A personal encounter or a good human interest story always drives home a point more effectively than a rash of raw statistics. When the College Entrance Examination scores dropped steadily for thirteen straight years, the educators tried to explain it away with academic doubletalk. Two dramatic examples, however, have illustrated the fact that a significant portion of our young people are simply not being taught the basic skills that our public schools were built and financed to provide.
A St. Louis television station recently aired an interview with a 20-year-old white boy who went all the way through the public school system and received his high school diploma, but cannot read or write. Now, having realized how a functional illiterate is handicapped in the job market, he is attending an adult remedial reading program.
Jerry Doyle isn’t retarded or stupid; he is merely untaught. On television he told how he was never given any grades in school; he was just promoted year after year. The school’s attitude was: “Here’s your diploma, now get lost.”
According to the Literacy Council, which is now successfully teaching him to read by the phonics method — which he should have been given in the first grade -— there are 70,000 functional illiterates in this one metropolitan area alone. The chief cause of this phenomenon is that they were culturally deprived of the opportunity to learn to read by the phonics method, the only proven technique of teaching anyone of any age to read the English language.
Washington, D.C. residents were shocked last month when the newspapers reported that the valedictorian of an inner-city school was denied admission to George Washington University because his Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were only half as good as they should have been. Thus, the highest-ranking graduate of the public schools in our nation’s capital hasn’t been taught enough to get into his hometown college.
As the George Washington University admissions dean said, “He’s been conned. He’s been deluded into thinking he’s gotten an education.”
This result has been fostered by school administrators who frankly state that students who cannot read should be awarded high school diplomas anyway, that diplomas should be based on attendance and not on academic achievement. Under this system, there are no standards for getting out of public high schools.
The psychological frustration this causes cannot help but breed social problems. The students are led to believe they are prepared to face life, but when they apply for a job they cannot even fill out a job application.
The failure to teach reading, combined with a refusal to admit the failure to teach reading, has produced a healthy reaction by some educators. In Chicago, one school superintendent, Albert A. Briggs, discovered that, of 296 eighth graders heading for high school in his district, only 26 could read at a seventh-grade level, and 358 could not read at even a third-grade level.
Briggs is a black administrator of a school district that is 88 percent black, and he realizes that these pupils have the right to be taught basic skills. If they cannot read or write, they will not be able to get jobs and, as Briggs said, many will “wind up in jail.” He showed great courage in his willingness to face the protests of teachers, parents and students in inaugurating a new policy of minimum standards.
I used to think that the dollar bill was the piece of paper whose value has slumped the most in the past ten years. It now appears that this dubious “honor” has been won by the high school diploma.
