Education Board Expected to OK Phonics Rules

Many experts praise the state for taking a comprehensive approach to early reading and for aligning its curriculum, instruction and assessment.

The new standards, they say, are among the best in the nation.

"California's work gets very high marks because it's very thorough," said Christopher Cross, president of the Council for Basic Education, a Washington, D.C., organization that evaluates instructional standards. "It's well-grounded in research."

But the state's new guidelines also have been criticized by several groups, including the California Reading Assn. and the International Reading Assn. They call the state's reading formula a narrow approach to early instruction, adding that focusing on word skills alone at the beginning won't work for some students.

"The heavy emphasis on one-way-fits-all really concerns a lot of educators," said Armin Schulz, immediate past president of the California Reading Assn. and an associate education professor at Cal State Stanislaus. "Unfortunately, learners don't come in a neat package and learn the same way. It's essential for teachers to have a wide menu of instructional approaches."

Ultimately, classroom teachers will have to make up their own minds because the framework and the standards are voluntary.

Instructors face a daunting task: implementing standards that are nearly 70 pages long and a framework, at more than 300 pages, that is as thick as a phone book.

The state has built in an incentive.

Beginning next spring, California's standardized test--the Stanford Nine--will be augmented to reflect the new standards in language arts and math.

That fact alone is motivating second-grade teacher Teri Ortt to bolster her language arts lessons with extra doses of the basics.

"I will be giving my students all of those things, such as decoding skills, grammar skills and reading comprehension through my curriculum," said Ortt, who works at Hobart Boulevard Elementary in Koreatown. But she added: "If you are a competent educator, you are already doing these things in your classroom."

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Teaching Blueprint

The reading and language-arts framework is an instructional blueprint to help teachers implement standards for what students need to know in each grade. Below are standards for kindergarten through third grade and the framework's recommendations on how to deliver the lessons.

Standards: