Phonics is key for students to read & write English
By Ken Mercer SBOE District 5
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN TX This coming Thursday April 1 2011 while the Texas Legislature is voting on the new education budget the entrenched political lobby of the Far Left is fighting to stop the funding of the new English Language Arts textbooks.
Why? The new standards include a return to a strong emphasis on phonics explicit grammar spelling & handwriting. Texas employers will tell you that these English skills are critical for a students success.
The Far Left however wants to keep funding their decades old political failure called whole language which includes holistic scoring of essays (scoring an essay with a 1 2 3 or 4) inventive spelling and no direct systematic instruction of grammar/usage.
As a member of
the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) I can tell you that the results of whole language are devastating.
The Commission for a College Ready Texas reported that 50 of college freshmen in Texas are unprepared and must enroll in remedial or developmental education. Texas students consistently rank in the bottom ten percent of our nation in the language sections of the college ACT and SAT exams.
Taxpayers must not continue another decade of funding the political education disaster of whole language.
In May 2008 the conservatives on
the SBOE had the courage and the backbone to listen to their constituents cries to go back to the basics. Now
our students need those new textbooks to help them learn the newly adopted standards. Many of the current textbooks are 12-18 years old.
Phonics is a key plank of the conservative agenda for education reform. We want our children to be successful. The ability of students in America to read and write English is critical to that success.
Of course the Far Left is stating that there are no funds for the new phonics-based curriculum.
That is a political lie.
The 2010 SBOE led by Chairman Gail Lowe (R-Lampasas) voted to send the 2011 Texas Legislature $3 billion dollars of brand new funding for public education. That money is not from taxes or fees but is made possible through the careful management by the SBOE of the Permanent School Fund (PSF).
It is the PSF endowment that provides free textbooks to school children.
The Texas Constitution gives the SBOE the authority to fund the textbooks but the Legislature has to agree to appropriate the money. The cost to fund new phonics-based textbooks for our 4.8 million K-12 students over the next ten years is approximately $450 million much cheaper than continuing to replace the expensive whole language textbooks.
Please call your State Legislators and ask them to vote for the children of Texas not the self proclaimed experts of the whole language lobby. The SBOE provided $3 billion or six times the funding required to pay for new textbooks that will emphasize phonics and the other basic and important English skills.
Texas must fully fund phonics.
Note: The SBOE requested that after purchasing the new textbooks the
Legislature dedicate the remaining $2.5 billion only to education!
Ken Mercer (RBexar County) is a current Member of the State Board of Education and a former State Representative. Mercer represents 1.7 million constituents in 12 counties including Blanco Burnet Caldwell Comal Gillespie Guadalupe Hays Kendall Llano and parts of Bell Bexar & Travis.
