the blumenfeld education letter february 1991

8/7/2019 The Blumenfeld Education Letter February 1991

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The BlumenfeldEducation Letter

V ol. 6 , N o .2 (L ette r # 54 )"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." HOSEA4:6

F eb ru ary 1 99ED ITOR : S amu el L . Blumenfe ldThe purpose of this newslettter is to provide knowledge for parents and educators who want to save the children of Americafrom the destructive forces that endanger them. Our children in the public schools are at grave risk in 4 ways: academically,

spiritually. morally. and physically - and only a well-informed public Will be able to reduce these risks."Without vision, the people perish. '.

W h a t 's W r c t n g W i t h W h o le L a n g u a g e ?The fundamental flaw in whole lan-guage instruction philosophy isthat itteaches

children to read English as if it were anideographic writing system like Chineseinstead of an alphabetic sound-symbol sys-tem.Weknow nowfrom years ofexperienceand observation that imposing an ideogra-phic teaching technique on an alphabeticwriting system can cause reading disabilitythrough symbolic confusion. Infact, it cancause the symptoms of dyslexia.

Itisfor this reason that the debate overthe implementation of the whole-languagephilosophy in reading instruction is so veryimportant. The future intellectual develop-ment and emotional health of millions ofchildren areat stake. If,aswe believe, that achild's normal language development canbeseriously harmed and retarded bywhole-language teaching techniques, it is impera-tivethat parents and teachers become awareof this.Itshould be the aim of every school, ofevery educator, to make sure that what isdone in the classroom does not inadver-tently harm the child.There issuch 2 L thing as"educational malpractice." And because

reading istaught tochildren at such anearly,impressionable age, thepermanent harmfuleffectsof a teaching method should be thor-oughly considered and explored. Our re-sponsibility to the children dictates that weuse proven methods of instruction, testedover the centuries, judged and verified bytheir results.

Although its practitioners insist thatwhole language is a philosophy and not aspecific instructional technique, there is nodoubtthatthe philosophy implies amethod-ology. In fact, at closer inspection we dis-cover that whole-language methodology isnot so very different from the look-say,whole-word teachingmethods that havebeenin use since the early 1930swhen look-saywas first introduced in the schools.N o M o r e D ic k a n d J a n e

The major difference between the oldlook-say and the new look-say is that thebasal reading programs with their insipidand inane little stories about Dickand Jane,Tom and Betty, and Janet and Mark havebeen replaced with what the educators call

The Blumenfeld Education Letter is published monthly. Sources of products and services described are not necessarily endorsedby this publication. They are intended. to provide our readers with information on a rapidly expanding field of educational activity.Permission to quote isgranted. provided. proper credit isgiven. Original material iscopyrighted by The Blumenfeld Education Letter.Subscription Rate: 1 year $36.00. Address: Post Office Box 45161,Boise, Idaho 83711. Phone (208) 322-4440.


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....-- Education Letter, Pg. 2 , February 1991

"real Iiterature." The theory is that if youimmerse first-graders in high-interest realliterature, read aloud to them by the teacher,the children will want to learn to read thesewonderful stories all by themselves. But thekind of reading instruction that is then giventhe children is the same kind of sigh tvocabu-lary, look-and-guess, meaning-emphasisinstruction, with some incidental phonics,that has brought America to its present liter-acy crisis.

Inother words, replacing thebasal read-ers with "realliterature" has not really re-solved the great debate between intensive,systematic phonics and look-say. Ithas onlyintensified it. To illustrate this, let me quotefrom an article by Howard Whitman en-titled, "Why Don't They Teach My Child toRead?" published in Collier's magazine ofNovember 26, 1954, about 37 years ago:

The man next to me in the airport bus enteringPasco, Washington, said, "My six-year-old readswords at school and can't read the same words whenI point them out at home in the newspaper. In schooltoday the children aren't taught to read - they'retaught to memorize."A man in the seat ahead chimed in, "Everythingis pictures. My youngster is in the sixth grade. He'llstill come across a word like pasture and he remem-bers a picture in his early reader and calls itmeadow."Neither passenger knew I was making a na-tional study of modern education; they volunteeredtheir remarks, sharing something they were con-cerned - and troubled - about. Like them, thou-sands of other American parents with first-gradechildren who are not catching on to reading as taughtby the modernists, and those with upper-grade chil-dren handicapped by lack of a solid reading founda-tion, are concerned and troubled.

