The Wizard of Reading : John Henry Martin Brought Computers to the Fight Against Illiteracy and Is Transforming the Way Kids Learn to Read

In 1973, at age 58, John Henry Martin suffered a severe heart attack, the result of a viral infection he developed after cutting himself while clearing his property in Cold Springs Harbor, N.Y.

He was dead on arrival at the hospital but physicians revived him. Then, as he recalls it, after 30 days in intensive care, he was sent home to die.

His wife, Evelyn, brought him to Florida, where the former high school teacher, principal, elementary school superintendent and educational consultant to government and private industry arrived by ambulance, went on permanent disability. He idled away a year waiting to die, and, by late 1975, got restless.

When he now tells the story of his second lease on life, he mentions one out-of-character detail, a “life-after-death” experience during his heart attack.

Referring to his well-earned reputation for orneriness and his lack of a reputation for any “other-mindedness,” he proceeds to say--with some embarrassment--that he went to Hades, crossed the River Styx and was met by his hero, Odysseus.

“He told me, ‘Go back. It’s not your turn.’ ”

Apparently not. His work until then seems now little more than a preparation for what he would achieve in his second life, tinkering with his old hobby at the urging of his wife.

In a country where the number of functionally illiterate adults is conservatively estimated to be at least 23 million and where as many as 60 million people cannot read well enough to function in society, Martin’s hobby was literacy.

He did well with it, accompanied for the first time in his experiments by his wife, who worked closely with him until her death last year.

In 1982, he teamed up with IBM; in 1984, after two years of tests on 10,000 children, Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., under contract to IBM, reported that Martin’s “Writing to Read” program worked. Its pupils outperformed comparison groups in many measures used, and equaled performance in other measures.

Based on Martin’s premise, “What kids can say, they can write; what they can write, they can read,” his multimedia, multisensory program uses personal computers that “talk” with digitized voice, typewriters, audio-visual materials, and a “cafeteria of sensory materials” such as slates and chalk, modeling clay, books, sand, rubber stamps, papers and pencils.

It offers something for every child’s individual taste, recognizing what Martin calls each child’s “sensory mix” with which he or she most readily learns. With teachers and aides supervising and offering individual attention, children proceed at their own pace to learn the 42 phonemes or sounds of English, to encode them, or make words with them out of their own thoughts, to decode the written words of others.

IBM began marketing the program. At last count, James Dezell, vice president and general manager of IES, IBM Educational Systems, estimated about 700,000 children began kindergarten and first grade this year with it. The program also has been adopted by Canada, Bermuda, several Asian countries and the black homelands of South Africa.

“That’s pretty good penetration in three years,” Dezell said at IES headquarters in Atlanta. But noting that the students in the program represent only about 20% of those eligible, he added, “I’m dissatisfied. That means there are 2.8 million children who are not (starting school with the program). I classify them as disadvantaged.”

Educators who have worked with the program sound almost as convinced, throwing in qualifiers for perspective. LaVoneia Steele, superintendent for the Lynwood Unified School District, heard about the program four years ago at an IBM workshop in Irvine where an Oakland school principal delivered a glowing report.

She had doubts until she saw for herself how it worked in Oakland. The Lynwood schools have had the Writing to Read program for three years, and while Steele, an educator for 32 years, stops short of saying it is the future of American education, she notes: “I have never seen anything like it. It’s one of the best teaching tools I’ve seen in my entire teaching career.”

Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School is one of 32 Los Angeles Unifed schools (and about twice that number of diocesan schools) that started the program last year, with a grant from the Riordan Foundation. (Through his foundation, Richard Riordan--a Los Angeles lawyer, businessman and philanthropist--is putting about $2 million a year into Writing to Read programs in public and parochial schools nationwide, but especially in Southern California, said Alice McHugh, Riordan Foundation president. He has offered to set up reading labs throughout the Los Angeles Unifed School District.)

