blumenfeld education letter april_1996

8/7/2019 Blumenfeld Education Letter April_1996

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The BlumenfeldEducation Letter

V ol. 11 , N o.4 (Le tte r # 115)

liMy People Are Destroyed For lack Of Knowledge" HOSEA 4:6

A p r I l 1996DITOR: Samuell. Blumenfeld

The purpose of this news!etter is to provide knowledge for porents and educators who want to save the children of America

from the destructive forces that endanger them. Our children In the public schools are at grave risk in 4 ways. occdamiccliy;

spiritually, morally, and physically - and only a well-informed public will be able to reduce these risks

"Without vision, the people perish."

Califo rn ia 's R ea din g D e b a c l e :

W h e n t h e In c o m p e t e n t R u l e , t h e C h i ld r e n . S u f f e r

A lady in Southern California recently

faxed me an article about California's liter-

acy disaster containing much interesting

information about what happened when

Whole language was introduced in Califor-'

nia schools in 1987. The article, "The Black-

board Bungle' by J i l l Stewart, appeared in

the March 1-7, 1996, issue of LA W eekly. Ms.

Stewart writes:

Since 1987, whole-language theory has swept

California. At its further extreme are whole-language

zealots who bel ieve reading and writing are natural

processes that children will pick up on their ownwithout formal instruction if they are immersed in

good literature and allowed to freely write without

correction. The theory's basic principles have been

institutionalized in the fonn of a widely aedairred

reading "fnunework" adopted by the state Board of

Pub l ic Education that downplays th e teaching of tra-

ditional reading skills. On the plus side, the ern. of

whole language has ushered into California 's c l a s s -

rooms th e use of literature and popu la r storybooks,

and has insp i red teachers to push children to createtheir own handwritten stories. "The core idea of

whole Ianguage," says one of its rrost vocal propo-

nents, Mel Grubb of the California literature Projectat Cal State Dominguez H i l l s , "is that children ro

longer are forced to learn skills that are disembodied

from the experience of reading a story. The e n p y -ment and th e wonder of th e story are absorbed just as

the skills are absorbed."

Poor Mr. Grubb seems to be confused

about the difference between reading a story

and learning to read. Apparently he thinks

both are the same. Ms. Stewart continues:

But whole language, which sounds so promis-

ing wkn descr ibed by its proponents, has proved to

be a near disaster wben applied to-and by-real

people, In th e eight years since whole language first

appeared. in the state's grade schools, California's

fourth-grade reading scores have plummeted to near

the bottom nationally, according to th e National

Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In-

deed, California's fourth-graders are now such poor

readers that only the children in Louisiana and

Guam=both hampered by pitifully backward edu-

cation systems-get worse reading sco res .

And who is to b lame for th is linear dis-

aster"-which is not nea r but ac tua l? The

article states:

It has become clear that many of the problems

stem from a tragic misinterpretation of th e state's1 98 9 reading framework,. intended as a helpful sup-

plement to baditional lessons but used by many ad-ministra10rs as a wholesale replacem ent for t hem.

Was it, indeed, a "tragic" misinterpreta-

tion or a deliberate misinterpretation? In

1987 , California already had a horrendousI__ ~_rl ~ ~

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Education Letter, Pg. 2 I April 1996

reading problem. An article from the San

F ra nc is co E xa m in er, reprinted in the Patr iot

L e d g e r (Quincy, MA) of Nov. 18, 1987, states:

Almost one in si x adults inCal i forn ia is "furc-

t ion a lly i ll it er a te : ' am most of those who can't read

ar e n ativ e E ng li sh speakers who went to school in th eUnited States, according to a new study by the state

Depar tment of Education. The r ep or t s ay s 3. 1 million

Cal i forn ians can't read well enough to understand

advertising in newspapers, simple rec ipes or jo b

applications. . . .

'These are people who might be ab le to read a

simple sentence , b ut can't tell whether a lease theysign with their landlord is taking them to the clean-

ers:' says Lynda Smith, a consultant on adult literacy

for the state Depar tment of Education. . . .

"It's a handicap people don't want to b road-cast," Ms. Smith says. ''There ar e people who can't

read walking around in libraries canying newspa-pers. Tbey want to be seen reading."

