'Balanced approach' is a term that Maureen Dimarco made up at a press conference to answer a reporter's question, and a term she rues (at least she did the last time I talked with her about it).

To say we need a balanced approach suggests that we had the right elements and only needed to tweek the blend a bit. However, as Marilyn Adams said at the PEER Committee that Jimmy refers to: "We have known for 30 years that phonics did a better job at teaching reading than whole word -- and now whole language -- instruction. But, you know, it never was that that much better. Something was missing...."

If you balance literature-based instruction with phonics, you will lose the opportunity to identity and correct early the 15-20% of students whose weak phonemic awareness is preventing them from learning the alphabetic principle. This group constitutes about 80% of below grade level readers and is truly remediable. Early remediation (k-1) may let some of them develop grade-level fluency; Late remediation improves reading accuracy but fluency problems almost always persist.

A student does not need a 'balanced approach'; you could say he needs balanced development.

To achieve good reading comprehension (everyone's goal), you must have rapid, accurate, automatic decoding AND oral language comprehension skills in that language. The amount of instruction that it will take for Johnny to have rapid accurate automatic decoding may be many times more the instruction he needs for developing good oral comprehension skills, yet Mary may readily decode but require a huge amount of instruction to achieve comprehension.

Someone may respond that 'schools need to offer a balanced approach.' Fine. But schools don't learn to read. And many of our kids won't do much better unless they receive instruction that is weighted (not balanced) to meet their needs.

Vocabulary, phonemic awareness, rapid naming, oral comprehension, working memory (a proxy for syntactic complexity): Each is reasonably accurately measurable in kindergarten and first grade. Each can bring reading development to a halt (in different and unbalanced ways). Each requires UNbalanced instruction that focuses on decreasing the deficit.

Anyone for balance?

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