But most of all they are puzzled. Why is readingtaught this way? A thousand times one hears thequestion, 'Why don't they teach my child to read?"How can schools tolerate a method which turns outmany children of eight, nine and older who starehelplessly at a word (not on their memory list) andcannot make a stab at reading it? What has happenedto the method of teaching reading sound by sound,syllable by syllable, so that a child can at least make areasonable attempt at reading any word?

Two basic teaching methods are in conflict here.One is the phonetic approach (known as phonics), theold-fashioned way in the view of modem educators.They are likely to call it the "spit and spatter" or"grunt and groan" method, satirizing the way young-sters try to sound out letters and syllables.The other method, which the modernists haveput into vogue, is the word-memory plan - alsoknown as "sight reading," "total word configura-tion" or "word recognition." Ithas the more friendlynickname of "look and say," since the youngster issupposed simply to look at a word and say itright out.He memorizes the "shape" of the word, the configu-ration, and identifies it with pictures in his workbook.Often he is taught to recognize phrases or whole sen-tences in his picture book, or on flash (poster) cards,before he can independently sound out and pro-nounce such simple words as cat or ball.The fundamental difference in approach in thetwo methods reaches deep into philosophy and scien-tific theory. Thinkers have wrangled for centuriesover which comes first, the whole or its parts (anargument perhaps as endless as that over the priorityof the "chicken or the egg"). The phonics advocatessay the parts come first; the word-memory people saywe start with the whole and the parts fall into place indue course.

Does any of the preceding sound famil-iar? One year after that article was pub-lished, Rudolf Flesch came out with his best-seller, W hy Johnny C an't Read, and the battlebetween parents and educators was joinedand is still going on today. Flesch was de-nounced by the professors of reading whothen proceeded toorganize the InternationalReading Association in order toprotect theirvested professional interests. The result, ofcourse,was the perpetuation of the readingproblem and its growth into our nationalliteracy crisis.

In 1967, Dr. Jeanne Chall, in an attemptto settle, once and for all, the great conflictover teaching methods, published her well-researched book, Learning to R ead: The G reatDebate, in which she asserted that intensivephonics instruction produced better readersthan look-say. Because of that conclusion,the book was royally criticized bymost of thetop leaders in the reading establishment.

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r------------- Education Letter, Pg, 3, February 1991Th e D eb a te G oes O n

Butthat was 24years ago.And now thatthe literacy crisis is far worse than itwasthen, have the educators had any secondthoughts? Are they willing to admit thattheymayhavebeenwrong? Theoverwhelm-ingevidence indicates that our literacy crisisis the result of faulty teaching methods andnot any inherent flaw in the capacity ofAmerican children tolearn. Yet,despite theurgency of the situation, the educators arestill debating! E ducation W eek of March 21,1990, carried a front-page story with theheadline, "From a 'Great Debate' to a Full-ScaleWar: Dispute Over Teaching ReadingHeats Up." The article states:

In 1967, one of the most prominent researchersin reading instruction, Jeanne S. Chall, analyzed thecontroversy that was then raging in the field in aninfluential book called The Grea t Debat e.Today, nearly a quarter of a century later, theHarvard University scholar says the "debate" notonly persists, but has, in fact, escalated to a full-scalewar. The battle lines are dra wn between advocates ofphonics, who stress the importance of teaching rela-tionships between letters and sounds, and those ofwhole-language methodology, who believe childrenshould be taught reading by reading whole texts.And so fierce have their arguments become thattwo recent attempts to find a common ground - afederally funded study and a proposal for the 1992national assessment - have not only failed to quellthe debate, but may have exacerbated it."It's always been, in reading, that there wasrestraint with all our fighting," Ms. Chall says. "Nowit's as if all restraints are gone."

And so, 36years after theCollier's articleon thedebate overreading instructionmeth-ods, that debate isnot onlystill goingon, buthas developed into a full-scale war. Mindyou, all of this has been going on while thegovernment has poured billions of dollarsinto thepublic education system, apparentlycontent to let the educators fight their warregardless of the casualties inflicted among

the students. One would have thought thatsomewhere along theline the" government"would have put its foot down and decidedthrough its own means which was the bestway to teach reading.A P o litic a l D im e n s io n

But what is now likely is that the warwill goon indefinitely for the simple reasonthat it has become sharply political. In anarticle entitled, "Political Philosophy andReadingMakeaDangerous Mix,"publishedin Edu ca tio n W eek , Feb.27, 1985,the authorswrote:

After spending six years observing the efforts ofthe self-styled "New Right" to influence educationthroughout the country, we have found a pattern ofactivities that could, if some members of the NewRight are successful, cause a very limited model forteaching reading to prevail in both public and privateschools. The model is based on the belief that literalcomprehension is the only goal of reading instruc-tion. Because it trains children to reason in a verylimited manner, it is a model that we believe couldhave serious political consequences ina country wherethe ability of the citizenry to read and think criticallyis an essential determinant of democratic govern-ance ....The accumulating evidence dearly indicates thata New Right philosophy of education has emerged inthis country .... By attempting to control the kinds ofmaterials and questions teachers and students mayuse; by limiting reading instruction to systematicphonics instruction, sound-symbol decoding, andliteral comprehension; and by aiming its criticism atreading books' story lines in an effort to influencecontent, the New Right's philosophy runs counter to_theresearch findings and theoretical perspectives ofmost noted reading authorities.If this limited view of reading (and, implicitly,of thinking) continues to gain in influence, America'sschoolchildren may be destined to become, as Barry

Goldwater warned about the New Right itself, /I easy prey to manipulation and misjudgment," andthe New Right will have successfully impeded theprogress of democratic governance founded on theideal of an educated - and critically thinking -electorate.

,--- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box45161-Boise, Idaho 83711 ....J


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r------------Education Letter,Pg.4,February1991

In other words, the kind of reading in-struction that Thomas Jefferson, GeorgeWashington, Benjamin Franklin, and JamesMadison got will impede "the progress ofdemocratic governance." Obviously, theauthors of the article, two professors ofeducation, are totally unaware thatthe prim-ers and spellers that taught millions ofAmericans to read during the first 150 yearsof this nation's existence were all based onthe methods they now disparage as "lim-ited."A S oc ia lis t A g en da

Itis interesting that the educators nowview the debate between systematic phonicsand whole language in political terms. Obvi-ously they have a political agenda to defend.But this is really not new. Itwas known backin the 1930s that the progressive educators,led by John Dewey, were behind the changefrom phonics to look-say in reading instruc-tion and that itwas part and parcel of theirradical revision of the public school curricu-lum. Their political agenda was no secret:the transformation of America into a collec-tivist, socialist society.Rudolf Flesch, himself a socialist, triedto steer clear of the political potholes in thedebate. He wrote in W hy Johnny Can't R ead:. Throughoutthis book, as you may have noticed,

Ihave carefully refrained from the kind of attacks onprogressive education that are now so fashionable incertain quarters. The fact is,Iam on the whole on theside of progressive education. Ihave a Ph.D. degreefrom Teachers College, Columbia, and I am a sincereadmirer of John Dewey. I think education should bedemocratic, free of senseless formalism and drill,based on interest and meaningful experience, andinseparably joined to the real life that goes on aroundthe child. I have four published books to testify to thefact that I am not a reactionary but a liberal.But where does all that come into the question ofteaching reading? Who says a progressive, liberal-minded teacher must not tell her pupils anythingabout sounds and letters, but must do nothing but

condition them to the sight of certain words? Why isthe word method always labeled modern and phon-icsalways branded as reactionary? There is no earthlyreason for pigeonholing them this way. Phonics isoneway of teaching reading based on certain psychologi-cal and linguistic principles, and the word method isanother way - based on certain other, inferior psy-chological principles and no linguistic principleswhatever ....Mind you, I am not accusing the reading "ex-perts" of wickedness or malice. Iam not one of thosepeople who call them un-American or left-wingers orCommunist fellow travelers. All Iam saying is thattheir theories are wrong and that the application ofthose theories has done untold harm to our youngergeneration.What is so ironic is that Dr. Flesch wascastigated by his progressive colleagues forexposing their imbecility, but hailed as a truehero by the conservatives, many of whombecame his most loyal friends.That whole language is an importantcomponent inthe left's social agenda is quitereadily acknowledged by its advocates. Inan article entitled, "Whole Language: What'snew?" (T he R ea din g T ea ch er, Nov. 1987), weread:Whole Language views the learner asprofoundlysocial. Thus practice congruent with Whole Languageincludes participating in a community of readersduring small group literature study, peer writingworkshops, group social studies projects with built-in plans for collaborative learning ....Whole Language ... is gaining momentum at atime when the homeless are increasing, whengovem-ment social programs have suffered many cuts, whenfreedom tocriticize is threatened by right wing groupssuch as Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Acade-mia. The political vision woven through Whole

Language beliefs grows out of this context. Its goal isempowerment of learners and teachers, in partthrough demystification (demystifying everythingfrom what proficient readers actually do to how citywater rates are actually determined.) The WholeLanguage framework recognizes that large exploi-tive contexts have an impact on individual class-rooms and relations within them; that increaseddemocracy within individual classrooms must ac-company work on understanding and changing largercontexts.