So obviously, 1987 was a good time to

change reading instruction in California' s

schools. Getting back to 1996, Ms. Stewart

writes;

The situation has deteriorated so fa r that fonner

state Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

who oversaw th e creation of th e 19f5 l reading frame-

work, has d is tanced himself from it, cal l ing the frame-work "fatally flawed for its failure to anndpate the

whole-language overreaction."

Not only has 11r. Honig distanced him-

self from the fiasco, but he has undergone a

complete a:nversion and now advocates a

phonics approach. In fact, he has written a

book on the subject entitled T ea ch in g O ur

C hildren to R ead , published by Corwin Press .

But we warned him in our newsletter of Sept

1 9 88 , in which we wrote:

damage to more lives than one can possibly calculate,

... And so if parents in California want to make sure

that their children learn to read, they will have to

teach them at h orre or place them in private or relig-

ious schools with good phonics reading programs.

How is it that we were able to predictthe disaster that lay ahead? And why is it

that we who have th is superior predictive

ability are never called upon by the profes-

sional educators to help them make th e right

decisions? The reason is very simple. Stupid

people ra re ly r ely on people who know more

than they do for fear that the smarter people

M11 supplant them. And so, they go on

making horrendous, tragic mistakes that

hann millions of children simply because

stupid people don't know or care what theyare doing. Ms. Stewart writes:

Says Honig today: "Things go t out of hand.

School administrators and principals thought they

were following the framework when they latd'ed on

to whole language, and our greatest mistake was

fai l ing to say, 'Look out for th e c ra zy stuff, look out for

th e overreaction and th e r elig io us ly a nti- sk ills f an at-

ics.' We totally mis judged which voices would take

charge of th e schools. We never drearred it would be

driven to this b izar re edge. When Ie D people that we

never even say the phrase 'whole language' any-where in the 73-page document, they look at me like

I'm mad"

And so, maybe Mr. Honig was not as

incom petent as he w as ignorant It stands to

reason that when you become Superinten-

dent of Public Instruction for the state of

California and you decide to create a "read-

ing framework" for the entire state school

system, you'd better know something about

what's going on in the field. The war betweenproponents of systematic phonics and those

of the whole-word method has been going

on at least since 1 955 when W hy J c h n n y Can't

RaId was first published. ' Is it possible that

Mr. Honig was unaware of this war? He sayshe failed lito anticipate the whole-language

overreaction." H that is indeed th e e as e, th e n

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.__--The Blumenfeld Education Le tte r - Post Office Box 45161 - Boise , Idaho 83711-

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Fuoct ional illiteracy will be boom i ng in Cal i for-

. Ilia in th e years ahead if th e state adop ts the look-say

basa l reading programs it has already app roved . . . .

Because of te xtb oo k se le ctio n d ec isio ns based on ig-ro ra nc e, m illio ns o f C aH fomia dUldren will be c0n-

demned to lives as fuoct iona l illiterates. Such state

sardioned educat iona l malpractice will be doing more



Education Letter, Pg. 3, April 1996

Mr. Honig was clearly unqualified for the job

as Superintendent.

The new Superintendent, Delaine Eastin,

is trying to correct the situation. She wants to

combine phonics with the good part of whole

language: rich literature and early writing.

Meanwhile, the legislators in Sacramentoare expected to mandate the teaching of

phonics in the grade schools. But what about

all of those teachers who have been teaching

whole language for the past eight years and

have no idea how to teach intensive, system-

atic phonics even if they wanted to? Are they

going to be retrained? And what is going to

happen to all of those nonreaders in the

upper grades? Wil l they all be remediated?

The sheer cost of the literacy debacle will

perhaps convince the legislators that theyought to test out all of these new education

fads before implementing them.

W ho le Language Takes O ver

How did whole language manage to

t ake over California? According to the ar-

ticle it began in 1 98 6 when Honig invited a

select group of educators li to brainstorm

about ways to set California on a new coursein reading." Honig says, '1 told them to

dream, and to forget about any old rules that

weren't working." And dream they did. Cal

State Chico professor Jesus Cor t e z relates:

"Somebody stood up and said that we were

there to create a new generation of superior

thinkers and readers and writers who would

run the businesses and set the policies of the

21st century. Creating that new generation

w a s th e dominant theme from day one"Not only were these people incompe-

tent, but they were wacky visionaries as

well! Stewart writes:

pressed for reading, and the shocking levels of reme-

dial reading required by California's college fresh-

men. . . . "They also knew that something had to be

done about beginning grade school reading. but they

weren't sure what."

