Robert Sprenkle is professor of oboe at the Eastman School of Music and principal oboist of the Rochester Philharmonic.
The problem of coordination of fingers and tongue is a fascinating one since the clarity of good clean technique largely depends upon it. As a teacher I am somewhat appalled by the misconceptions which seem to prevail concerning it. Perhaps the worst of these is the mistaken idea of "preparing" the next note by fingering it (the next note) at the earliest possible moment. I feel this is distinctly detrimental because it breaks down the possibility of a unified rhythmical response in both the fingers and tongue. Of course if a passage has short afterbeats it would be helpful in maintaining the feeling for the beat to move the fingers on the beat and tongue on the afterbeat, but this would be an exception rather than the rule.
True preparation consists of being ready to play a note but not in being already committed to it. A vivid sense of rhythm will include both the tongue and fingers as a unified feeling. Why, with no discernable advantage, should we dilute or dissipate this precious unity of rhythmical feeling for something we don't need and can't use (that is: being early with the fingers) just because there is time? The fact is that any passage which you can finger in time legato (all notes slurred) you can also finger exactly in the same time when it is articulated. In other words, it is both possible and desirable to train oneself to respond always with the same rhythmical feel to a passage regardless of how the slurs or tonguing marks are superimposed upon the notes.
To me the tragedy of this problem doesn't lie in its difficulty but rather
that the fact of its existence is so seldom comprehended. In many years of
teaching I have encountered only one student who correctly coordinated his
fingers and tongue to the same rhythmical impulses without having been taught to
do it.
This then poses a problem - why is this error (in my judgment) so
universally acquired? I believe it is an inevitable consequence of the way we
start out on our instruments. First we are told a fingering; then we put the
instrument to our mouths and play it, etc. This groping procedure continues
unnoticed and unchecked until it is perfectly "natural".
I'm not a gambling man, but I'll wager that you can take almost any player
who has not consciously worked out this problem and if you ask him to play three
simple notes such as 
he will move his fingers ahead of
time for the notes in the staccato passage. If you ask him "why?", he
either hasn't noticed it himself or will report that he is "getting ready"
for the next note. This is about as valid an excuse as trying to have your
weight equally divided on both feet when you are dancing so you'll always be "ready"
for the next step.
Like many other problems, its very elementary character causes it ordinarily to go unnoticed. Its opposite error, that of being late with the fingers is immediately apparent, so it never develops into a lasting problem.
I strongly advocate that we stop emphasizing individual tones and concentrate on intervals. All music depends for its rhythm, line, inflection, etc. largely on its progressing from one note to another. So by concentrating on a minimum of at least two note progressions from the very beginning, we can develop an awareness of the true interval nature of music instead of having a useless sense of "note by note" playing. Always fingering the written rhythm is certainly consistent with this point of view.