worse before it gets better

from K9 Sasha:

There isn't going to be positive reform any time soon. Every single one of my classes for a Reading Endorsement has pushed whole language and many of them have also denigrated phonics and teaching skills systematically. The book for my current class is titled, Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers.

This is what new reading specialists are learning (at least in the state of Oregon) so this is what schools will be doing.

They do what they do.

Speaking of which, I came across this study in my travels yesterday:

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group, with the intervention group being divided into four groups of three children each. The intervention program was carried out over a period of 24 weeks and comprised 56 highly sequenced, semiscripted lessons in phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills delivered by a teacher aide who received training and ongoing support from a remedial reading specialist. Posttests results showed that the intervention group significantly outperformed the control group on measures of phonemic awareness, pseudoword decoding, context free word recognition, and reading comprehension. Two-year follow-up data indicated that the positive effects of the intervention program were not only maintained but had generalized to word recognition accuracy in connected text.

Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms
Janice F. Ryder, William E. Tunmer, Keith T. Greaney

This study was done in New Zealand -- looks interesting.

I've got to re-boot; will post some passages concerning whole language in New Zealand later.