At Martin Luther King, there were reservations about the program, said principal Judy Burton, “but once teachers and parents see the results the children have achieved . . . you don’t have to say anything more about the program. Everyone wants their child in it.

“It’s not magical or so far out. It’s just good common sense.”

Trips to Hades aside, everything about John Henry Martin bespeaks common sense and a down-to-earth approach to problems at hand. It’s in his purposeful step, compact build, well-groomed-executive style, self-deprecating humor and irreverent, gadfly approach to his profession.

At his busy, efficiently planned suite of offices just north of West Palm Beach, he has reserved the dinkiest, windowless one for himself, “avoiding the Napoleonic complex,” he explains. He answers the phone “Hi”; he decides with little coaxing to scrap a restaurant meal, in favor of ordering out sandwiches from his favorite deli.

This seems not so much a case of folksy informality or familiarity. At 73, he is a busy man with much to do and an air about him of “let’s cut the small stuff.” Miles to go; more programs to develop; work to do.

After spending more than four hours recounting the history of his involvement with literacy, he concluded with a story about his Irish grandmother. She rejected what she called the British-influenced attitude that moderation is a virtue and told him if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing to excess.

“I’ve always tried to be obedient,” he said, reddening a little and chuckling.

As he speaks, his eyes and lips often contradict each other. Despite glasses, his fiery blue eyes are startling against his ruddy complexion and white hair. They reveal everything--impatience, humor, disdain, mischief--and often mist with emotion. His stiff upper lip reveals nothing. No read-my-lips macho here. These lips are illegible, making him look like a hard bargainer.

Dezell fondly calls him “the orneriest man I ever knew. . . . We’re head to head every day when I’m working with him.”

If so, Martin manages to keep the orneriness under wraps. What is more apt to slip occasionally, instead, is a kind of Peck’s bad boy at war with the authorities and conventions. “I like the smell of smoke,” he said, commenting on the inner-city riots of the late ‘60s.

He was superintendent in his native New Jersey, in Freeport and Mt. Vernon, N.Y., in the years of desegregation battles. He made enough people angry that his house once was under 24-hour surveillance and the oldest of his three daughters could not leave her classroom unescorted.

No, he said, bodyguards and surveillance were not common for superintendents. “Only for those who live dangerously,” he said, thumbing his nose and adding, “I’ve always had this attitude.”

He will supply, on request, the long version of liking the smell of smoke: “A great opportunity to fulfill yourself lies by accepting the challenge to become deeply involved in the trouble of this world. To run from trouble is to run from life’s purpose. . . .”

He started to tell the story of how he got involved in literacy, trying to proceed chronologically. It is ground he has gone over many times: how he came out of the Navy after World War II, then became a high school principal in Oyster Bay on Long Island. There, four boys wound up in his office for discipline one day, forcing him to confront what was to him a new phenomenon--the boys could not read.

His own background was in history and English. He knew nothing about teaching children to read, but his doctorate from Teachers College at Columbia at least had taught him how to use a library. He hit the reserve shelf and read the research.

“I ate those books, looking for procedures,” he recalled. “After four to five months of futility, my boys were beyond the edge of tears with our joint frustration and my inability to bring them the things that would unlock the printed page.”

One obscure work made the most sense to him--research by Grace Ferneld of USC who had taught bright but illiterate collegians to read by finger-tracing words drawn with wax crayons. Her central thesis was that children learn by tactile experience. His boys made some progress with this method.

“And then I made a mistake all too common throughout the history of American education. I assumed in joyous ignorance that I had the answer to how children read.”

There is a lesson to be drawn in everything, and Martin is the man to draw and deliver it. He is not too successful at presenting the chronology of his work or his life. He is vague or cursory on personal details. He is somewhat disjointed in discussing professional matters. He does not appear to hide anything so much as to constantly sidetrack himself with a far more interesting distillation of his experience.