Hadn't any of the dummies read V\hy

Jo hn ny C a n't R e a d by Rudolf Hesch or Prof.

Jeanne Chal l 's T h e Grea t D eba te: Im m in g to

R e n d or Sam Blumenfeld's T h e N ew Illi ie r -

ates? Obviously not. Nor did anyone sug-

gest investigating the many private schools

where children were being taught to read

quite successfully with a phonics program.

They were just gung-ho on something new,

anything new, as long as it sounded good.

Ms. Stewart elaborates:

"The group was charting new ground, and we

wanted an inspirational document," recalls Jerry

Treadway, a textbook author and a professor at SanDiego State. H I remember specific rreetings at which

Mel Grubb and other whole-language proponents .

convinced everyone that there was no distinction

between learning r o w to read as a first-grader and the

way a mature reader would handle th e printed word ..

We decided that until we go t kids to deal with lan-

guage th e way it is used by adults, as a whole thought,

our reading programs wouldn't work. . . . We under-

went a real interesting perceptual shift in the meet-

ings, and what we finally stated, almost derisively, isthat th e traditional reading approach, the emphasis is

on mere accuracy, We said, 'How absurd it is to care

about individual words and ao::uracy! ' Under whole

language, .th e rule was e ffic ie nc y o f the mind: Get the

meaning using the least perception possible. Skip

words. Absorb ideas instead. At the time, it sounded

great."

Am Iexaggera t ing when Icall these

people inrompetent? Not only incompetent,

but obstinately so .

Ms. Stewart elaborates:

B u t te nsio n began to arise over draft language

that so ft-p ed ale d th e need to teach basic read ingsk ills. . . . And the ro ted Harvard researcher and

author Jean [sic} Chal l warned th e committee that it

was ignoring major f indings about how grade school

c hild re n a ctu ally le ar n to read-by th e carefu l decod-

The secondary-school representatives emerged

as natural leaders because they, more than anyone,

were driven by tremendous frustration over skyrock-

eting drop-out rates, the hatred. many teenagers ex-

L T h e Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Offi", Box 45161 - Boise, Idaho 83711 ....J



Education Letter, Pg. 4 , Apri11996

in s of each and every lets and word. . ., But Chal l

was completely igmred.

We wonder how many on th e commit-

te e had actually read Chall's book In any

ease, the ronunittee went whole hog for whole

language when Francine Alexander, in

charge of curriculum, proposed that the state

adopt Impress ions , Holt Canada's rontrover-

sial whole-language story book The idea. of

replacing the boring old pr imers with excit-

ing Ureal literature" is what probably en-

thused th e teachers most about whole lan-

guage. The article rontinues:

Un fo rt un at ely , w h ile th e group pursued its i deas

within this cloistered atm osphere of growing consen-

sus, emerging research was showing that just th e

reverse was true about row dIi ldren learn to read . . . .

But while Honig and many skills-oriented

membe r s of th e framewcwk commi~ re l ied heavily

UfCI l B a : o m i n g a Nution c f Readers, which ronfinned

tb e need fo r in tens iv e ~ training fo r small

child re n, the rest c : J . th e committee Il"eIl'b!rs were in

the process of ~ such research. Irdeed, many

on th e committee began gathering material from

theorists who supported their evo lv ing views against

teaching ski l ls . looking back, Hlnig says, "It is the

curse of all progressives that we a re an t i. -r e sea rch and

anti-sdence, and we rever seem to grasp r o w ina-

tional that attitude is. This is probab ly our deepest

fa ilu re ." ..•

In the end. th e commi t tee produced a thick

document tha t was adopted by th e state Boa rd of

Education and praised nationally on talk shows.

Official textbooks were selected that were mostlylite ra tu re ; th e b oo k d lo se n. by 80 pereent of the school

distr icts rontained no lessons at all. Schools were

expected to follow th e new approach. . and rompIi-

ance officEn began appear ing in local classrooms.

