The Cost of Educational "Experiments"

The Cost of Educational "Experiments"

By Ursula B.G. Kilner, Salisbury

Over the years I have taught just about every age of student. Ray Pavlak [Death by Voucher, July 19] blithely mentions that the Cleveland public schools will be experimenting with vouchers for the next five or ten years. This is where I get on my soapbox. It is all well and good for the school "planners" to take five, ten, even fifteen years to see how some system or method works out. They blithely forget that the students have a very limited time to get their education.

The one student who immediately comes to mind is a girl I had in freshman English at UConn. She, poor dear, had been in primary and secondary school when rote reading was the current rage. (Rote reading, sometimes called the "whole language method," teaches students to read by "recognizing" words and deprives them of the opportunity to learn the phonic building blocks—which would enable them to sound out new and unfamiliar words.) She was a bright and willing student, but because of rote reading she was unable to look anything up in the dictionary, sound out a new word when she was reading, and generally was at sea with any work involving research. She had been taught each word as a word and she thus had no phonics, no way to sound out a word (or look it up), as everything was done by memory. She said to me at the end of the semester, "I am so glad my younger brother has come through his primary and secondary school learning with a basis of phonics." She knew her limitations, but it was too late for her to relearn how to read.

My point is that five or ten years, in the basic learning time for any student, is a long time. While the pundits push us to try this and try that, the students are growing up and out. They simply do not have time for the experimentation. When the tinkering educationalists will find this out, I do not know, but God help the students who suffer through these recurring experiments—which, generally, do not work. This leaves the students in a frightful quandary and in a mire of ignorance. All I can say is: Do you remember the experiment in math with "base 8"?