Don Parker; Creator of Learn-to-Read System

Don Parker, 88, who invented a learn-to-read system that stressed individual achievement and comprehension. Parker originally created his SRA Reading Laboratories system, which de-emphasizes grades and encourages students to learn at their own pace, in 1950 when he was a reading teacher in rural Bradford County, Fla. He noticed that the slower learners in his class fell further behind their classmates when he taught them all from the same textbook. So he began encouraging students to individually master beginning, intermediate and advanced lessons before graduating from one color-coded set of workbooks to another. The color coding, he thought, would avoid embarrassing students at the beginning level. Parker took his idea to Science Research Laboratories, which marketed the curriculum to schools and eventually extended the method to math and science and the teaching of other languages. More than 127 million children in 64 countries have used the system, which peaked in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Decades later, Parker endorsed a controversial advertising campaign by Orange, Calif.-based Gateway Educational Products dubbed “Hooked on Phonics.” Gateway added Parker’s SRA Reading Laboratories, then published by a division of Macmillan-McGraw Hill, to its product line in 1992. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Parker worked for Sears, Roebuck in Florida for 13 years before starting his college education. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he quickly earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at the University of Florida and went on to a doctorate in education at Columbia University. He wrote two books on education, “Schooling for Individual Excellence” and “Schooling for What?” and recently completed a book of poetry. On June 21 in Carmel, Calif.