Bureaucracy Comes Before Kids' Reading

For over a century the education establishment has pushed the idea of “whole language” reading instruction. As Geoffrey D. Cronin writes, it is based on the idea that

learning to read is a natural progression, like learning to speak or listen.

And maybe the educationists are right, where their own children are concerned. You can easily imagine that nearly all children in literate, middle-class homes where there are lots of books will insist on being taught to read.

But the common school system was not set up for that. It was set up to educate and Americanize the millions of immigrants, especially dangerous Irish Catholic immigrants. The idea was to take the children of feckless and illiterate immigrants and make ’em learn to read and write and figure whether their parents liked it or not.

In fact, the government education system has always suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. The officials and activists in charge have never decided whether to make the schools respond to the needs of their own children or to the perceived needs of other peoples’ children.

So things kinda dragged along getting slowly worse.

After a century of failure with the whole language method, people finally started to take notice, and a program called Reading First was included in the No Child Left Behind Act.

It is actually having a positive effect.

The independent Center on Education Policy's Keeping Watch on Reading First finds that this initiative "is having a significant and positive impact on student achievement, and has led to many changes in curriculum, instruction and assessment." ... So far, the direct beneficiaries are 1.7 million students and 100,000 teachers, and the results are especially impressive, since Reading First money has only been aimed at the highest-poverty, lowest-performing schools. Further, the achievement gap is closing, as reading scores for black and Hispanic 9-year-olds have reached all-time highs.

You would know that a success like this would not go unpunished.

Now, after several years of political pressure from vendors of the failed programs of the past, comes a report from the Education Department's inspector general, blasting Reading First management for being too aggressive and stocking its review committee with SBRR advocates.

Oh no!

[T]he IG pores through a bunch of e-mails to try to show that Reading First's implementation was slanted toward certain program designs over others.

Good Lord! This is scandalous. We should start a government-wide campaign to stop the stacking of review committees with program proponents. As if. As if the whole idea of any government program is to push a particular agenda and impose it on the American people whether they like it or not.

Still, we shouldn’t get to worked up about this. Because education is not the job of the government. Education is the job of the family, and the government would do better to keep out of the way. Literacy in the United States was as high or higher 150 years ago before the government took control of education.

If we were really serious about education we would get the government out of it. Forever.