Competition in Education; D. Hager

Its owners must provide value to attract and retain customers. The school markets its ability to teach youngsters to read. More than half of its customers are minority families, many with limited incomes. As a result, the owners have to offer a reading pedagogy that is not only effective but inexpensive. Failure to deliver the promised results would lead to declining enrollment, loss of revenue, and potential extinction for the enterprise. By contrast, there is little accountability in public school systems. The schools isolate their customers from the choice of reading pedagogy. Parents must try to exert their Mr. Hager is a senior research associate with Patrick Henry Associates, a consulting firm. An earlier report on H. G.P.E. Academy appeared in the June 1992 issue of The Freeman. influence through elected representatives, who usually defer to professional managers on curriculum matters. This political insula tion allows professionals with motives and agendas at odds with those of parents to nevertheless impose their choices. Only through political pressure, a process that is simultaneously more time-consuming and less effective than merely taking one's busi ness elsewhere, can customers modify the services offered to their children.

H.O.P.E. Academy's teaching technique is phonics. Children are taught the relationships between sounds and alphabetic symbols and learn how to combine the correlations into words, sentences, and meanings. This system flourished when private schools were the rule in teaching the nation's children. The domi nant text then was Noah Webster's "Blue Backed Speller," the familiar name for a book first published in 1783 and used for more than 100 years. Webster provided an analysis of sounds leading from the simple to the com plex, numerous tables of words illustrating "an easy standard of pronunciation," and practice lessons for students to read. Make Way for Dick and Jane The method used to teach reading that prevails in public school systems today orig inated in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was touted by a number of educational elitists, including Horace Mann, the leading figure in establishing state control over education. Under this system children are introduced to reading by memo rizingwhole words and later receive instruction in symbol relationships, though not in the sys tematic manner provided by Webster.

In his 1973book The New Illiterates,Samuel Blumenfeld traced the roots and development of this newer reading technique. Thomas Gallaudet, who taught from 1817 to 1830 at the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, used it, plus supplemental pictures to link words with objects, to teach deaf-mutes to read. He applied the method to his own children, who had normal hearing; they enthusiastically and rapidly learned the meanings of simple words 223 224 THE FREEMAN • APRIL 1997 without having to first master phonetic prin ciples. The sightword technique was soon adopted by other textbook authors. But it resulted in poor results in Boston, where a group of schoolmasters succeeded in banish ing it after 1844. However, the social-management philos ophes who fashioned the "progressive educa tion" principles that spread into the nation's schoolrooms in the early decades of the twentieth century revived Gallaudet's method after a period of obscurity. In 1930 "Dick and Jane" made their debut in a series of readers featuring controlled vocabularies to be mas tered by students through the sightword or look-and-say technique.

Hooked on Failure As this reading pedagogy proliferated, Blu menfeld noted, "the failures of the method" soon led to "a whole remedial reading indus try." Critic Rudolf Flesch pointed out that the method reduces English to an ideographic language, using symbols to stand for whole words and negating the advantages offered by alphabetization. He explained, "We have decided to forget that we write with letters and learn to read English as if it were Chi nese." According to Blumenfeld, whole-word memorization enables children to get off to a fast start, but "this initial success is deceptive because it does not provide the foundation for learning thousands of additional words, and therefore it is in the second and third years in which the sight readers' problems become evident." This pedagogy, despite significant opposi tion, has remained entrenched in public ed ucational systems.An amendment to the 1986 Human Services Reauthorization Act re quired the Department of Education to study costs and benefits of different beginning read ing instruction programs, including phonics.

It took seven years for the Department to produce a report titled The Beginning Reading Instruction Study. The highest-priced programs employ sightword instruction. The most expensive cost $312.97 per pupil to implement, or nearly $9,400 per 30-student classroom, based on 1992 prices. Other systems ranged downward between $309.80 and $205.26 per pupil, and several fell below $200 per pupil. Phonics based programs ranged from relatively costly to very inexpensive. One system ran $215.20 per pupil, but others, consisting simply of kits for classroom use, cost as little as $.83 per pupil. The cheapest offered only a teaching manual and cost just $18, or $.60 per pupil. That manual is used in each classroom at H.O.P.E. Academy in conjunction with an $18 set of phonograms or flash cards to drill students in phonetic relationships. A library of graded books enables them to practice and improve their reading skills.Making the cards instead of buying them could further reduce costs, saysschool co-owner Eleanor Sambaer.

The students also use notebook paper for students' writing exercises instead of the ex pensive workbooks included in sightword programs. H.O.P.E.'s tuition runs about two-thirds the average cost per pupil in Michigan's public school systems. Sambaer and partner Marina Farhat are so confident of their ped agogy that they offer a tuition refund to parents of any kindergartner who is not reading at first-grade level by the end of the school year. The school has not had to issue a refund in its nearly 12 years of operation. The public sector, of course, could not make such a guarantee, since it would quickly run out of money. Insulated from consumer pressure, educational professionals continue to promote their costly pedagogy while refus ing to take responsibility for substandard literacy around the nation. Only the market place can determine the best pedagogy-the process of teaching reading that produces the best results for the lowest cost.

In short, the only really effective educa tional reform would be to abolish public education. Then schools would have to com pete for customers, and parents could choose with their checkbooks. D Potomac Principles The Judgment of History P resident Bill Clinton has run for public office for the last time. No longer subject to judgment by the voters, he is now account able only to history, or at least to the histo rians who write the history books. Nearly 50 years ago historian Arthur Schlesinger organized a poll of 55 historians to rate America's presidents. Schlesinger staged a repeat in 1962. Some journalists subsequently conducted their own surveys. Now Schlesinger's son, writer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has organized yet another survey of the historical establishment. The results of all these efforts are predictable. Presidential greatness is defined as action, the more frenetic the better. Which means big government, the more intrusive the better.