Compliance officers? Sounds like s0me-

thing out of a pol ice state. We thought that

educators are. strongly opposed to anything

approaching l l rensorship," but here we have

rom plianre o fficers m ak ing su re that teach-

en; don't teach intensive phonics. The article

continues:

1he late 1 9 1 3 G 5 and early 1 9 ' X B were heady tiIn!s

fo r whole language. An estimated 20M teachers

took in-service classes or learned the new approach

from mentors. O thers paid $650 to private trainers

like B ob and Ma rle ne McK ra ck en , just tw o of a contin-

gent o f c o ns ul ta n ts who swarmed. Califo rn ia. . . .

A t Cali fornia 's 72 teacher c o ll eg es , m e a nwh il e,

a near-religious fervor took hold. VVhole- language

e nth us ia sts lik e Barbara Flores at Cal S tate San Ber-nardino began pushing th e idea, via teacher-creden-

t ia li ng c la ss es , th at teach in g p ho nics and other skills

directly to chikiren was actually bad fo r them . ... By1995 , 3JIre 10,(XX) fresh rew teachers had poured into

grade schools, thousands of whom had little training

in th e usual methods fo r teaching reading to kids.

How much will the state of California

have to pay to retrain its teachers to be able

to teach intensive phonics? Will there be a

retraining program at all?

It didn't take very long be fo re the inade-

quacies of whole language became appar-

ent A grandmother by the name of Marion

joseph, a ch ie f p olic y a naly st under Conner

state Superintendent Wilson Riles, found

out by happenstance that the primary schools

were no Ionga' us ing primers. She oontacted

several teachers to find out what was going

on. She relates, I'} got, almost without excep-

tion, 'Oh my Cod, Marion, we are having a

tenible time. The new reading method is notworking.' If they tried to teach phonics or

word attack skills to the kids who weren't

getting it from th e storybook and th e in-vented writings, compliance officers came in

from their district office and ordered a stop

to it. It w as terrib le stuff, virtually a new

rel igion, a cult."

Marion Joseph compla ined to Honig,

and Honig began to talk to teachers and

came to the rondusion that his reading f r ame-

work had been "grossly misinterpreted."In1 9 . : ) 3 , Honig was forced to res ign after

his conviction on conflict-of-interest charges,

Ms. Stewart writes:

In th e end, a rudder less group of state officials

were left: struggting to intelp'et a un ique and un-

tested ~ philosophy that they themselves did

~ ,,_ Blumenfeld Education Letter ~ Post Office Box 4S161 - Boise, Idaho 83711 _

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Jeny T readw ay , of Sa n Diego State, rerently

became the J O O S t p romin en t w rot e- language J . T O I X > -

rent to publicly concede t ha t who le -l an guage theay

was fundamentally flawed. even while several of its

techniques, such as using rich literature and early

writing. were good i deas that should be retained....

"Idon't mind saying it has been a disaster, as long as

L T h e Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Offioe Box 4!;:t61 - BoIse, Idaho 83711 __ -----'

not understand. At th e schools , deep divisions broke

out as district bureaucrats began d ic ta tin g b iza rre

orders to teachers and principals,

Meanwhile, teachers and administra-

tors at E agle R ock 's Toland W ay Elementary

School in los Angeles County decided toraise funds for spel l ing books since the state

had no t approved of any . Compliance offi-

cers got wind of what was going on and

spent three days in Toland Way's dassrooms

observing the teachers. They were repri-

manded fo r using spelling books!

Nevertheless, state education officials

were dumbfounded in 1992 when the Na-

tional Assessment of Educational Progress

(NAEP) announced that California's read-

ing scores were among the worst in the na-

tion. M s. Stew art re lates:

In response , a meet ing ci top state cun iculum

offidals was called in 1993. There, wrote-languageproponents-circluding th e powerful Califomia Read-

ing Association,. th e California Uterature Project and

several state officials-successfully deflected an at-

tempt to re-emphasize basic ski l ls in g rade schools.

