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[Marieta Reeks]

Inone of the tributes that follows, a longtime friend and associate recalls how Jeanne Chall believed being a teacher was the most important job: "She delighted in telling how, when she became a professor of education and director of the Reading Laboratory at Harvard University, her mother asked if she could still tell her friends that her daughter was a teacher."

Jeanne Chall died Thanksgiving weekend, 1999. She was 78 years old. Last fall, The International Dyslexia Association (IDA), an organization with which Jeanne Chall had long been associated, devoted a special issue of its newsletter Perspectives (Volume 26, No. 4) to her memory. The guest editors, Marilyn Jager Adams and Linda K. Rath, gathered tributes from many of Jeanne's colleagues, students, and friends. With IDA's permission, we have chosen five of those tributes to reprint here, and we have added a review of the book Chall finished shortly before her death. "No single person has contributed more to the substance, dialogue, or advancement of the field of reading education," the editors of Perspectives wrote. To that we can only say, with gratitude, Amen.

As a historian of education, I have studied the history and politics of reading research. Based on my research, I can say without qualification that Jeanne Chall's significant contribution to this field changed the course of the debate about reading in the last third of the 20th century. Chall will long be remembered for both the quality of her research and for her matchless integrity, which inspired her students and admirers in many other fields.

Here is the context that brought Jeanne Chall to the forefront of the reading debate. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the public schools were roundly criticized for intellectual flabbiness. Then, in 1955, Rudolf Flesch's sensational book, Why Johnny Can't Read, charged that there was a national reading crisis caused by the widespread use of textbooks and reading programs that rejected phonics. Flesch insisted that the popular "look-say" method, found in books like the Dick and Jane reading series, had no support in research. His book topped the bestseller list and was serialized in many newspapers.

In 1961, as the debate about how to teach reading continued, the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned Jeanne Chall, who was well established as a careful reading researcher, to review the controversy. Chall spent three years visiting hundreds of classrooms, analyzing research studies, and examining textbooks; she interviewed textbook authors, reading specialists, and teachers. In her landmark book Learning to Read: The Great Debate, published in 1967, she did not agree with Flesch that there was one and only one successful method for teaching beginning readers. She concluded that no single method had completely solved the problems of teaching reading; some methods were better than others, but none was a panacea.

Chall was not an ideologue; she was a careful researcher who understood teaching. She knew that it was extraordinarily tricky to compare the effectiveness of different teaching methods because each approach contained elements of the other. She pointed out that schools that had recently adopted phonics programs still used the look-say readers, and teachers tended to rely on the methods with which they were most familiar. In the 1930s, she observed, phonics survived in a hostile environment because some teachers clung to their old phonics charts, closed the classroom door, and hoped that their supervisor did not come in unannounced. However, she discovered that teachers who had been trained since the 1930s had never learned to teach phonics and were likely to fall back on what they knew best, which was the look-say method.

Chall found that from 1930 until the early 1960s, there was a pervasive professional consensus on the one best way to teach reading. This consensus de-emphasized the use of phonics and concentrated on teaching children to recognize whole words and sentences. It stressed silent reading, rather than oral reading (oral reading was associated with phonics because it demonstrated the child's knowledge of the sounds of letters and syllables). Children were encouraged to identify words "at sight" by referring to pictures and context clues; the sight vocabulary was carefully controlled and repeated often in the primers. While phonics was not necessarily banned, it was relegated to a minor role in learning to read.

This orthodoxy, Chall discovered, was not supported by research. In reviewing reading research from 1912 to 1965, Chall found that studies of beginning readers over the decades clearly supported decoding. Early decoding, she found, not only produced better word recognition and spelling, but also made it easier for the child eventually to read with understanding. The code emphasis method, she wrote, was especially effective for children of lower socioeconomic status, who were not likely to live in homes surrounded with books or with adults who could help them learn to read. For a beginning reader, she found, knowledge of letters and sounds had more influence on reading achievement than the child's tested mental ability or IQ.

When the whole language movement became a major factor in American education in the 1980s, as Chall had predicted, she was often targeted as one of its "enemies." In publications and debates, she was sometimes accused by whole language partisans of being a tool of the "far right." This, of course, was absurd. Jeanne Chall never let herself be used by anyone. She was a woman of remarkable candor, clarity, and personal integrity. She reported what she found, and she did not seek favor from anyone nor serve as a foot-soldier in anyone's political campaigns.

Even as the attacks on her continued, she stressed that both decoding and comprehension were critical for young readers. Her critics twisted her words, but they never managed to tarnish her scholarly reputation, and she never descended to trading insults with those who insulted her.

Her message over the decades was clear and consistent. Teaching children to read is difficult, not easy; it requires consistency, skill, and open-mindedness. Research can point us to better methods, but only well-prepared teachers can make good methods effective in their classrooms.

She will be remembered in the history of American education as a teacher, a scholar, and a person of the highest character who cared deeply about children. Having just completed a history of American education in the 20th century, which documents Jeanne Chall's important role in clarifying "the great debate," I can assure her many friends that her work will not be forgotten.

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. Her latest book is Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

When we sat down for lunch, I saw that Jeanne had brought a copy of my book. "Listen," she said, "I want to read you something." She opened the book and read from my summary remarks about The Great Debate.

I felt at least uncomfortable. In giving oneself license to write from the soul, one necessarily gives others license to see, rightly or wrongly, more than one has written. Had I overstepped in this reflection? Had I misread? Had I trespassed on her person?

That evening she called on the phone. "I've been thinking," she began. Then with a great swell of pride in her voice, she announced, "The Great Debate was my first feminist book! Do you know?" We both laughed, for both of us did.

Not that Chall was surprised that phonics is useful for young readers. English, after all, is an alphabetic script. Yet, few who delve into the primary research are prepared for the strength or the scope of the phonics effect. A working knowledge of spellings and spelling-sound correspondences is fundamental for young readers. It is essential. Furthermore, whether children gain that understanding is very, very strongly influenced by instruction. That is what Chall figured out as she wrote The Great Debate. Moreover, she figured it out despite the fact that, by today's standards, the research base from which she worked was both crude and spotty. Had she been anyone else, she might well have understood and written about these findings only as they fit her prior beliefs. But she did not. Bothering instead to push and ponder their collective meaning and credibility, she caused herself to question and, ultimately, revise her own beliefs, even knowing the social and professional risks of so doing.

Still today, after many hundreds more pages, many thousands more experimental hours and subjects, and many millions more dollars worth of work, we have certified much but learned little more. The conclusions of our scientific efforts to understand beginning reading remain "point for point, virtually identical to those at which Jeanne Chall had arrived [in The Great Debate] on the basis of her classroom observations and interpretive reviews of the literature."2

If Chall's conclusions defied her expectations, if they have been proven only through subsequent decades of hard empirical effort, then one cannot help but wonder. How did she manage to figure them out? The answer, I am convinced, derives no more from Chall's exceptional intelligence and discipline than from her uncontainable intellectual honesty. In the last chapter of The Great Debate, Chall wrote:

Compare this voice to those who have so loudly and brutally maligned her for her work. Then reconsider the strength of this woman. How much easier her life would have been had she given up or given in.

Now, more than 30 years later, our country is again recognizing that its future depends on the education of its children. At the same time, for reasons of informational advances and demographic shifts, the educational disparities and inequities of our public school system are more clearly quantified and more starkly ghettoized than ever before. In her preface to The Reading Crisis, Chall reflected:

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