Congressional Panel Learns What Schools Want

Several members of Congress got a lesson in education reform Thursday when educators, administrators and academics discussed the pros and cons of charter schools, phonics and “whole language” during an informal congressional hearing at a local school auditorium.

The town hall-style meeting resembled a PTA gathering, with more than 60 teachers, parents and community leaders in attendance at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center.

The event was the second of about 40 neighborhood hearings scheduled around the nation by the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce. The goal of the meetings is for political leaders to come to a better understanding of the impact of the 760 federal programs that deal with education.

“There’s plenty of evidence suggesting we’re not getting what we should for our kids,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan). “So before we add any more education programs, we want to find out what’s effective and ineffective in the ones we have now.”

What Hoekstra and his four political colleagues learned during their visit to the Pacoima campus was that most teachers in attendance wanted phonics reinstated in the reading curriculum. Also, the teachers were joined by students and parents praising charter schools in the San Fernando Valley and central Los Angeles.

“Before coming here today, I didn’t know much of anything about charter schools,” said Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Santa Clarita).

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McKeon tossed dozens of questions about budgets, policies and salaries at a panel of charter school officials, including Vaughn Principal Yvonne Chan, Fenton Charter School Principal Joe Lucente and Eric Premack of the Institute of Education Reform. The congressman seemed impressed with their answers.

“This to me is my ideal in community coming together with parents and teachers working together to make decisions,” McKeon said. “Here you have pride in your school, you have involvement versus going downtown and dealing with a big bureaucracy.”

The discussion of reading education centered on phonics and the whole language approach that replaced it in California schools eight years ago.

Educators told the members of Congress that a combination of phonics and whole language needs to be used to provide the most comprehensive reading instruction for children.

“We need to take the best of whole language and the best of phonics and fuse them together in an explicit, systematic approach to teaching kids how to read,” said San Diego State University professor Jerry Treadway.