The Invincible Thaddeus Lott

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Spring 1994]

When you first hear the good news about a school like Wesley Elementary School in Houston, your first fearful thought might be, "What will the education bureaucracy do to kill it off? How will they destroy it?" Wesley is a public school in a predominantly black neighborhood, whose black principal is the determined Thaddeus Lott.

It is a school that 1950s Americans of all races would recognize. Lott and his teachers maintain a strict disciplinary structure, use phonetics to teach reading, and drill students in arithmetic tables. In other words, its administration is committed to the old-fashioned basics that worked for generations, and still work.

At Wesley, fifth graders do math on an eighth grade level and read Shakespeare and Steinbeck. A teacher at the school, who happens to be white, was so impressed by the school's educational program that she transferred her two sons to Wesley.

So, how could there be a problem? Well, one's initial fear of obstruction proves justified. Sure enough, in 1991, Houston's school board tried to discredit the high-performing Wesley, whose students had outscored their counterparts in the district's suburban schools. Apologies were soon forthcoming, however, and television's Prime Time Live, in a segment on the school, took the board to task for its harassment of Lott and his teachers. Thousands of Houstonians then closed ranks around Wesley, giving the school and its principal their full support.

Lott describes his troubles with the school board as a struggle with the "Whole Language groupies" who control it. These bureaucrats are dedicated to a rigid curriculum that stresses "homogeneous learning outcomes," over basic skills. (See "Outcome Based Education," in Issues & Views, Winter 1994.)

On an inspection visit to Wesley, curriculum administrators found kindergartners engrossed in reading. Instead of being praised, principal and teachers were criticized because the children were "sitting at their desks." According to modern teaching techniques, such behavior is considered too conforming and "uncreative."

In an article in the Houston Chronicle, Lott writes, "At Wesley, we use phonetics extensively in kindergarten through second grade. We use memory. We demand independent work and extra reading from our students. We grade every student extensively, virtually every day.

"Most of my children do not have the trappings of self-esteem--good clothes, good toys, vacations and the like. Wesley's commitment is to give these children a foundation for more enduring self-esteem, that is, intellectual independence."

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