Senator STAFFORD. Thank you very much, Senator Zorinsky, for a very thoughtful and thorough statement.

We are now ready for the first panel. We would ask Mr. Samuel Blumenfeld, Dr. Patrick Groff, and Dr. David Smith if they would come to the witness table.

Gentlemen, we appreciate your being here. We know all of the hard work you have gone through to prepare and the time and trouble you have gone through to be here. And so it is with great reluctance that I have to say that time compressions in the Senate force me to ask you to summarize your statements in 5 minutes. We have that infernal traffic signal in front of you, which will give you 5 minutes on the green and then the red.

Your full statements, where we have them, will be included in the record as if read.

Having said that, it would be my intention to go with the panel as we have named you, which means, Mr. Blumenfeld, you are first. You are an author and an educator from New England way, Boston, MA. You will be followed by Dr. Patrick Groff, who is professor of education, San Diego University in California, and finally, Dr. David Smith, who is dean, College of Education, University of Florida, and president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

Gentlemen, we are ready, and Mr. Blumenfeld, we will hear you. STATEMENT OF SAMUEL L. BLUMENFELD, AUTHOR AND EDUCATOR, BOSTON, MA; DR. PATRICK GROFF, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION, SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY, CA; AND DR. DAVID C. SMITH, DEAN, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, AND PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES FOR TEACHER EDUCATION, GAINESVILLE, FL

Mr. BLUMENFELD. Thank you, Senator.

About a year and a half ago, an American collegiate debating team toured the Soviet Union for 2 weeks. During one debate, a Soviet man in the audience asked the Americans a very embarrassing question. He said:

Recently, I came across some statistics which shocked me. Your journal, U.S. News & World Report, wrote that 23 million Americans, that is to say, one out of every five Americans, does not know how to read and write well enough to cope with the demands of everyday life. What can you say in regards to this? Can it really be that this is possible in such a developed country as the United States of America?

The American at the podium, who spoke fluent Russian, was at a loss to provide an answer. He made a lame joke and passed on to the next subject.

Interestingly enough, the Soviet Union does not have a reading problem. Any child who attends a Soviet school learns to read. But millions of children in American schools become reading disabled, and many graduate as functional illiterates.

Why?

Is it possible that something is wrong with the way we teach children to read?

How do they teach reading in the Soviet Union? They use the analytic/synthetic method-a method commonly known as inten

ing problem.

But later in the 1930's, a new method of teaching was introduced into the schools, called "look-say," the whole-word method. It was based on the peculiar idea that you can teach children to read English as if it were Chinese. The result has been an academic disaster of such proportions that it will take generations before its ill effects are eradicated from our society, if ever.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch exposed the teaching methods problem in a historic book entitled, "Why Johnny Can't Read." In it, he wrote: "The teaching of reading all over the United States, and in all the textbooks, is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and com

What was the reaction of the educators to all of this? They denounced Flesch, created a powerful professional organization to counter his influence, and continued to promote their methods in the schools of America. And, of course, the situation continued to get worse.

In 1965, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, supposedly to cure the reading problem and other ills. But, in fact, it made matters worse, for while the educators got $42 billion for title I between 1965 and 1984, the teaching methods were not changed. Meanwhile, the SAT's began their nosedive, falling 43 points between 1966 and 1980.

The failure of title I did not go entirely unnoticed. In 1969, a blue-ribbon committee on reading was formed to study the literacy problem. In its report of 1975, the committee had this to say about title I:

It is not cynical to suggest that the chief beneficiaries of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have been members of the school system-both professional and paraprofessional-for whom new jobs were created. Seven years and as many billion dollars later, the children of the poor have not been "compensated" as clearly as the employees of the school systems through this investment.

The committee came to the conclusion that the literacy problem could only be solved by bypassing the existing education macrostructure. What the committee was telling us, in effect, is that the greatest obstacle to literacy in America is our own education establishment.

The legislation before you calls for a full and complete investigation of teacher training in the United States by a commission made up of noneducators; that is, parents, whose children are the victims of educational malpractice, representatives of business and industry who must employ the functional illiterate, and school board members who must govern the public schools for their communities.

It is obvious that today's organized teachers cannot be trusted to monitor their own performance. They have too high a vested interest in institutionalized malpractice. It justifies the enormous Federal investment in public education.

In July 1980, David Broder interviewed Terry Herndon, executive director of the NEA, and asked him why so little was said at the NEA convention about educational quality. Herndon's response was quite astonishing. He said: "We don't have the answers.

If the Government finds it important to protect Americans from toxic waste, consumer fraud, and the possible harm of cigarette smoking, it ought to become equally concerned with protecting American children from the devastating blight of functional illiteracy. Therefore, I hope that the proposed Commission will be established as a first step in providing that protection.