It was argued that teachers would "go

nuts" if requi red to mak e another big changein teaching methods, However , in1 9 9 4 , new

NAEP s co re s re ve ale d the depth o f C alifo r-

nia's reading debacle Grade schoo l reading

levels were in a f ree fall, with Calitomia's

fourth-graders beating only Louisiana and

Guam.

The result is that California educators

have spen t the last year soul-searching and

commiserating about the failure of their

wonderful reading program. The article

states:

it's clear to everyone that it was .done with th e best of

intentions by a lo t o f really c om m itte d p eo ple ."

But that hasn't stopped whole-language

fanatics from resisting efforts by California's

department of education to implement a

new reading program which stresses phon-ics and spelling. Infact, it is more than likelythat th e s ta te 'S te ac he rs rolleges will resist

changing their reading methodology courses

and will instead remain faithful to whole

language theoty and practice. Thus" newteachers will continue to rome out of these

colleges with little o r no know ledge of how

to teach intensive phonics .

All of which means that the public

schools of California cannot guarantee that

any child will learn how to read phonetically

within that sys tem, Arid SO; concemed par-

ents will have to do the job themselves byhomeschooling or by placing their drildren

in private schools that know how to teachreading.

In the end, when the in com pe te nt ru le "

the chi ldren suffer.

C a l i f o r n i a n G i r 1 C o m m i t s S u ic id eB e c a u s e o f D y s l e x i a

Karl Jorgensen, 22, former basketball

star on th e Fresno State women's basketball

team, mrnmitted suicide on J a n . 18" 1996,

after struggling all her life with dyslexia. ForKari, the written word had become an insur-

moun tab l e barr ier to g ro wth . Aa :o rd ing to

th e F r e s n o B e e of 1/23/96:

She dreaded this world of words. She feared it

She cursed it But too many years went by masking

her secret, klo many days ~ he r emJtiom. Kari

Jorgensen rould. fare no m ore torrorrows, SO s re took

her own 1ife. She was 22 .

Tbe depths of Karl Jorgmsen 's despair, her lrng

struggle with dyslexia and , in recmt months,with 1ife

witrout basketball are perplex ing to her many friends,



Education Letter, Pg. 6 , April 1996

teammates and acquain tances who neve r knew. 'They

never knew Jorgensen did not join th e Brownies

organization as a girl because sh e could not memorize

the motto. They never knew she wonied about

getting her drivers license because of the written test.

Iorgensen's fear was th e ridicule of others, so

she turned to her ploys, anything to avoid the shameinher e ye s. . .. But the t r ickery would never take away

th e sting within: Basketball did. The zeal with which

sh e played th e game, which she seemingly failed to

expend in th e class room, became her escape . . ..

But when her California State University, Fresno,

basketball eligibility ran dry, Jorgensen began taking

a hard look at her life, a life where she could not run

from her reading disorder. . . .

The words of her daughter keep spinning in

Carolyn Brown's mind. "Karl would say, 'Mom,

what am I going to do? ' . •. I'd s ay , 'K a rl , 1 1 1always

take care of you for th e rest of your life.' I told her that

whatever sh e did, happiness wasn't so much how

much money you make. It was more than that." ...

Family , friends and a conununity will be tor-

mented by las t Thursday, th e day Karl Jorgensen was

found hanging in a room in her r o m e .

Comment:

God knows how many Kar is have been

created by California's primary reading

programs. Most of these individuals will go

through life crippled by the teaching meth-ods used by teachers imbued "with the best

of intentions" and the dumbest of brains.

Much has been written about how reading

disabilities and dyslexia af fec t the emotional

lives of th e victims. But, apparently, reading

teachers are the last people to know or care

about such things.

Reading S k ills D ec line in Brita in

The following is from the london Dai l y

Telegraph of Nov. 28, 1995:

What is happening in Britain and the

u.s. is also taking place in the rest of the

English speaking world. The dumbing downprocess is being carried out to prepare chi l -

dren for the New World Order. In fact, the

very same process is also taking place

throughout th e Western world via the United

Nations educational ann, UNESCO. A new

book, published in France, entitled z v r J t l C h i a -

vel p e d a g o g u e au Ie min i s t ere de 1 a r t fo rme p e d a -

gogique (Machiavelli as Educator or The

Ministry of Educational Reform) by Pascal IBernardin, documents what UNESCO has Ib een doing in education to destroy Western

iChristian civilization through values and t

behavior modification and multiculturalism, jl

In other words, the author found corning out I

Alarming ev idence of a sharp a m . accelerating of UNESCO all of th e same pagan, socialist I

drop in th e reading abilities and overall educational programs now be ing promoted in American !attainment of ll-year-olds was publ ished yesterday schools. The book can b e ordered from: I

by Secondary Heads Association, A survey of nearly Librairie La Proue, Esca1iers du Marche 17, I

