April 16, 1999

The Honorable Charles W. Turnbull

Commissioner Ruby Simmonds, D.A.

Dear Governor Turnbull and Commissioner Simmonds,

Would you give me the opportunity to meet with you to talk about how we can make the Virgin Islands public school reading (and writing) program the model for the United States?  We can rise up from the doldrums and show “the rest of them” how to do it right.  I know we can.  The Turnbull administration can turn around the fortunes of the Virgin Islands by instituting phonics-based reading in our public schools.

            Governor, you know who I am.  I’m still counting on you to write that history of the Virgin Islands.  No doubt it will be a richer read now that you’ll be able to include first-hand chapters on leading the Virgin Islands.  Let’s give it a happy ending.

             For the benefit of Commissioner Simmonds, I want to tell you who I am and why I’d like to  talk with you.  Although my official name is Edward Haskins Jacobs, I am commonly known as Ned Jacobs, or, more formally, as Attorney Ned Jacobs.  For the past nineteen years I have lived and practiced law in St. Croix.  Attorney Douglas Brady and I practice law together as Jacobs and Brady, and our office building is across East Street from the Department of Education headquarters in Christiansted.

             Our office, 7 Church Street, has housed Jacobs and Brady since Hurricane Hugo, but now it has an additional tenant - the Phonics Institute, and I’m its director.  I created the Phonics Institute to promote the phonics habit.  I want to help you promote the phonics habit among our public school students.   

          Why do I now wear this new hat as the director of the Phonics Institute?  Why am I focusing on teaching kids how to read?  I’ll tell you why.

             Many moons ago - back in the late ’80s and before, I knew nothing about how you get kids to read.  Sure, my wife and I read to our kids plenty and tried to encourage their intellects to blossom, but my profession was lawyering and I never gave schooling much of a thought.  Our elder child, our daughter, went to Montessori programs in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, and delighted me with her dogged determination to, and her delight in, figuring out each written word in her reading by pronouncing it out using the letter sounds.   Really, I never even thought much about what she was doing, because what she was doing  seemed perfectly natural and normal.  Reading was fun.  We had a great time together.

             Then came first grade in ’90-’91.  Little-by-little my daughter started throwing in guesses at unfamiliar words.  She no longer saw it as her job to get each word exactly right by figuring out the sounds of all the letters.  She seemed to think that being sloppy and just hacking her way through the reading was o.k.  I watched her backslide from the good habit of taking responsibility for figuring out every word just right, into the bad habit of guessing at words.  Sometimes the guessing had nothing to do with the letters themselves.  I remember one time when she read “camp” for “tent” in a story about camping.  Figuring out letter sounds no longer had the prominence it used to.  Knowing what she was capable of, I was baffled by her turning away from an intelligent approach to her reading.  Reading was no longer the playtime it used to be.  Instead, it fell into a guessing game marked by many a wrong guess, leading to frustration and failure.  She knew in her heart of hearts that she had lost it.  She was no longer the confident burgeoning expert she used to be.  And  her comprehension suffered.  After all, if you really want to be able to understand what you read, you have to be able to “speak the written word” - that is, convert the written word into the speech it represents, word-for-word, right on target.

             At the parent-teacher conference in the spring of first grade, my wife and I, concerned about our daughter’s reading, asked the teacher how she went about teaching it.  The teacher said the class did not use “basal readers.”  This was the first time I had ever heard the term.  She said she used a “whole language” approach, but I had no idea what she meant.  She mentioned writing journals, children-made books and the like.  She said she tried to create an atmosphere of excitement about reading, but strangely she said nothing about how you get kids to read out written words accurately.  I said (something like) “Of course you teach them rules, like ‘I before e, except after c, or when it sounds like a as in neighbor and weigh.’” She replied that no, she didn’t, because there were too many exceptions, and that went for most direct instruction in letter sound rules.  I told her I was really concerned about our daughter’s habit of guessing at unfamiliar words.  I told her I couldn’t believe how lazy our daughter was getting in her reading, especially because she knew how to figure words out, and she was a naturally intelligent and industrious girl, not a lazy girl.  I just couldn’t understand it. 

