The report of Delaine Eastin's California Reading Task Force came out Sept. 13, and it evokes both joy and frustration. Eastin, the state superintendent of public instruction, appointed the task force in April after the latest round of national test results showed California was giving new meaning to the word "dismal."
"Every Child a Reader," complete with its logo of a perky butterfly emerging from the fluttering pages of a book, has its top-10 list of recommendations and there's a lot there to rejoice about. Parents who have been complaining for years that the "whole language" theory of reading instruction was arrant nonsense will feel vindicated. The state's most recent panel of experts has retreated from the long-dominant view that phonics is bad for children.
"A balanced and comprehensive approach to reading must have," it says, "an organized, explicit skills program that includes phonemic awareness (sounds in words), phonics, and decoding skills to address the needs of the emergent reader."
A balanced program must have good literature too, but no one need quarrel with that.
The task force report also recommends that the state Board of Education should revise and clarify its reading manifesto, the English-Language Arts Framework, to add "the details of skills instruction."
In other words, the guiding document for reading instruction in this state, the results of years of effort by hundreds of experts, unaccountably neglected to mention that teaching children skills was essential. And now that unskilled children aren't reading in embarrassingly large numbers, it is somehow the teachers' fault for misinterpreting the framework.
Sorry, but the framework was perfectly clear in disparaging and discouraging the teaching of phonics. And that's what's frustrating. The names on the task forces may change, but basically this is the same crew that brought the framework to birth and inflicted it on generations of California children. The same philosophy of education that created the framework determined the teacher-training curriculum, drove the publishing and adoption of reading textbooks and directed the form of the now-abandoned statewide assessment program.
"The state government must reduce statutory and regulatory obstacles to teaching," the report concludes.
"Our crisis in reading is serious. It is time to act."
Oh, how true. But who caused the crisis?
Another cherished article of faith, mixed-ability classrooms, is quietly vanishing from the creed as well. "Grouping by developmental level for some skills instruction is useful as long as the grouping remains flexible with students reassigned as their needs and the tasks change," it says. Translation: if some children are reading Ezra Jack Keats and some are reading J.R.R. Tolkien, they need different lessons.
One recommendation is to get the community involved through volunteer programs. Fortunately, not everybody has waited for Sacramento's permission to think that's a good idea.
Last week I attended a workshop at Livermore's Joe Michell Elementary School for parents interested in becoming volunteer reading tutors. The leader was Dolores Hiskes, author of the book "Phonics Pathways" that is used in the tutoring program for first through third graders whose teachers think they can use an extra boost in reading. The program is starting its third year.
Hiskes' book is charming but corny, its mascot Dewey D. System (Bookwormus Giganticus) delivering proverbial groaners along with each lesson: "You don't have to be GOOD to START, but you have to START to be GOOD." 
Children in the program have brief lessons each day with a volunteer tutor until they catch up with their class. First-grader Jennifer Lynn Irey, who attended with her mother Francia, helped us out by playing the role of a student in a demonstration lesson and also showed, by dissolving in giggles, that corny jokes are still funny.
"Children love it when their teachers act silly," Hiskes said, after showing how to use a game that allows the tutors to do exactly that.
Hiskes says her book is especially popular with home-schooling parents, and it's easy to see why. The lessons are well-organized and easy for just about any adult to teach.
In contrast, the state report is slanted toward professionals, and sprinkled with references to "reading experts" and "mentor teachers" and "personnel who are highly trained in well-researched reading instruction programs."
But the failed "whole language" approach is one of the most thoroughly "researched" ideas there has ever been. Innumerable academic careers were launched on a sea of unreadable articles in obscure education journals proving it was wonderful. It's just that the research was based on an incorrect premise, the dubious assumption that children learn to read naturally and effortlessly if they are simply placed in a nurturing environment filled with wonderful books.
Some do, especially if their homes are like that. But most learn faster if someone gives them some hints about the correspondence between spelling and sound, rather than expecting them to rediscover this paramount virtue of alphabetic languages for themselves.
Even now, Eastin feels she has to warn us about too much emphasis on skills.
"Certainly, we need to teach phonics, spelling, grammar and computation skills," Eastin said. "At the same time, there was nearly universal agreement that no one is advocating simply returning to the repetitive skill and drill approach."
But what's to return? I started first grade in 1945, and phonics had already vanished from the classroom. Teachers are trained to talk about phonics only when children have difficulty learning to read. Why has it taken 50 years for the experts to decide that it's a really dumb idea to wait until children start to fail before we start telling them what we adults know about reading?


Message No. 1 is: Phonics works