'-- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711 ..


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...--- Education Letter, Pg. 5, February 1991

Obviously Iwhole language isalotmorethan just a new way to teach reading. Itembodies a leftist messianic vision, whichmay account for thefanaticism found amongwhole-language visionaries.

Meanwhile, the advocates of wholelanguage insist that their methodology dif-fers significantly from the look-say or sight-word method. Connie Weaverl author ofU nderstandinq W hole Language, writes inEdu ca tio n W eek ofMar. 28, 1990:

In a sight-word approach, children read stiltedprimerese - "stories" with new vocabulary wordsrepeated at least five times in a selection - and theyrnay bedrilled with flash cards containing frequentlyused, "basic" words. In whole-language classrooms,children read and reread favorite rhymes, songs, andpatterned stories with repeated phrases, sentences,and stanzas - not single words repeated in unnatu-ral contexts, and gradually - but with teacher assis-tance - they develop the phonics knowled.ge theyneed to read.A sight-word approach uses a part-to-wholestrategy, and in this respect, it resembles phonics. Bycontrast, whole-language instruction moves fromwholes toward parts, often in a single day's activities,

Ms.Weaver1s explanation still doesn'ttell us how whole language works, and itdoesn't address the crucial question ofwhether the children are expected to look atour written words as ideographs - that is,units ofmeaning as inwritten Chinese - orsymbols of sound - that is, direct transcrip-tions of speech. But here and there we findclues. For example, in abook entitled Evalu-ation: W hole Language, W hole C hild by JaneBaskwill and Paulette Whitman, we read onpage 19:

The way you interpret what the child does willreflect what you understand reading to be. For in-stance, if she reads the word feather for father, a phon-ics-oriented teacher might be pleased because she'scome close to sounding the word out. However, ifyoubelieve reading is a meaning-seeking process, youmay be concerned that she's overly dependent onphonics at the expense of meaning. You'd be happier

with a miscue such as daddy, even though it doesn'tlook or sound anything like the word in the text. Atleast the meaning would be intact.On page 16of the same book, we read:

At some point you may want to determine whatbasic sight words the children know. In Independencein Rending, Don Holdaway includes a list of suchwords and a means of determining whether the chil-dren know them outright


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r------------ Education Letter, Pg. 6, February 1991child about the nature ofour writing systemand the symbols we use. Ours is an alpha-beticwriting system, not anideographic one.Alphabetic writing is an accurate transcrip-tion of spoken words. Ithas great advan-tages over ideographic writing in that itrequires mastering fewer symbols - 26let-ters that stand for 44 sounds - permits agreater expansion of vocabulary, aids in thedevelopment of good pronunciation, andprovides important keys to spelling. Italsomakes reading easier, more fluent, moreprecise, andmoreenjoyable. That our educa-torswould deliberately deprive our childrenof all the advantages of alphabetic writingindicates not only a lack of understandingand basic knowledge on the part of theeducators but an inability tosee the obviousfaults in their methodology. They seem towrite about teaching reading asifthree thou-sand years of experience were totally irrele-vant. They write as if they've discoveredsome new, wonderful principles of learningthat have hitherto eluded thenoticeofevery-one but themselves.

Butwhat is even more reprehensible isthat whole-language advocates have com-pletely ignored the considerable evidenceindicating that the teaching of a sight vo-cabulary can produce severe reading dis-ability and the symptoms of dyslexia. Thisphenomenon was first written about byDr.Samuel T.Orton in 1929.The Collier's article(11/26/54) reported:

Extensive reading-method studies were madein Iowa in 1926-27 by the late neurologist, Dr. SamuelOrton, under a Rockefeller Foundation grant. At thattime children who couldn't read were said to have"congenital word blindness" - but Orton wantedproof. What he found was quite different. He re-ported his findings in a scientific paper entitled, The"Sight Reading" Method of Teaching Reading as aSource of Reading Disability ( Journa l o f Educat iona lPsycholoqy, Feb. 1929).Dr. Orton barnstormed Iowa from school toschool with a mobile mental-hygiene unit. One of hisfirst observations was: "In my original group of read-

ing disability cases I was surprised at the large pro-portion of these children encountered." He latercompared two towns, one of which had twice asmany retarded readers as the other. "In the commu-nity with the lesser number of cases," he said, "sight-reading methods were employed but when childrendid not progress by this method they were also givenhelp by the phonetic method. In the town with thelarger number, no child was given any other type ofreading training until he or she had learned 90 wordsby sight. . . . This strongly suggests that the sightmethod not only will not eradicate a reading disabil-ity of this type but may actually produce a number ofcases."

