What’s the difference between an elephant and an elevator? This is not a joke (although it sure sounds like one). Imagine for a moment that you had never encountered either an elephant or an elevator—though you knew of their existence—but suddenly stumbled upon one of them. How would you identify and make sense of this strange thing? Would it help if you were given a clue, such as the following picture of its environment?

At this point, you might reasonably presume that you had encountered an elephant. How exciting! A new discovery. And you deduced that it was an elephant because any fool knows that it is exceedingly improbable to encounter an elevator on the African savanna. (Where would it take you, anyway? To the top of that acacia tree?) Plus, you intuited that wildlife is apt to be found out in the wilds (except perhaps during Spring Break, when it heads for Daytona Beach). In short, the context helped you to decipher something unfamiliar.

Learning new words can be like that, as well. If you were to encounter an unfamiliar word and could not identify it, you might look to the surrounding words for help. For example, consider the following passage:

George did not take the stairs. He was in a big hurry. So he rode the elevator. But the power went off. And George was stuck in the elevator for an hour.

Assuming that you were not familiar with “elevator,� there is a good chance that you might decipher the word by noting that it required “power,� George “rode� and “was stuck in� it, and it was similar to—though supposedly faster than—“the stairs.� This meaningful context would also help you to distinguish “elevator� from words similar in appearance, such as “elephant� or “escalator� or “Ella Fitzgerald.�

Of course, as an alternative, you might ignore the context altogether and simply break the word down into its constituent phonemes and sound it out. This strategy would be akin to identifying an elephant (to return to the original example) using the clues in this picture:

By now, dear reader, you are no doubt wondering what the point of this lesson is and whether the author has discontinued his medication. The point is that there is more than one way to skin an elephant. There is more than one way to make sense of language and the world—and to teach such. Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education does not see it that way, at least when it comes to its Reading First initiative. For the DOE, it’s their way or no way, and this rigid stance is putting some local school districts in a difficult position, as reported by the New York Times:

In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash

MADISON, Wis. — Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.

“Pumpkin,� ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.

“Look at the word,� the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?�

Parker looked again. “Pea,� he said, correctly.

Call it the $2 million reading lesson.

By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.

The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.

According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.

Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research� required by the program.

But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen. [full text]