Failing to get it right!

See a Good Idea. See It Run Into Trouble.

By PAUL BESTON November 9, 2006; Page D6

In 1991, a New York State teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he announced his departure from public school teaching after 30 years. He was no longer willing to "hurt kids" in a broken system where political pressure snuffed out worthy efforts for change. By now, he wrote, "even reformers can't imagine school much different."

Indeed, the first priority of education reformers is often not success but the preservation of methods with which they are already comfortable. As Harold Henderson writes in "Let's Kill Dick and Jane," the American educational establishment possesses "an uncanny ability to transform golden ideas for change -- from left, right, or center -- into a leaden sludge." Mr. Henderson, a longtime staff writer for the Chicago Reader, describes the fate of one textbook company -- Illinois-based Open Court -- as it tried to bring its share of golden ideas to a resistant school system.

Some teachers, complained a consultant, had 'all the spirit and excitement of baked halibut.'

The book's title refers to the basal readers that were once a mainstay in American schools: Dick and Jane, created by advocates of the "Look-Say" theory of reading instruction in which children were taught to memorize the appearance of words at the expense of phonetic understanding. The theory has since been discredited, at least in part by the publication in 1955 of Rudolf Flesch's best-selling "Why Johnny Can't Read," which urged a return to phonics instruction.

Blouke Carus and his wife, Marianne, Americans with strong German roots and a familiarity with the exacting standards of the German gymnasium, read Flesch's book and formed Open Court in 1962. Together with a small band of dedicated educational theorists and consultants, they created innovative materials with the goal of educating the American masses as rigorously as the elites of Europe. Providing both a history of this remarkable company and a withering portrait of the education culture, Mr. Henderson's book is more compelling than any lay reader could reasonably expect.

The vision of Open Court was to break down what Mr. Henderson calls "the false dichotomy between traditionalist 'skills' and progressivist 'meaning'" and focus simply on what worked. Incorporating the traditionalist emphasis on skills (particularly phonics) and the progressive insight that different children learned differently, the company managed to attract opposition from both sides.

But the most vigorous objections came from progressive advocates of Whole Language. This theory rejected specific skill instruction in favor of "meaningful contexts" for reading. Some of its practitioners believed that reading could be learned as easily as talking; others feared that a systematic focus on skills was somehow akin to cultural and economic oppression. Dismissing these chimeras, Open Court argued that depriving children of such skills was the true act of oppression in a society where the boundaries of opportunity were drawn mostly by ignorance.

A recurring theme of "Let's Kill Dick and Jane" is the anti-intellectual rigidity of the educational establishment, which continually resisted the research-based methods that Open Court employed. The effectiveness of Open Court's pedagogy, to the extent that it was measured, indicated that Blouke and Marianne Carus knew what they were doing. The overt resistance of professional educators lessened somewhat over time, only to take on more subtle forms. Even when the educational system seemed ready to respond to cries for reform, as in California in the 1980s -- where Open Court's materials were found to be the only ones that met the state's promising new standards -- bureaucracy and the status quo ultimately prevailed.

The publishing company was eventually worn down by organizational and financial difficulties. It never commanded more than a small percentage of the textbook market and was finally sold, in 1996, to McGraw-Hill, which has doubled the sales of its materials. But the question of what might have been lingers. For all of the challenges the company faced, perhaps the most insurmountable was securing the commitment of teachers: They were often too deeply attached to their established routines, which were much less demanding than what Open Court was asking of them.

Their resistance, Mr. Henderson stresses, was caused more by inertia than ideology: "They have all the spirit and excitement of baked halibut," complained one Open Court consultant on a school visit. Contrast this dull conformity with the passion of consultants and creators of Open Court, one of whom says simply: "If you teach a child to read, you never have to do another right thing in your life."

And therein lies a fundamental dilemma. In the U.S., such dedication is more typically associated with those who work in business or the more lucrative professions. Despite decades of reforms, an unanswered question hangs over the education debate: how to find enough spirited, and gifted, people to do vital work that does not pay especially well and that has none of the glamour bestowed by success in the private sector.

The American education culture, Mr. Henderson concludes, "can assume a veneer of progressivism or traditionalism as the times dictate, but its routines lie deeper than ideology." The founders of Open Court, and education reformers before and since, can testify to the truth of those words.

Mr. Beston is a writer in Beacon, N.Y.

	URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116303151470417925.html

Copyright 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved