WHERE READING FAILS : A STATE TASK FORCE ASKED THE WRONG QUESTIONS, GOT THE WRONG ANSWERS AND HAS GIVEN CALIFORNIA'S TEACHERS THE WRONG SOLUTIONS.

Byline: Jeff McQuillan

MOST students don't like doing homework. Still, teachers expect that they'll do it, and do it right, or else they won't give them a passing grade.

Californians will be disappointed to discover, then, that the members of the state's specially appointed Reading Task Force failed to do their homework in determining the causes of California's current ``reading crisis.''

What went wrong here?

The RTF was established last May to determine why California's students perform so poorly on state and national reading achievement tests. The committee's conclusion: California students don't have enough ``basic skills'' and phonics instruction when learning how to read.

According to the RTF, the main culprit has been the state's own English/Language Arts Framework adopted in 1987. The Framework de-emphasized traditional skills teaching and promoted the use of meaningful, comprehensible literature and books, sometimes called the ``whole language'' approach.

The RTF failed to ask two very fundamental questions in coming to its conclusions, however. First, have test scores actually dropped since the 1987 implementation of the whole language approach? Second, are there any other likely causes for declines in test scores, and for California's relatively low national ranking in reading achievement?

The task force report relied primarily on reading achievement scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading report, a standardized Assessment administered every two years by the federal government to students in 41 states.

The problem with this evidence is that the state scores prior to 1992 are unavailable, so we can't tell how and if reading scores have changed since the Framework was adopted nine years ago.

Scores from the old California Assessment Program, on the other hand, suggest that reading scores remained fairly stable after 1987. In short, there is no evidence that things have been getting worse in California in the past 10 years.

What we do know is that California performs relatively poorly compared to students in other states. But the use of whole language can hardly be blamed for this low ranking, since nationwide, children in whole language classrooms do significantly better than those receiving heavy phonics-based instruction. Clearly something else is at work here to bring down our test scores.

As it turns out, that something else has to do with money, not methodology. Consider the following:

California ranks near the bottom in school library holdings.

The quality of school libraries has a direct and powerful impact on reading achievement scores. The formula is straightforward: the more access kids have to books, the more they read; the more they read, the better they read. California ranks next to last in books per pupil in its elementary school libraries. Little access to books in the school library means less reading.

California's public libraries have been decimated over the past seven years.

Book budgets in the state have been cut 25 percent since 1989, the number of library hours have been reduced 30 percent since 1987, and per capita spending on books dropped 36 percent in the past eight years. Little access to books at the public library means less reading.

California's children are poor and getting poorer.

If you're poor, you are much less likely to be able to afford books for your children. How does California rank in terms of the percentage of children living below the poverty level? An abysmal 41st out of 50.

No books in the home, no books at school - that's the real cause of California's crisis in reading.

The RTF asked the wrong questions, got the wrong answers, and has given California's teachers the wrong solutions. Instead of starting with the obvious explanations for low reading test scores and seeking to focus the state's resources in places where it can do the most good, pro-phonics purists have instead chosen to promote new versions of the failed drill-and-kill approaches which research has shown to be less effective than the whole language curricula.

The task force's recommendations deserve the same grade as any other poorly completed assignment: an F.

MEMO: Jeff McQuillan is an assistant lecturer at the University of Southern California.

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Photo: Crisis: Students don't have enough ``basic skills''and phonics instruction.

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