Since 1929, Dr. Orton's findings havebeen confirmed by the millions of reading-disabled functional illiterates emerging fromour schools. Can the advocates of wholelanguage guarantee that they will end thistragic waste of human potential?

In 1986 (Nov. 29), the Wash ing to n P o stpublished anarticleonwhole language withthe headline: "Reading Method LetsPupilsGuess." The reporter wrote:

The whole-language approach immerses chil-dren in literature in the belief that they naturally willacquire basic reading skills by developing an enthu-siasm for and understanding of written language.Teachers read aloud to children, have themdictate their own stories and practice reading them. Inits pure practice, teachers of whole language do notcorrect children who mispronounce a word or mis-take one word for another, as long as they understandthe meaning ....Jeanne S. Chall, a professor in the HarvardUniversity Graduate School of Education, calls themove toward whole language "shocking" and saysthere has been little research to document the method'ssuccess in this country ...."I see the failures from it already," said ChaIl,who heads the university's remedial reading labora-tory. "Children are coming into the lab who were inwhole language classes." ...The most controversial aspect of whole lan-guage is the de-emphasis on accuracy.American Reading Council President JuliaPalmer, an advocate of the approach, said itis accept-able if a young child reads the word house for home,or substitutes the word pony for horse. "It's not veryserious because she understands the meaning," said

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~ Education Letter, Pg. 7, February 1991

Palmer. "Accuracy is not the name of the game."Ifaccuracy is not the name of the game,what is? Guessing?Recently, our friend Charlotte Iserbytsent us a copy of the "Early Literacy Lan-guage Arts Evaluation Record" for an ele-mentary school in Rockport, Maine, wherethey are using whole language.The evaluation covers five differentareas: Interest, Book Knowledge and LibrarySkills, Comprehension, Reading Strategies,and Concepts About Print and Developmentof Writing Strategies. In all, the teacher isrequired to evaluate 58 different "achieve-ments" of the student, of which only two

have anything to do with learning that let-ters stand for sounds. Since this evaluationlist gives about as clear a picture of howreading is taught in a whole-language pro-gram, we reproduce below the list of achieve-ments under Reading Strategies:1.Can relate reading material to personal experi-ence.2. Can reproduce from memory short sentences orparts of stories familiar to him or her.3. Uses directionality when sequencing pictures.4. Uses directionality when following print.S.Can discriminate between a long and short word',orally and visually.6. Can discriminate between letters and numerals.7.Recreates a story line from meaning, occasionallyattending to print. With subsequent story read-

ings and reconstruction, the story line moreclosely approximates the printed story,

8. Can word-eye-finger match: a. Can point to eachword as itis spoken and/ or b. matches word orphrases on a chart story.9.When reading new or unknown words in a story

may: a. predict what the word will be, b. checkthe prediction by using knowledge of lettersounds.10. Begins to predict unknown words in versethrough meaning, grammar, and identifyingrhyming words.11.Uses context or meaning of what is being read topredict and/or identify new words.12. Acquires sight words by reading those wordsoften within complete language (e.g., story or

experience story) or within supportive context(e.g., picture dictionaries or environmentalsigns).13.Will skip a word if unable to read itand read on.14. Knows how to substitute a word that makessense for an unknown word and reads on (e.g.reading house for home or rug for mat.) Substi-tute a word that fits with context and/or gram-matical function of unknown word.15.When reading and coming to something he/ shedoes not know, will return to beginning of sen-tence or phrase and try again.16. Understands reading is a predictive process bymaking predictions about meaning and gram-matical accepta bility while monitoring the printand self correcting when something does notmake sense.17.Will self correct when something does not soundlike language, by using knowledge of gram-matical patterns of language; when somethingdoes not make sense, by using previous knowl-edge about content; when something does notlook right, by using knowledge of graphic pat-terns and grapho-phonetics; when the numberof words does not match number of printedwords.18. Is developing the ability to recognize sound-symbol correspondence and uses sound-sym-bol correspondence to identify new words.19.When reading and coming to something he/ shedoes not know, will look up to pictures in story,picture dictionaries, or other support clues tohelp understand the words.It would be difficult to find a morecomplicated and frustrating way to learn toread than the method portrayed above.Obviously, whole language, with its tortu-ous reading strategies, is not going to solveAmerica's literacy crisis. Itis going to make