~---The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711__j

500 state and independent secondary schools in

England and Wales found that s tanda rds of read ing ,

spelling, comprehension and literacy fell continu-

ously between 1 9 9 1 and last year.

Two earlier national studies showed that the

average reading ability of seven-year-olds fell signifi-

cantly between 1985 and 1 9 9 1 . The fall was widely

attributed to "progressive" teaching. John Sutton,genera l secretary of th e association, whose members

run the majority of comprehensives, described th e

results as shocking and called for a "blitz on literacy"

in pr imary schools.

TIle findings were based on the standard tests of

reading. verbal and non-verbal reasoning admini-

stered by 90 pe r cent of secondary schools to teach

new intake ....

Estelle Morris, one of labour's education spokes -

men, said: 'The f indings are an important warning of

the need to ra ise standards---partiru1ly in th e Three

Rs--- in pr imary school. Unless we ge t th e basics right

at an early age, we cannot improve achievement in

later years." . . .Many secondary h ea ds re ma rk ed on a deterio-

ration in It-year-old 's behavior, confirming that chil-

dren's experience of failure tends to be accompanied

by high levels of disaffection and boredom

Comment:

I

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1003 lausanne, Switzerland. Price: 30 Swiss

francs 10 centimes. You'll probably have to

purchase a bank draft in Swiss fran cs w hen

you mail your order.

pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to se t the

curr icu lum. When you have kids you think, What

exactly do Iwant them to learn? Most of th e stuff they

study in school is completely useless. But some

incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're

older-yet you could learn them when you're younger.

And you start to think, What would Ido if Iset acurriculum for a school?

G O O , how exciting that could be! But you can't

do it today. You don't ge t to do what you want. You

don't ge t to pick your books, your curriculum. You

get to teach one narrow specialization Who would

ever want to do that?

1here are solutions to our problems in educa-

tion. Unfortunately, teclmology isn't it. You're not

going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge

onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in everyschool--none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us

into thinking we're doing something to solve the

problem with education,Lincoln did not have a Web site at th e log cabin

where his pi iI ren tS homesch:>oled him, and he t u rned

out pretty mteresting. Historical precedent shows

that we can tum out amazing human beings without

teclmology. Precedent also shows that we ca n turn

out very uninteresting human beings with technol-

ogy.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in

your aJs-that technology's going to change the world.

In some ways it will , in some ways it won't .

S teve Job s on C omputers andEducat ion

Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple

C om puter, w as interviewed in the February

1996 issue of Wimi magazine. He was asked,

"Could teclmology help by improving edu-

cation?" His response was quite interesting:

I used to think that technology could help edu-

cation I've probably spearheaded giving away morecomputer equipment to schools than anybody else on

the planet But I've had to rome to th e inevitable

conclusion that the problem is not one that technol-

ogy can hope to solve. What's wrong with education

cannot be .fixed with technology. No amount of

technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sodo-

political. The problems are th e unions. You plot the

growth of th e NEA [National Education Association}

and th e dropp i ng of SAT s co re s, and they're inversely

proportional. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of

these people who believes th e bes t th ing we could

ever do is go to the full voucher system.I have a 17-year-dd daughter who went to a

private school for a few years before high school. This

private school is th e best school I've seen in my life. Itwas judged one of the 100 bes t schools in America. It

was phenomenal The tuition was $5,500 a year,which is a lot of money for most parents . But th e

teachers were paid less th an p ub lic school teacher&-

so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked th e

state treasurer that year what California pays on

average to send kids to school, and I bel ieve it was

$4,400. While there are rot man y p are nts who could

rome up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could

come up with $1,(00 a year.H we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, ence.

