What Else We Lost on September 11

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    Illinois Loop: Reading


What Else We Lost on September 11
by Kevin C. Killion

September 11, 2001 was going to be an exciting day for the 18 students in a second grade class at Emma Booker School in Sarasota, Florida. Having guests is always exciting, but this day's guest was the president of the United States.

President Bush saw this as an important day, too. After all, education was his top priority. And now he was going to be showcasing to the nation how education can be made truly effective, and that he was dedicated to making it so. This classroom he was going to visit was one of the "good" ones. His administration and key advisors placed great stress on primary reading using solid, research-based methods. The Booker School was doing exactly that.

The teacher, Sandra Kay Daniels, remembers when Bush entered her classroom. "He came in joyful and happy and greeting the kids, and laughing -- very, very cheerful." Bush sat down in front of a sign saying, "Reading makes a country great."

Ms. Daniels sat by a display board showing words and their component pieces. Behind her, on a whiteboard, she had written some more words and a reference to "SRA Reading". She began the lesson: "Everybody, touch the word. Boys and girls, sound this word out, ready ..." The classroom replied with eager and enthusiastic choral response to each word and each fragment, sounding each out and then stating the whole word.



This was revolutionary stuff! For years, teachers who believed in the power of phonics had been slandered by the education establishment, and phonics advocates had even been shouted off the stage at education seminars. The Direct Instruction method of teaching, which Ms. Daniels was using, had logged particularly spectacular results but was ignored by ivory tower "experts." But now! Here was no one less than the president of the United States, giving his endorsement and a national spotlight to a classroom where kids of different backgrounds were really learning how to read, through phonics and Direct Instruction. The event provided a model for how America's schools might get back on track in teaching children to read.

But then Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, walked in and whispered into Bush's ear. Ms. Daniels remembers, "I thought, this is not OK, because in the corner of my eye I could see the gloom on his face."



Bush stayed only a few minutes though his face showed that his heart was in pain, and that his thoughts were a thousand miles away.



Then, the media were asked to leave the room. Ms. Daniels recalls, "There was a lot of activity, and finally the President walked up to me and said, 'Mrs. Daniels, I have to leave now, something terrible has happened.' He shook my hand and I whispered a prayer to myself for him."

In its coverage, Education Week reported the visit under the headline, "Crisis Shelves President's Focus On Education."

Now, newspapers, magazines and television news are all dominated, understandably, by the grave threat of terrorism and our response. Education issues have largely been pushed way back to the inside pages, right there with the old chestnuts about teacher strikes and asbestos abatement. That revolution in reading? As part of their commemoration of the one-year anniversary, Patti Ann Browne of Fox News interviewed the teacher, Sandra Kay Daniels, and started out by saying, "So, students in your second grade class were reading to the president out of a reader, and all of a sudden, he got the word..."

"Reading out of a reader." Ho-hum. And so the revolution planned that day was sidetracked, lost to a more urgent new reality. The campaign on how to teach kids how to read continues, but without the paramount emphasis we had hoped would be available for it.

Copyright 2006, Kevin C. Killion


Also see:
    Illinois Loop: Reading