Miranda Devine devinemiranda@hotmail.com;
16 March 2006; The Sydney Morning Herald
There is a problem, there is a solution. What are we waiting
for?
DIANE PHILIPSON is a former primary school teacher
who spends her days at home in Newcastle coaching children who are
struggling to read. This week she had phone calls from two desperate
mothers who say their sons, one aged 12 and one aged eight, feel life
isn't worth living.
"The eight-year-old told his mother he'd rather be dead than have to struggle
so much with reading," Philipson said yesterday.
Philipson is one of a number of backyard operators across Australia to
whom anxious parents have turned to teach their children to read when
school has failed. They invariably use a method that involves direct,
explicit, systematic phonics. This is the inexplicably politicised way
of teaching children that letters in our alphabet are associated with
sounds.
There is a pharmacist in a country town in NSW, for instance, dismayed
by the number of parents coming to her to fill scripts for attention
deficit disorder medication, when all that was wrong with their children
was they couldn't read. With a little research, she discovered a phonics-based
course which she is agitating for the local school to use to further
train reading teachers.
In Newcastle, desperate parents found out about Philipson, 63, by word
of mouth, or through informal referrals from a learning disorders clinic
at the hospital, which, according to one mother, "doesn't want to
be seen to be helping Diane's business but they know what she does works".
Philipson has devised her own system of teaching, a systematic phonics
program in which children hear a sound, say it, then read it and sound
it out. "I've never had a child I couldn't teach to read," she
says.
Some of the children she coaches have specific learning disorders. Others,
mostly boys, just haven't been taught how to read in a way that suits
the way their brain works. She has had 10-year-olds unable to read a
word.
No one blames the teachers, most of whom do a tremendous job, and the
best of whom are saints. But as the committee of the National Inquiry
into the Teaching of Literacy (of which I was a member) pointed out last
year, as many as 30 per cent of children are leaving school functionally
illiterate.
The report of the inquiry, released in December, finds that most teacher
training institutions aren't giving graduate teachers the repertoire
of skills they need to teach all children to read. Less than 10 per cent
of course time in university teacher education departments is spent training
teachers how to teach reading.
The former education minister, Brendan Nelson, set up the inquiry in
response to an open letter from 26 of Australia's literacy researchers,
cognitive scientists, psychologists and speech therapists warning of
the crisis facing large numbers of children who were failing to learn
to read. The scientific verdict was in, they said, and it was overwhelming:
phonics was a necessary foundation of reading.
But from the start the inquiry was bedevilled by the belief within education
circles, and even among some on the committee, that there was no literacy
problem, that phonics was already being taught and that our students
were superior to those of every country except Finland.
Nelson's concern was dismissed as pandering to right-wing extremists
who were committed to imposing "boring phonics" on children
as a form of ideological control. One leading educationist even drew
a link between the teaching of phonics and the Iraq war.
Try as it did to base its findings on the best evidence-based research,
the inquiry never managed to escape the whole-word-versus-phonics wars
which have been raging for almost 40 years. The attack on its report
was led by the popular children's author Mem Fox, a whole-word devotee
who seems to think if parents read enough of her books aloud their children
will automatically learn to read.
Some might, but at least 25 per cent of children won't, according to
Kevin Wheldall, director of Macquarie University's Special Education
Centre, and one of Australia's leading literacy experts. Anyone who thinks
we do not have a literacy problem should visit Aboriginal students on
Cape York. Or perhaps doubters could spend an hour in Wheldall's classroom
at the Exodus Foundation in Ashfield, where underprivileged children
in years 5 and 6 are given remedial reading instruction.
There you will meet children who have spent five years going to school
and haven't a clue what those black marks on the page mean.
And as many of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy committee
discovered, the effect on little boys and girls of not being able to
read is devastating.
The Reverend Bill Crews set up the Exodus program because, he said, he
was "sick of burying kids". Normal, bright children who weren't
being taught to read soon grew into sullen pre-teens who felt worthless
and preferred to get into trouble than go to school where their "stupidity" was
on display.
Nelson, who often visited the Exodus classroom as a backbencher, said
when he launched the inquiry's report: "I ask myself, as a layperson,
how is it we can live in a country where a boy at the age of 12, with
neither a physical nor intellectual disability, can seriously [say],
'I didn't realise it's the black stuff that you read. I didn't realise
you start on the left hand side and work to the right.' "
Literacy was a pet project for Nelson and he warned he would withhold
funding from states which resisted the recommendations of the inquiry's
report, which included systematic phonics teaching, improving teacher
education, and testing children regularly.
But Nelson has moved on, as politicians do, and his replacement, Julie
Bishop, has yet to prove herself. We will know, soon enough, when the
federal budget is released in May, how much Nelson's fine words really
meant.
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