusing, so vague, so mushy that nobody can understand them,
so we have this industry to help people interpret and explain and
develop strategies and techniques to teach this mush."

The proposed standards ignore at least 50 years of research on grammar
instruction, counters Kylene Beers of The Woodlands, president-elect
of the National Council of Teachers of English and a senior reading
adviser to secondary schools in the Reading Writing Project at
Teachers College at Columbia University.

People who yearn for a return to the basics usually attended school in
the 1950s, and by the end of that decade only 20 percent of the best
paying jobs required at least some college, she said, in contrast to
today's figure of 56 percent.

"When we talk about getting back to the basics in literacy education,
the first thing that smart people have to do is to realize that
literacy demands have shifted. What's basic now isn't the same as what
was basic when middle-aged adults of today were in school," she said.

Both sides view the fight over reading comprehension as bigger than
the one over grammar.

"They have renamed 'whole language' as comprehension. It's down to the
classic debate of phonics versus whole language," Bradley said.


Keeping it professional
Decades of research into how children learn shows that drilling the
basics does not achieve desired results, said Alana Morris, language
arts program director of the Aldine school district and president of
the Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas.

"If you drill the basics on handouts and worksheets, then that's where
kids will be able to apply them," she said. "The bottom line is that
drilling doesn't transfer into solid writing."

Teaching grammar is important, "but we want to teach it clearly so
that kids can actually transfer it into their writing," Morris said.
"Teaching grammar in drills makes no sense, whatsoever, to them."

The proposal calls for students to learn how to infer the importance
of a setting in a story in one grade level, visualize the setting in
the next grade and then summarizing the setting two grade levels
later, she said.

"It's the most ludicrous thing I have ever seen in my entire life,"
Morris said. "Each year with higher level text you should learn how to
draw inferences, how to ask questions, how to synthesize information,
how to summarize."

Teachers will remain professional if the State Board of Education
approves the pending document, Morris said.

"Teachers are not the type that will march on Austin," she said,
adding that experienced teachers will simply ignore the new English
textbooks.

link:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5716392.html


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