Explorer and Archeologist

He is an adventurer, both an explorer and archeologist, bringing back reports from the past and future frontiers of learning. Those are tales he wants to tell. He is thrilled, for example, to discuss the alphabet’s invention. That history is central to his educational theories.

“What are marks on a piece of paper?” he asked. “They are fairly recent inventions in the intellectual history of the human race. The Old Testament existed for a least a millennium before it could be written down.”

Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideographs, the arrival of the flattened clay tablet and sharpened writing implements in Sumeria, the wedge-shaped marks replacing pictures. . . . “Lo and behold, it turned out I would not need more than 20 to 40 of those marks--some would say as many as 65--for almost any language in the world. . . .

“We in our schools seem to be unaware of that gigantic act of genius. But when I speak to computer experts and say in the English language 26 symbols can be recombined to make over a half-million words, they say, ‘That’s one heck of a code.’ ”

It is the code Martin wants to help children crack. He wants to let them in on the secret, to tell them why the alphabet was invented and teach them first how to encode their thoughts and speech into writing; then, how to decode the thoughts and speech others have written for them to read.

Long before the arrival of the personal computer, on which the Writing to Read program is now delivered, Martin had determined (as have others he cites, including Romalda Spalding, author of “The Writing Road to Reading,” and Harvard linguist I. A. Richards) that this was the proper order to teach. This is the reverse of the more common classroom practice.

Granting the vast irregularities of English spelling, Martin’s teaching of the 42 phonemes or sounds of the language does not teach spelling, at first. Children figure it out any way they can, encoding their speech by their own logic. They catch up with the formal spelling, as they see conventionally spelled words in books, receive classroom lessons and work with the computers.

Acknowledging a 50-year-old war in educational theory, he said his theories do not deny what is valuable in phonics or word-sentences approaches to reading. He then offered an aside about the zealotry that abounds in education, with true believers making it their life’s work to expose and snuff out heresy.

Martin, in his life, pursued his research while continuing up the administrative hierarchy in education. He said he was jolted by his wife’s observation that the higher he progressed the less he seemed to be involved with children. He rearranged his schedule and priorities to keep reading a major concern--two hours for administrative duties, the rest of the time in “classrooms, clinics, courts, jails, foster homes, studying the lives of children. Nothing else in our schools produces as much failure, and therefore (illiteracy) becomes an important basis for much of the pathology that afflicts our youth. It’s a root cause for the dropout, for the juvenile delinquent, for adult crime.”

Theories and Research

Over the years, he kept amalgamating his theories and research, finding value in such diverse sources as Montessori, Piaget, B. F. Skinner, Thomas Dewey, Jerome Bruner.

He picked up an appreciation of technology in the ‘50s from a mentor, Benjamin Wood, who had published research on motion pictures in the classroom and typewriters. Martin, thanks to Wood, found himself in a seventh-grade classroom where he and his secretary taught touch typing to the class. Next they added a metronome, and soon, military music, until “I watched 32 children in Manhasset, Long Island, type with military precision to Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes.’ ”

Then there was the impossibly expensive “talking typewriter” that he worked on with Yale’s Omar Khayam Moore.

Finally, after his heart attack, it was time to sort out all he had been hoarding and put it together in a way to teach children to write and read. His wife got him moving, he said, making one of many loving and admiring references to his companion of 50 years.

In 1976, the school superintendent in Martin County, Fla., lent him an empty classroom and gave him access to students. Using their retirement money, Martin, his wife, aides and volunteers built a lab stocked with hand-held phonographs, tape recorders, audio-visual materials, eight typewriters IBM had granted him, and more ordinary classroom and playground materials.

It was, he knew, effective for learning. But the impossible adult-child ratio made it too labor-intensive and costly to be feasible, a deficiency that could be overcome, Martin recognized immediately, with the arrival of the personal computer in the late ‘70s.

He said he bought a computer and designed the first program sitting at his dining room table, until he decided that at his age, he had better buy the computer designing talents of others.