[Mr. Blumenfeld's response to additional questions by Senator Hatch and his prepared statement follow:]

18

Questions for Mr. Samuel Blumenfeld, first witness at the hearing on June 7, 1984 on S.J. Res 138, A bill to establish a National Commission on Teacher Education. From Senator Orrin G. Hatch.

Mr. Blumenfeld. During your discussion before the subcommittee you stated categorically that ". .not more that 15 percent of the schools of this nation teach intensive phonics. (Emphasis mine)

1. Would you please define the precise meaning of the term "intensive phonics." From whence was the term derived, and how was its meaning established in what literature is it used?

2. Concerning the number of schools which fall within that 15 per cent category, how was the percentage established? Is there any statistical difference between inner city and rural schools, affulent suburban school districts and magnet schools, etc? do 15 per cent of the schools on a non-stratified random sample simply fail to use this method you seem to prefer?

3.

or,

The semantisist, Mario Pei, suggests that there are just a whole lot of words in the English language that cannot be analyzed phonetically? What is your estimate of the number of words that fall in that category?

4. Dr. Pei also suggests that there are some fifty recognized sounds in a language like English, and that these sounds seldom coincide exactly; consequently, from these fifty sounds, the total possible number of speech sounds could run into the thousands. He also suggests that, because the ear is something less than a perfect hearing instrument, the average person really hears only about fifty per cent of the sounds produced by a speaker and supplies the rest out of his own sense of the context. Because no two native speakers of any language pronounce any word or sound of that language exactly alike, doesn't this suggest that teaching "context clues" (as suggested by another witness at the hearing) may be a more effective technique for teaching reading than "intensive phonics?"!

5. Going back to the imperfections of our hearing mechanisms, accoustically, the five basic vowel sounds, a, o, e, i, and u, are perceptible by the ear in the order just given, while among the consonant sounds, k, g, ch and j are more perceptible than p, b, f, v, t, d, s, and z which are used in more words than the first group. In the method of intensive phonetic teaching of reading, how is this disparity in how the ear actually hears sounds (assuming all ears hear exactly the same, which they do not) taken into account? (Remembering, of course, that the ear only hears about half of what is spoken in normal conversation and no two sets of ears are hearing precisely the same sounds at any given moment in time.)

6. In your historical account of how the nadir has been reached in the development of teachers, you neglected to account for the changes which have taken place in the home since those jobless, depression years you recall so well when children saw their parents read, and were often read to by their parents the same homes that now have a number of TV sets so the family will not squabble over which program to watch. Doesn't the fact children see less and less reading in the home for both pleasure and study, have, some effect on our nation's literacy level?

Here are the answers to your questions in reference to S.J. Res 138, a hearing for which took place on June 7, 1984.

Let me say at the outset, Senator, that these questions are quite pertinent, but that they should have been answered by the Department of Education or the National Institute of Education a long time ago. There is no reason why we should not know, with certainty, today, which way is the best way to teach children to read. That information should have been obtained years ago, before the federal government spent billions of dollars for compensatory and remediatory education. The fact that these questions are still being asked is the best reason why the Zorinsky Commission is necessary.

It is also apparent that the opponents of the Zorinsky Commission do not want these questions to be answered. They probably do not even want them to be asked. But the government must ask them and get the answers if Congress is to justify the spending of billions of dollars to solve the reading problem.

Now to the questions.

1. "Intensive phonics" is a method of teaching children to read. It consists of teaching a child (or adult illiterate) the alphabet and the sounds the letters stand for in a systematic, logical sequence, using drill as a means of reinforcing the child's mastery of the alphabetic system. My own instruction book, ALPHA-PHONICS, teaches the letter sounds in the following sequence: short a; the consonants; short e, i, o, u; consonant blends; long vowels and other vowels. These letter sounds are taught by using one syllable words in spelling families, nonsense syllables (which will be later encountered in multisyllabic words), short sentences using the words already learned. The term "intensive phonics" was coined to differentiate it from "incidental phonics" which is taught in look-say programs. In look-say, the sight vocabulary is the chief means of teaching the child to read. Incidental phonics is taught merely as one of the tools of "word attack" along with picture clues, context clues, and configuration clues. "Incidental phonics" is piecemeal phonics taught over a long period of time, after the child has mastered a sight vocabulary, and is used as "phonetic clues" to help the child decipher unknown words. In "intensive phonics" a sight vocabulary is not taught.

"1 I do not know who originated the term "intensive phonics. The term may be of recent origin but the method is not. "Intensive phonics" is the method that has been used over the centuries to teach children to read an alphabetic writing system since the alphabet was invented some four thousand years ago. It was used in ancient Greece and Rome and used exclusively in the United States until the 1830s when the first whole-word, look-say system was invented by Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the celebrated teacher of the deaf and dumb. However, it did not become the dominant and virtually exclusive means of teaching normal children to read until the 1930s when the progressives introduced it in the public schools.