            The teacher then said that I should not be concerned about her guessing, that it was normal in beginning reading to do a lot of guessing and that her stumbling, hacking reading style was perfectly o.k.  Going further, the teacher unabashedly revealed that she actively encouraged guessing as a “reading strategy.”  Suddenly I was struck with the realization that this teacher sitting in front of me was the cause of my daughter’s abandonment of great reading habits and her development of horribly bad reading habits.  I was shocked to the core of my being.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was dumbfounded.  It was frightening to realize that my daughter’s teacher was a bad influence on her.  Before then I  assumed that the teacher knew exactly what she was doing.  Never in a million years would I have associated her with my daughter’s guessing.  What a rude awakening!

             Let me break away from my story for a moment.  Despite much bad press, we know that many of our Virgin Islands public school students are capable readers and writers.  But many more have lots of trouble reading and writing well.  Do students in our schools use guessing as a reading strategy?  Has it become for many of them an entrenched habit, and not just in first grade, but in third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh grades?  Do our teachers put up with it - even encourage it?  Are our  schools the cause of bad reading habits in our students?  If so, we’re  not alone.  Guessing is regarded as a reading strategy in most reading programs in the States.

              Guessing, hacking, stumbling through reading can be nipped in the bud early on, or if it has become a habit, can be rooted out, but you’ve got to know how to do it.  It’s through phonics-based reading instruction that (1) strongly encourages the children to figure out the “sound values” of all the letters in all the words on the page - and (and this is important) that (2) equally strongly discourages as a reading strategy guessing and whole word memorization without grasping all the letter sounds.  A good phonics-based program does not ignore other elements of a good reading program, such as instruction in grammar, vocabulary building, and developing good thinking skills.  

Unlike my daughter’s first grade teacher, a “phonics-first” teacher explicitly, extensively, and systematically teaches letter sound rules and gets the children to write words using those rules already learned.  The phonics-first primary grade teacher limits early reading assignments primarily to words the children know how to figure out because they have been taught the applicable letter sound rules (the rules of phonics). That way the children learn they can read with precision, as “reading experts,” without guessing.  Of course you can read to the children all kinds of texts, but their reading assignments are best designed if early on the vocabulary is controlled to give them practice in sounding out words, not in guessing.

All teachers in primary grades read stories to the children.  This is good.  But how do you get children to learn to read stories on their own?  In a phonics-based reading program you give the children heavy doses of the basic and most used rules explaining letter “sound values,”and then give them words and stories they can read using those rules.  Opposed to this is the system where you encourage the children to learn to recite each story while looking at the pages, and little-by-little, through hacking and guessing, thereby “learn the names” of the words on the page.  Is this second method used in our schools?  This second method encourages guessing as a habit in reading.  And it tells the children that they aren’t expected to read with precision.  This failure of the teacher to expect and require precision is a crucial difference between the phonics-first classroom and one that isn’t phonics-first.  In the typical whole language classroom, the phonics rules needed for precise reading are not progressively and systematically taught.  Instead the phonics rules tend to be de-emphasized as one of several “reading strategies,” and limited to occasional pointers. Guessing and rote whole word memorization are  respected parts of the program.  Guessing isn’t seen for the devastatingly bad habit it then becomes for many of the children. 

             There is plenty of talk these days that the key is to get children excited about reading.  Much effort is spent in our schools to do exactly that, in order to encourage “lifelong learners.”  But think about it - do you get excited about doing things you aren’t any good at?   Isn’t the real key the development of the skills - and the habits - needed to become really good readers?  If you are an excellent reader, you’re much more likely to be excited about reading than if you don’t have command of it and have to stumble through it.

             Back to my story: Once I realized there were widely divergent ways of teaching reading, to me, the choice was clear.  I didn’t want my child to be encouraged to guess at anything in her reading.  Instead, I wanted her to be taught the phonics rules right from the start, and to be taught to always use the rules to figure out every word exactly.

             My wrenched gut led me to my mother, who sent me Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read and Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, and a couple of other books.  The scales fell from my eyes.  I started an intense, continuous, years-long study of reading and teaching to read, as I taught my own children to read by phonics, and helped out with a few others along the way.  I decided to attend UVI and in May 1998 I obtained a master’s degree in education with emphasis in administration and supervision.  I am now a licensed educational consultant in the Virgin Islands.  My daughter is doing great, thank God, but I’ll tell you, a bad habit can be a tough nut to crack, believe you me.  If we get together, I would like one of our topics to be the benefits of using habit development analysis in formulating effective school reading programs.

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