By the time he was ready to go public with his lab and the results children were achieving there, he had arrived at a precursor of the unvarying “Writing to Read” lab or learning center.

All children start with the computer, working in pairs, interacting with it and the instructions it voices for 15 minutes. They then spend the rest of the hour on typewriters, working in their journals and selecting materials from the cafeteria. He calls it a “risk-free” atmosphere where children do not fail but build self-confidence through constant reinforcement of their successes.

He wrote a report on his findings in 1980, and, at the end of the year, went to Princeton and gave a demonstration at ETS, using illiterate Trenton first-graders. About 40 hardware executives, publishers and educators watched the experiment go off as planned--the children were successfully typing words.

Within months, he started receiving a steady stream of visitors, some “offering large cashier checks” but none willing to underwrite his demand for exhaustive, two-year, ETS-supervised studies of 10,000 children of all types under all conditions.

“I wanted the data to be incontrovertible. I didn’t know if it would work, not under the careful control of the Martins, but under the ordinary vicissitudes of teachers all over with one- or two-day training courses,” Martin said.

IBM announced its microcomputer in 1981; the next year an entourage of executives came to Florida to have a look, Martin said. They wanted it and agreed to the ETS testing.

Dezell said the company wanted the tests as much as Martin did, because, “for IBM to get into the business of teaching kindergarten children to read and write, we wanted to be damn sure that what we were saying, that (children would) read better, write better” was true and under all circumstances--”poor children as well as middle class, black children and white children, male and female.”

A typical installation costs about $10,000, plus perhaps another $5,000 or more for additional equipment and materials. Dezell said IBM educational programs operate at a profit but not one comparable to its commercial division. He estimated Writing to Read amounts to about $30 per child.

(It is not the only program of its kind. Apple Computer, for example, has marketed its Early Language Series for kindergartners through third-graders for about a year, said Elaine Knechtel, an Apple spokeswoman. The Apple program is in about 700 classrooms and labs and differs from Writing to Read, in that it “does not specify how to implement it. We feel the teacher is the most important element, and that each teacher has their own style. This is not a turn-key solution where the program tells you exactly how to proceed.”)

Martin and IBM say they consider the teacher no less important, despite the specific instructions to be followed. They contend their program frees the teacher from repetitious chores.

Version for Adults

An adult version, Principle of the Alphabet Literacy System (PALS)--also developed for IBM by Martin and his company, JHM--went on the market in 1986. There are now about 350 PALS labs in high schools, prisons, community centers and offices nationwide, including one at the Los Angeles Times. The Spanish-language version of Writing to Read comes out this fall.

It is too early to test the program’s long-term effects, too early to judge whether the initial success and superiority of students in the program will continue throughout elementary school.

Martin acknowledges that but hastens to make an analogy with nutrition. To feed a starving child for a year, measure his progress, then deprive him of food for years and measure him again, he said, is no fair measure of the value of that first year. That is why his company is developing for IBM more programs to be used throughout grade school.

In Lynwood, Steele expressed concern lest “all those gains not stay with our kids. I really want IBM and John Henry Martin to come up with a program for second grade and beyond. I wish they’d work a little faster.”

Martin seems ready for the challenge. Four hours is way too long to talk. He had been half rising out of his chair for the better part of an hour, as if that would somehow hasten things to a conclusion.

But one last question for this obsessed man. How did he get into teaching in the first place?

“Oh, I was a school dropout,” he said, affecting an offhand and casual manner, “a child from the city slums, whose behavioral oddities were offensive. Off and on I was a dropout. At 13, I entered high school, and I was two months short of 20 when I graduated. I decided I’d be a teacher because there were a lot of kids like me.”

His manner was not entirely convincing. Finally he allowed himself a pleased smile. He’s proud of that past. “It’s a nice story isn’t it? Let’s just say, I never forgot where I came from.”