itworse.To date, whole-language advocates haveprovided little evidence that their methodsare producing good readers. In fact, thefourth-graders tested in the Rockport Ele-mentary School, from which the evaluationrecord came, did very poorly indeed. TheCamden Herald of June 8, 1989 reported:

Rockport Elementary School principal MarvinHiggins said Tuesday that he was "disappointed"

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Education Letter, Pg. 8, February 1991

with the recently released Maine Educational Assess-ment scores for the fourth grade. Higgins said thatwhile the class's performance on earlier standardizedtests had indicated that the MEA scores would be low,they were in fact lower than had been expected."The writing was where Ithought it would be,"Higgins said, "but the reading score was considera-bly lower than we'd like to see." The class had a scoreof250 in writing, compared with a state average of 250and a comparison band (of schools with similar back-ground characteristics) of 240-295. The reading scorewas 215, compared with a state average of 250 and acomparison band of 250-305.Higgins added that he was sure lithe scoreswould be an issue of concern, as they should be," butcautioned against laying blame for the poor perform-ance on school programs ....Higgins attributed the low scores to a combina-tion of factors, including large class size.... Further-more, the proportion of special-education students inthe fourth grade, some 13 percent is three to fourtimes previous ratios of 3 or 4 percent, Higgins said."This was the first class to be taught wholelanguage," Higgins said, adding that the class beganthe program in the second grade, and that the class'ssecond- and third-grade teachers were working withthe program for the first time as well.

Obviously, the tests showed up wholelanguage for what it is: an ineffective, dis-mally poor way to teach reading. To whichwhole-language advocates have respondedas expected. "Whole-Language AdvocateSays New Tests Are Needed" reads theheadline in the Americ an J ou rn al of Portland,Maine, of Oct. 12, 1988. The article states:

If students taught to read by the new "wholelanguage" methods don't do well in reading tests, thefault is with the tests, not the teaching methods, Dr.Marie Carbo, a leading whole-language teacher, toldthe New England Reading Association Saturday inPortland.Reading comprehension is what matters, andany other tests of reading skills are of little conse-quence, she said.New tests better suited towhole-language teach-ing methods are being introduced into the NationalAssessment of Educational Progress, Princeton, N.J.,she said in printed material distributed with her talk.State tests in Michigan and Illinois also will be

adapted to whole-language, she said.

Where will it end? The whole-languagefad will run its course, leaving in its wakemillions of disabled readers. And who willbe blamed? Why ..the children, of course.

N ea rly H a lf o f T ex as S tu de ntsF ail N ew A ch ievem e nt T es tA tougher statewide achievement testadopted by Texas officials proved true to itsbilling, as about half of the state's Sth-, 7th-,and 9th-graders failed the test, according topreliminary results. Students in 3rd grade

fared better, with 67% passing, as did high-school juniors, 68% of whom passed. thestate's high-school graduation exam.Taken by about 1.4million children, theTexas Assessment of Academic Skills re-quired students to demonstrate critical-think-ing and problem-solving abilities not in-cluded in its predecessor, the Texas Educa-tional Assessment of Minimum Skills. Theearlier TEAMS test also did not include anessay assignment for high-school juniors.That portion of the TAAS isstill being scored.The passing criteria for this year's testwas 60 percent. The criteria will be raised to70 percent in the 1991-92 school year. (Educ.Wk.1/9/91)

V ita l Q u o te"A good education is the apprenticeship of life;in its widest sense it includes everything that exerts abeneficial influence on a young person and prepares

him or her for a virtuous and fruitful living. There arefour tests of a good education - correctness andprecision in the use of language; gentle mannerswhich give form and color to our lives; sound stan-dards of morality and a character based on thosestandards; the power and habit of reflection and theability to work. In short, a good education developsthe ability to speak and write and imparts a sense ofright, duty, and honor."- Prof. Hans Sennholz, Grove City College

i..- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 8371"-- __ -l

the blumenfeld education letter february 1991

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