AUSTIN — The inability of many Texas students to write and speak English well is like a dreadful disease requiring aggressive treatment, say some education advocates who want to use different teaching approaches.

Social conservatives on the State Board of Education, influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a new curriculum that increases the focus on basics, including grammar.

They've met fierce resistance from teachers and educators who warn this emphasis will prepare students for the 1950s, not the 21st century, and embarrass Texas in the process.

They fear the state's proposed new standards for English language arts and reading contradict established research and will only make things worse.

"The results will be bloody," warned one expert, former English Professor Joyce Armstrong Carroll.

A fight over the board's perceived exclusion of Hispanic experts from development of the curriculum has overshadowed this larger struggle.
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A public comment period on the proposed curriculum will end May 18, and the 15-member board is to take final action on May 22. If approved, it will guide how the state's 4.7 million children in public schools learn English and reading over the next decade.

Much of the debate focuses on grammar and reading comprehension. The debate is being driven, in part, by Donna Garner, a retired English and Spanish teacher in Hewitt, a prolific author of education-related e-mails and a consultant and writer for a Web site called MyStudyHall.com.

Students must learn precise communication skills, and grammar requirements must be spelled out with explicit language, she argues.

"We have a disease in Texas — our students do not know how to write and speak English well," Garner said. "We need to treat the disease aggressively."

"The skills need to build upon each other as the student progresses from one grade level to the next. Learning the basics of the English language will provide students with a strong foundation upon which to write sophisticated papers and upon which to base clear communication," she said.

Sharp debate

The integration of grammar with writing has been taught in Texas for 15 years with an appalling lack of success, Garner said, citing statistics showing half of Texas college freshmen are in need of remedial education compared with only 28 percent nationally.

But Carroll — an author, former English professor at McMurry University in Abilene and co-director of a teacher-development group called Abydos Learning International in Texas — warns that teaching grammar separately from writing and skimping on reading comprehension will have dire consequences.

Standardized tests like TAKS and the SAT don't examine grammar skills in isolation — they test comprehension, she said.

Carroll was part of an educators' coalition that offered input during the three years it took to produce the curriculum proposal.

Some of its members take a dim view of State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist, and board member David Bradley of Beaumont, who have helped lead the back-to-basics push.

"Would anyone believe that the coalition's research is bogus but a dentist from Bryan is right?" Carroll asks. "Would anyone believe that every major ELAR (English Language Arts and Reading) organization that testified on behalf of the teachers of Texas ... are wrong, and a man without a degree from Beaumont is right?"

Bradley says he and McLeroy "are eminently qualified because, first of all, we're parents, we're business people and we're taxpayers."

"And we have the majority support of 1.4 million people in our district and who do want rigor in their children's academic programs," he added. "The only ones protesting this are the educrats, the paid consultants and the curriculum specialists" who exist to interpret standards "so confusing, so vague, so mushy that nobody can understand them."

"If we are successful, at the end of the day, all the consultants and facilitators and coordinators will be unemployed."

The proposed standards ignore at least 50 years of research on grammar instruction, counters Kylene Beers of The Woodlands, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English and a senior reading adviser to secondary schools in the Reading Writing Project at Teachers College at Columbia University.

"To choose, purposefully choose, not to do what we know we must — systematically teach comprehension skills across all grades, embedding that instruction in the content of what is read — is not only wrong, it is shameful," Beers said.

Talking past each other

Both sides view the fight over reading comprehension as bigger than the one over grammar.

"They have renamed 'whole language' as comprehension. It's down to the classic debate of phonics versus whole language," Bradley said.

That perspective draws a swift rebuke from Cindy Tyroff, a secondary-language arts instructional specialist in Northside Independent School District and a coalition leader.

"Either he does not listen or read well, or he's deliberately misrepresenting the coalition's position," she said. "We have consistently advocated for the explicit teaching of phonetics, the explicit teaching of reading comprehension and the explicit teaching of grammar."

Learning grammar is a little like learning to ride a bike, said Virginia Guerrero, an administrator in English language arts in San Antonio's North East Independent School District.

"You can know all the rules, you can know how to turn the handlebars, how to operate the pedals, but until you actually get on the bike and ride, there's not much meaning to that," she said.

Students once learned grammar as an end in itself, "when, in fact, it's really a tool for being an effective communicator," Guerrero said. "The best form of communication in which to teach grammar is writing."

Grammar drills become tedious chores for students without offering any relationship to anything else they are doing, she said.

English teachers want to see major changes in the proposal. Board Chairman McLeroy anticipates some improvements but no major changes.

He said he has not heard one good reason against keeping grammar as a separate teaching strand. Grammar, he said, "will get more emphasis, and it needs more emphasis."

Teachers "have all the freedom in the world to teach grammar in writing. That point needs to be crystal-clear," McLeroy said.

Emphasizing problem solving and critical thinking over knowledge acquisition results in less of each, and that's especially harmful to lower-income students who arrive in school with a huge knowledge deficit, he said.

"A lot of the disadvantaged child's time in school is being wasted on process and strategies. They have minds that can just soak up a vast storehouse of knowledge that will make them better readers."