Texas educators split over teaching English basics

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.

gscharrer@express-news.net