School Trustees May Order Phonics Tests

The school board tonight will consider testing elementary school children on phonics, a controversial method to teach reading, and indicating their progress on report cards.

State officials including Gov. Pete Wilson and the State Board of Education recently have supported phonics, as opposed to the whole-language approach, in the classroom.

Santa Ana Unified School District Trustee Rosemarie Avila proposed phonics testing “to have a way of holding the district accountable,” she said.

Avila said most district textbooks emphasize the whole-language approach to reading because that is what the state endorsed when the books were purchased about half a dozen years ago.

But spokeswoman Christine Sanchez noted that the school district has always included some phonics instruction in its curriculum.

Whole language aims at teaching children to read by looking at the words as a whole and using pictures. Phonics attempts to break words into sounds and the letters that form the sounds.

Under the proposal, children would be tested in phonics in the first, second, third and fifth grades. The tests would be given in English or Spanish, depending on the student’s primary language.

Avila said tests would not be given in the fourth grade because students already have learned phonics rules by then; the fifth-grade test would be a comprehensive, final review.