Students "poisoned" by whole language.

• Position: Literacy

"Balancing phonics and whole language reading instruction is like balancing food and poison," declares Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, Calif. In a recent episode that is becoming commonplace across the nation, an elementary school in Rockford, III., was ordered to discard direct instruction in phonics--despite the method's overwhelming success, maintains Ghate.

Thanks to phonics, ordinary third-graders at Lewis Lemon Elementary School scored near the top in statewide reading tests, their results bested only by students at a school for the gifted. However, the incoming school superintendent ordered that phonics instruction be replaced by "balanced literacy'--which mixes phonics with "whole-language" instruction.

In issuing his order, the superintendent is following the still-dominant voices in schools of education, Ghate suggests. Because "reading is such a complex and multifaceted activity," says Catherine Snow, professor of education at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., "no single method is the answer."

"This is not a technical dispute about the best way to teach reading," explains Ghate. "The...