schools would. be start ing right and left. People The study analyzed nuns' youthfulwould ge t out of oollegeand say, ''Let's start a school." "Wr i ti ngs and found. that those who showedYou could have a tmck at Stanford within the MBA low linguistic ability in their 20 s had a muchprog ram on how to be the business-person of a school. hizher risk of Alzhei:mer's when they wereAnd that MBA would ge t together with somebody 8~

else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these elderly. The findings could indicate thatyoung, idealistic people start ing schools, worldng for Alzheimer's impairs language ability when

L T h e B lu me nfeld E duca tion Letter - Post Office Box 4 .0 ;1 6 1 - B o is e, Idaho 83711 .....1

S tudy L inks A lzheimer 's w i th

L inguis tic Ab i lit y

According to the Bodon Globe ci 2/21/

96, researchers have found that individuals

with greater linguistic ability in early life are

better able to resist Alzheimer's disease in

later life than those with weak linguistic

ability. This finding is the result of a study of

nuns w ho are donating their brains to sd-

._--_._--



Education Letter, Pg, 8 , April 1996

people are yotmg, the researchers said. On

the other hand, greater linguistic ability early

in life might indicate a healthy brain resis-

tance to Alzheimer's later on.

"It's a chicken-or-an-egg thing at this

point:' said the lead researcher, David A

Snowdon, an associate professor of preven-

tive medicine at the University of Kentucky .

The findings appeared in the Journa l o f th e

Amer i can Medica l Assoc ia t ion .

The researchers studied the autobiogra-

phies of 104 nuns from the School Sisters of

Notre Dame. The order's 678 nuns have

agreed to donate their brains for th e feder-

ally funded research. The women wrote

one-page accounts of their lives for the ar-

chives just before taking their vows, at anaverage age of 22.

Scientists autopsied the brains of 25 nuns

who died, 10 of whom had Alzheimer's.

Those who had low linguistic ability when

young had abundant neurofibrillary

tangles-the lesions of Alzheimer's disease---

when they were old. Nine of the 10 nuns

who developed Alzheimer's disease-90

percent-showed a low linguistic ability in

their autobiographies, compared with only

13 percent among those who did not haveAlzheimer's. Linguistic ability was meas-

ured by tw o traits----grammatical comp lex -

ity and idea density, or the number of ideas

per number of words.

Comment:

deaths. Infact, there are no indications that

any of these illustrious individuals became

feeble-minded as they got older. We know

that look-say and whole language produce

all kinds of reading and learning problems

very early in life. Is it not possible that these

faulty teaching methods am actually set the

stage for Alzheimer's in later life? One thing

we do know is that Alzheimer's is much

more common today than it was years ago,

when phonics was the prevalent method of

teaching reading.

1 in 5 M a s s . A d u lt s

F u n c t io n a l ly I l l i t e r a t e

Nearly one in five Massachusetts adults

- totaling 877 ,00 ) - is functionally illiter-

ate, according to a new state Board of Educa-

tion report. Another 1.2million adults would

have difficulty passing a high-school Eng-

lish test, the repor t said. Lack of room in

adult education c lasses for many who want

to conquer illiteracy is part of the problem.

'We finnly believe that the grope of the

chal lenge cannot deter us from taking theimportant steps recommended in this re-

port:' said D r. Jerome Grossman, chairman

of the state Board of Education's Adult

Education Committee.

"Truthfully, the number of illiterate

people doesn't vary much in any part of the

country," Rober ta S001man , president of theMass. Coalition for Adult Education, told

reporters. 'When you're dealing with so

many people, you're dealing with all seg-

ments of the population," Soolman said itgets harder for adults to learn to read with

passing years.

"There's quite often a great deal of

embarrassment or fear of going into an

educational setting where they've failed

before:' she said. (Booton He ra ld , 9 /1 5/9 5)

The researchers should ask the nuns

how they were taught to read back in their

primary schools--by intensive phonics or

look-say. Obviously, look-say produces

lower linguistic ability, while intensive

phonics produces higher linguistic ability.

When one th inks of the founding Fathers,

many of whom lived well into their seventies

and eighties, we see them writing letters of

great linguistic complexity right up to their

L-__ The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161 - Boise, Idaho 83711__

blumenfeld education letter april_1996

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