The insatiable Sol Stern is back with another broadside on the Bloomberg/Klein administration. This time he takes the Gotham group to task for poor decisions and faulty leadership on reading.
New York City's 2002 shift to mayoral control of the schools created a unique opportunity.... Introducing his education-reform plan... Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that schools in the past had enjoyed too much autonomy, with "a baffling profusion of approaches to teaching the three Rs throughout the city." Now, there would be "one, unified, focused, streamlined chain of command [and] the Chancellor's office will dictate the curriculum and pedagogical methods." The mayor promised that reading instruction in the early grades would "employ strategies proven to work," including "a daily focus on phonics."But in a tragically mistaken policy decision, Klein went in the opposite direction on reading, franchising out most instructional decisions to a group of progressive educators who regarded it as a crime to teach children how to read through scripted phonics programs. Under the influence of his deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, Diana Lam, Klein chose an approach called Balanced Literacy for the system's core reading program starting in September 2003. The city's version of Balanced Literacy was crafted by Teachers College education professor and progressive-ed guru Lucy Calkins and included only a small phonics component, Month by Month Phonics. The rest of the program assumed, based on no real evidence, that children can intuit the meaning of printed words through context clues and through such activities as "shared reading" and "read alouds." Champions of this approach believe that children can learn to read simply by reading-by immersing themselves in print. The city imposed the new program on virtually every elementary school in the city, even shutting down the special Chancellors' District set up by one of Joel Klein's predecessors, Rudy Crew, in which about 35 high-poverty schools were using a research-based reading program called Success for All and almost uniformly achieving higher reading scores.
Stern goes on to argue that neither New York City's recent move toward school-level autonomy, nor Joel Klein's remorse for picking Month by Month Phonics, have changed the situation; whole language still reigns supreme.
Stern wants a $150-million "Marshall Plan for Reading" for NYC; it's too bad none of that tab will be picked up by the federal Reading First program, defunct as it is likely soon to be.
