improving education; you're doing it wrong

A small group of people claim there's a literacy crisis in America so they can lobby to make English spelling more phonetic.

Today, if you pick any random topic, chances are there's a group out there with a website, a Twitter account, a page on Facebook, and a blog, or at the very least organizing a protest. Even something as innocuous as an annual spelling bee competition has its opponents. They call themselves the American Literacy Council, and they want to do nothing less than change the spelling of the English language, claiming that if words were to be spelled phonetically, the language would be easier to learn and literacy rates would surge…

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell. "Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.

Ok, where do we begin with this one? First off, literacy rates in the United States are very high and have been since the 1970s, so from where this 40% stat comes is a mystery to me. And even if it's technically true with a very creative accounting of special education programs and gloom and doom reports, wouldn't it be logical to question how the material is being taught? If some 40% of students are struggling with English and yet we're still left with a high literacy rate, obviously we should be teaching people better rather than rushing to lower the bar to make it easier for everyone who can't, or won't, learn the presented materials. English is not impossible to learn. As an immigrant to the U.S., I know that firsthand. And come on, does the ACL really and truly believe that the changes it's proposing would make it easier to learn the language?

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer," a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."

Now, is it just me, or are they replacing spelling they deem illogical and arbitrary with far more arbitrary words they claim are easier to understand? The ALC sounds like a "huked on fonix rilly workd fo mee" t-shirt which somehow managed to spring to life. By the way, do they have a sister group called the American Math Council which advocates that we should be able to just give a range of possible answers for arithmetic equations so our "illogical emphasis" on getting the right answer doesn't discourage those students who can't do math? Is writing 2 + 2 = 3 to 5 better because it's easier for those who struggle with the basics? Absolutely not. Oh, it's always a good idea to encourage literacy and competency, but you don't do it by lowering the bar so low, you'd be able to haphazardly shuffle over it, obliterating an entire language's etymology, structure and flow, requiring tens of millions of books to be rewritten in the process. You improve education by adopting tough, consistent, and factual standards (unless you're on the Texas SBoE) delivered by engaging, highly trained teachers.