ught.Despite the overwhelming volume of research supporting early, intensive, systematic instruction in phonics, college textbooks used by most university departmentsof education fail to apply this research in the training of prospective teachers.The National Education Association declared in the 1983-84 Annual Edition of "Today's Education" that "the overemphasis on phonics with beginners" is now"ready for the scrap heap."Why do faulty reading methods continue to be used?It's Big Business!The sale of instructional reading programs is big business today, as it has been since the 1930's when the basal reading series for elementary schools wereintroduced.Each year publishing companies compete for the adoption of reading programs in states like California and Texas where millions of dollars of expendable "lookand say" workbooks are purchased every year. Many Americans will recognize Dick and Jane, Alice and Jerry, Janet and Mark, Danny and Sue, or Tom andBetty. These are the characters in the "look and say" readers that most of us grew up with.The 1986 National Advisory Council on Adult Education report, "Illiteracy in America" cites several examples of how the cost of reading instruction can bereduced, while at the same time improving reading scores:"In her book, "Programmed Illiteracy in Our Schools," [Mary Johnson] says that: `The workbooks to a sight method [`look and say'] basal series soon becomesuperfluous whenever phonics is taught by a direct method. . . .the annual expenditure on workbooks was more than four times greater than that on hardcoverreaders [used in a phonics-first program]. (The workbooks have to be replaced each year because the children write in them.)'"The Superintendent of Schools in Seekonk, Massachusetts hired a private-sector organization to train his primary-grade teachers in intensive systematic phonics.The cost of reading materials to implement the new program was eighty-eight percent less per pupil than the...
