Alarmed by his son's insipid textbooks, an electrical engineer named Blouke Carus sat down at his kitchen table in 1962 and transformed the way children would one day learn to read.
With a stack of reference books at his side, he cobbled the skills of phonics with classic children's literature--and peddled his program to schools.
For decades, this frustrated father from Peru, Ill., was ignored, even ridiculed.
Now he has become the darling of California's phonics revolution, with schools spending millions for the word drills and writings he compiled.
Carus may not be a household name, but the program he created--Open Court--is becoming a fixture in the state's classrooms. His evolution from pariah to savior is a lesson in persistence and California's ever changing educational currents.
"People didn't take us seriously in the beginning," said Carus, a 72-year-old Caltech graduate, "but we knew we were on the right track."
Open Court can now be found in one of every eight elementary schools in the state. That's up from one in every 100 schools just five years ago.
Los Angeles Unified is the latest convert: 92% of the district's low-performing campuses--372 elementary schools--recently picked Open Court when given three options.
Yet the program that inspires so much faith also offends many teachers. Some object to its heavy emphasis on phonics exercises, saying its approach doesn't work for all students. Others chafe at the thick instruction manuals that dictate every detail of the daily lesson, even telling teachers when to praise a student's work. Privately, skeptics call it "Open Cult," a reference to the way teachers fawn over the textbooks as if they are a cure-all for academic failure.
"Learning doesn't need to be smashed down your throat," said one kindergarten teacher from Northern California who asked that her name not be used. "There is no one program that will fit all children."
Nonetheless, momentum is building as schools from Santa Ana to Sacramento report substantial gains in test scores among students using the curriculum. And it's being championed by a variety of leaders among the state's educational elite.
David Packard, son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, has invested $40 million from a family foundation in 27 school districts that use Open Court. The money pays for training teachers who use the program.
State's Poor Scores Spark Call for Change
