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Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are:

- if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds

- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts

I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here.

For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].

[0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

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We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I remember when we first brought her to kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was "decoding" the text, rather than reading it.

OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.

Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!

Most of the time I defend teachers, but I confess to feeling pretty weird about it because with some (super notable) exceptions I had pretty bad experiences with them. I have a lot of opinions about schools/teachers/education whatever but they're pretty polemic and would derail.

But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)

We're going through it now, the same book 100 lessons. I have two kids, one is almost 6 and one is 3.5. We got the book because the 6 year old was struggling considerably with reading. The book is a real effort to go through and requires a lot of patience with the 6 year old. Thankfully we are 80% of the way through it. The incredible thing is the 3.5 year old sees the older one do it and she wants to do it and she's actually on track to read much earlier than the 6 year old. It's really something to watch. I'm glad we found this book (actually on another HN thread..)

My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we need to do something different". Educational methodology is almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what works, tested on children, versus proving of academic scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and should be continued until something better can be identified. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.

Always a bit of a struggle as an engineer who is always searching for the solution and has a trained approach to debugging. Some just don't want to try something new for fear it won't work or that it isn't the preferred approach. This is most people I feel.

Thanks for sharing. I'm going to try this book. My 5 yr old likes to be read to, but sternly refuses to attempt to read words. Also montessori. He likes some mobile games which have menus so I'm going to explain why we are doing it but also position this book as a way so he can read menus in games so he knows how to play. And then I'll reinforce that when he asks me to read any menus/storylines in the games by going through the phonetic process and challenging him.

> Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.

I had a similar situation where I had a thesis on my child's behavioral health concern. Saw a neurologist and she confirmed exactly what I said. Wife was STILL not convinced and even criticized the neurologist's evaluation. But our kid improved after I disclosed the neurologist's evaluation to my sis in law and told them we need them to move out. They had been staying with her family in my house for a year and my wife had been watching their kid. Problem solved. Case closed. My wife wanted to help her sis so much that she was refusing to see the damage the situation was causing.

I also had to take matters in my own hand with getting kids to be sleep trained. Wife refused to do cry it out and we just kept struggling and getting no sleep over and over and kids weren't getting quality sleep. I'll get onboard a plan but if it doesn't work, I'm not going to continue to stay on that path.

I told her I'd handle it and then boom, got them trained in a few days. Not fun at ALL, but all these industries and philosophies take over and push it out there as the new one true way when we have hundreds or sometimes thousands of years of success in various things that work lol.

This is not unique of course. We see this in engineering all the time. Until the tried and true disciplines prevail. And the ones that care about what works best for the context, rather than what is popular at the time are the ones with less stress/anxiety.

I've seen family members say - oh cry it out is stressful for the child and creates distrust. Meanwhile, both partners get no sleep, project their stress and frustration and even end up yelling at their child because of it! Their spousal relationship suffers big time too. Makes no sense to me. Also the same ones who try to optimize everything for their child according to modern parenting philosophies are the ones who have completely unhealthy marriages in my experience. In my opinion, the best thing you can do for your kids is to just show them how to treat and love your spouse and do things that take care of yourself and your spouse so you can be great parents. If you try to do everything according to what is popular at the time, you're going to have a bad time. You need the oxygen mask so you can help your dependents.

Or you have parents who refuse to do cry it out and say - oh I couldn't get baby down last night, had to hold them on my chest and sleep in a chair. Utter madness. Don't do that. They will now be used to your warm embrace and heartbeat and they will never be able to sleep normally in their bed. Well... until you do some form of cry it out lol.

Most things really aren't that hard or frustrating unless you create and foster an environment that makes them so.

end rant

We use the same book with our kids, and had a similar experience with educators. When she moved a to new school in first grade, they were extremely skeptical that she has able to read chapter books.

But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".

I suspect that many teachers also (1) don't want to feel like parents can just casually do their job pretty well, like their years of education and certification aren't necessary, and / or (2) deal with an above-average number of parents who think their kids are above-average, so develop some skepticism over time. We just sent our kids to school knowing how to read without telling anyone and let their teachers tell us how well they're doing.

Teaching is pretty hard. It's a lot easier if you have only 1 kid, you control their home life also, they have a similar culture and background as you do, you can give them your (relatively) undivided attention all day, and you don't need to get them to pass a standardized test. Elementary school teachers have > 30 kids, new batch every year, from all walks of life, they can't control their home life, and they have to teach to a test.

Oh, I agree. My wife taught in public high schools for a couple years in an economically struggling city. It was so hard (and paid so poorly, especially per hour of labor) that she quit after those two years and is still traumatized by it a decade later.

Oof I'm sorry. But yeah, an all-too-common story. Maybe it's corny but, thanks to your wife for her service.

Funny you say that because I'm an Army officer, so people regularly thank me for my service, but my wife arguably worked harder, had more responsibility, and was contributing more to society while she was in those schools. And she got paid less than a 19 year-old private in the Army. In fact, the principal of the whole school was paid less than I had been paid as a lieutenant in my early 20s.

Anyway, what's hard about teaching is not pedagogy or the subject material itself, but rather the administrative burdens and management of large and diverse classrooms, as you said, unfortunately.

I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening quote of an older article in Time (https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers...):

> The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

That definitely comes through in the piece the parent linked, it's very much a narrative of fighting against misinformed outsiders pushing phonics for various research-based reasons, instead of just trusting teachers.

There are plenty of academics who oppose or have reservations about the capital-letters Science of Reading https://radicalscholarship.com/2022/05/23/nyt-blasts-calkins... . Of course they, too, could be ideologically motivated or stubbornly attached to their existing beliefs, for all I know, but it's clearly not a clean split between academics and teachers.

I would be surprised if it were (a clean split between academics and teachers). However, it seems like your link at least isn't at odds with the idea that there may be a clean split between those who seek to optimise for the declared learning outcome (reading proficiency, in this case) and those who optimise for the advancement of some political goal to which the learning outcome is at best conditionally conducive, and almost certainly secondary. (Just look at the tag collection in the sidebar.)

Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my three kids and I can tell you it was a joke.

It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.

I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.

Yeah I mean, other commenters have noted that it takes a while for curricula to change, but yeah I bet that's what was going on and that sounds like bad instruction.

I'd dispute your characterization of the NEPC summary as well-reasoned. It's definitely a different perspective, but it's clear in a preference for valuing the experience and beliefs of "literacy scholars" over any sort of evidence that could contradict them. It does seems like a good view of the education institution's side of this argument.

It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-experimental research" in favor of "decades of classroom-based and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with "although literacy researchers caution there is still much to learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.

Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what should actually be taught, except that no particular method should be mandated or banned, and that education should be "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).

I mean, I guess a good of framing this is yeah, it is "the education institution's side of this argument". I see it as informed by decades of shifting research on how to teach reading and attentive to the tension between "we need regulations to guard against bad teachers" and "we need to give teachers the freedom to apply their expertise". Most of the rest of your argument is just not realizing that those are the actual names of things (e.g. there's actually a thing called "the simple view of literacy").

And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it. I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.

The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts". Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we need to appreciate the nuance here.

Sorry, I should have been clearer, totally agree about the podcast being a poorer source on the reality and history, and just not trustworthy on the big picture. The article you shared is a fantastic resource, but I would think better of it if it had laid out the sort of strong, pragmatic argument you made here about teachers' autonomy. The article really doesn't want to question the status quo, which would be fine for a historical overview, but feels incongruous with the constant needling of anyone who happens to be pushing phonics (whether because of concerns about dyslexia or neuroscience).

I also didn't mean to suggest those terms were invented by that article, just that they reflect the perspective of the people who use them. I'm assuming initial proponents of the "simple view of literacy" didn't describe it that way, just as we might call "whole language" something different if it ends up being discredited (cf. the focus on cueing in TFA).

Yeah I think we're kidding ourselves if we think there's not some level of aesthetics involved here. I would imagine most teachers (not all but most) would like it if teaching were a holistic, organic journey of learning and discovery--I'm not disparaging here, that sounds nice to me too--to the point they'll really try to make those approaches work over more proven/grounded ones that are more assembly line and impersonal. And I buy that a fair amount of animosity against NCLB played a role too.

> I would think better of it if it had laid out the sort of strong, pragmatic argument you made here about teachers' autonomy

I wouldn't mind something more concrete either. There's educational research out there, but not a ton, and what I've read is pretty non-committal and not very prescriptive. I don't know if that's in deference to "trust teachers" or what have you. I do know that from time to time, teachers who are trying very hard to teach their kids using old, busted techniques they learned in school and are--rightfully so--super bitter when they discover "new" techniques that are decades old and proven more effective, so it's not like there's not an audience for this stuff.

Mostly I think this argument is just two sides that don't trust each other at all, and they're lobbing whatever they can over the wall to try and win the argument (you don't care about dyslexia, you're dooming children to illiteracy to stick it to Bush, blah blah blah). I think that's a big problem. Education in the US is super messed up despite costing a ton, everyone knows it, and it's probably impossible to fix because of the political and bureaucratic structures involved. But it definitely doesn't help when our educators are rejecting government educational research because of (earned) political/cultural mistrust.

Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.

You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.

They did test it: see Project Follow Through. They didn't like the results, so they ignored them.

As the sibling comment mentions, it was tested. It got tied up in some weird politics and the George W. Bush administration was championing evidence based reading programs so teaching programs at places like Colombia took the opposite stance. Obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

> Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step

Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.

> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all

This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.

> If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.

Let's be a little more civil than this.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.

Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.

It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading," which is not the point of teaching the decoding step to begin with. The Guardian article grossly misrepresents the actual study, which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read

> The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.

There's a genetic component there too; my children are adopted and had wildly differing outcomes from the same curricula (and often same teachers). My personal opinion from observation (N=4, plus a few kids of friends) is that some kids will teach themselves phonics even in a whole-language program. Other kids don't. And the kids who don't struggle to read until someone teaches it to them.

>> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

> The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.

Again "fails totally" is wrong, but also low SES students are a difficult group for complicated reasons, none of which teachers control.

> Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.

Totally agree, my beef is that most of the legislation and parental demands around phonics and SOR force teachers to use phonics in situations where they know it won't work, or actively isn't working.

> It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading,"

I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.

The quote from the DoE is:

"Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2."

That's good! But it's entirely unresponsive to the argument the report makes, which is that while phonics works for getting students to sound stuff out, their reading scores in subsequent years drop dramatically. It's Table 1 in their report.

> which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read

I don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong. This is a sign of a good paper, not a bad one.

I think maybe we're talking past each other a bit here. First I agree that phonics alone is insufficient and in and of itself does not lead to reading comprehension. I think the evidence is clear there. It also seems clear from the report that England is wielding it like a hammer.

> I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.

Yeah, my issue was that the Guardian piece was cherry picking from the report to make it seem like phonics was useless and not based in evidence. Whereas the report makes it clear that phonics is in fact excellent as a first step, but must be followed by broader instruction in language/culture/literature/etc.

> don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong.

I was paraphrasing pretty directly from the conclusion section. My point being that the Guardian was making stronger claims than the research supports, or rather the existing research wasn't great and the report acknowledges that but the Guardian obscures it.

I think overall England has probably gone in the wrong direction and treats phonics like the proverbial hammer. In particular there seems to also be a weird trend there in abandoning instruction in the cultural competency required to comprehend most extant English language writing. My concern is that here in the US, teaching has to its detriment abandoned phonics in favor of a whole language model which has proven terrible at teaching kids to decode language.

Yeah I think this is mostly fair. I had to read it multiple times to form a reasonable opinion because it's written in this disjointed style.

I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.

Sorry, I was writing it on my phone so the prose is lacking and for what it’s worth I was subjected to the whole language approach.

Fortunately I think the US is so disjointed that we might see some good experimentation with different complementary approaches.

Oh shit no, I meant the article haha. It just slaps the two sides together with little contextualizing. Your post was :ok_hand:

AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education. Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years and years ago that it was harmful.

This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.

Yeah. I mean I agree that Heinemann is milking books they've already put resources into publishing and they should quit. And I'm sure there's a bunch of teachers who aren't good at teaching or being humans and not teaching very well. But the core conceit of Sold a Story is there's currently a huge problem with reading pedagogy everywhere, and that's at least currently false, and maybe was never true.

> if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds

Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.

I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? I clearly remember myself learning to read, sounding out words and then being like 'oh that word is X'. And I see the same wheels turning with my daughter.

> Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud.

IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children progress to reading independently, but even there its not the only thing going on (context is important).

> How else can you learn to read if not sounding out?

Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.

The podcast goes into how this is exactly wrong. For phonetic languages, kids best learn to read via phonics.

> kids best learn to read via phonics.

parent comment didn't say "learn best", it said "learn first".

Even in phonics, kids learn common words like "the" by sight. But that doesn't scale. People don't learn to recognize every word as an individual token.

> But that doesn't scale.

You're saying that they move on from it. That doesn't contradict the "learn first" part, does it?

This is one of those topics that people debate endlessly because what works "for most" does not work "for all".

I learned full word reading, it works great for me. I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. Pretty sure I didn't internalize "e at the end makes vowels long" until nearly high school.

I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.

I've met plenty of other people who are the same, but I will also acknowledge that this doesn't work for everyone.

But you know what? I bet a lot of chemists "read" chemical names the same way.

Full word reading works fine for a subset of kids, but it leaves a sizeable amount behind. Phonics is fundamental for teaching those kids how to read.

This is how the podcast explains what reading research has found about how people learn to read:

- First learn to associate letters with sounds

- By sounding out words, reinforce those associations

- And associate combinations of letters with known words from their spoken language

Our brains aren't wired for written language like they are for spoken language. We have to actively learn. And by associating letters with sounds, our brains are able to loop in the existing language areas of the brain into written language.

> I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words

Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.

From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually reads 'the whole word' (I don't think any adult spends any amount of time examining the minutiae of letter ordering in everyday life). However, the opposite does not work. As you pointed out, despite your high reading level, you weren't able to figure out basic phonetic rules until high school. This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example. Even ones not based on latin alphabet. The practice of blending sounds together is a fundamental part of reading.

A child who is using phonics is able to (1) understand, (2) sound out, (3) and speak the written word (which means they will be able to do things like read poetry). A child who is using the whole word approach may be able to understand, but if they cannot enunciate properly the words on the page, then they cannot do either 2 or 3, which means the reading is not complete. I don't see how we can consider this an acceptable replacement.

> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.

This is not exceptional for an adult.

>> I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level.

> The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.

I don't really think that's what they're saying here. They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. That's different than "not fully able to read".

>> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.

> This is not exceptional for an adult.

Sadly, I think that it is. I looked up US literacy rates for this thread to validate my memory that they were something like 98%. I learned that not only are they 92% at "level 1", but only "[f]our in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences" [0]. I know this isn't exactly directly responsive to reading speed or whatever, but this is just to say I had a much rosier picture of US literacy in my head and maybe you do too.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

> They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue.

I read a lot of fantasy literature as a kid, and I'll argue that not needing to bother with pronunciation is a huge boon when trying to go through a particular style of fantasy novel!

This is not the gotcha you think it is. Once a child masters reading to themselves silently, phonics or not, the ability to read fantasy novels is immediate. I'm curious how you see a teacher even evaluating a whole word based approach. If the child is unable to enunciate the word they're reading, all you can say is that the child claims to read the word and understand it.

> This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example.

But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.

> This is not exceptional for an adult.

Really? I've met plenty of functioning adults who say they sound out words in their head when reading. Go to any one of the many online threads about reading methods and you'll come across plenty of people describing that they have a voice in their head pronouncing each word that they read.

> But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.

Realistically, if I read technical papers and see a word I don't need to pronounce, I just refer to it in my mind as whatever it's written as. I learned phonics as a kid, yet have no trouble simply ignoring the pronunciation. Yet... since I do know phonics, I could pronounce the word, which is a strict superset of abilities compared to the whole word method. Which is my point... Phonics is strictly superior. There is nothing a whole word approach can do that a phonics student cannot, but there are things a phonics user can do a whole worder cannot.

It's strictly superior from a "can you pronounce words" standpoint, but not necessarily in terms of a "long-term reader" standpoint. As another "whole words" person who pronounced the 'b' in 'subtle' until he was in like 5th/6th grade, I can tell you I was reading and comprehending things that my peers in the "gifted" program were not and could not, and that continued... probably to the present day but definitely through my school age years.

And there's evidence that the focus on phonics essentially kills a love of reading and has a deleterious effect on long-term reading skills [0].

[0]: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...

> you'll come across plenty of people describing that they have a voice in their head pronouncing each word that they read.

That's not the same thing as sounding out words. It's just the internal monologue.

Some people may choose to sound out a word they've never encountered before to have an idea of what it sounds like, but that's optional.

Young kids don't start with logographic languages or whole world recognition. Just look at languages that use logographic scripts: Japanese has two phonetic "alphabets" (kana), and kids learn those first. Content for kids is written in kana. Kids start learning basic Kanji later on, but the phonetic script comes first.

The logographic languages (Chinese really) all start with phonetic systems before the children then start memorizing the ideograms. There are dozens of chinese phonetic systems in use for teaching. The HTML standard has a whole element reserved just for asian pronunciation systems.

> . . . and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version.

Not until I read this sentence! Feels a bit like "breathing manually".

For a long time I've held the unpopular opinion that most elementary teachers are utterly incompetent, and that as an academic field, Education is becoming more and more bullshit. I will be down-voted to hell because of this, and yet, the reality always seems to agree with my world-view.

I like my kids' elementary school teachers, they seem fine, and maybe it's mostly about teaching kids to behave in another social setting at that age - but I do have it in the back of my mind that zero of the best and brightest from my graduating high school class (judged by who was in the honors / AP classes) went into teaching elementary school.

I don't mean to come off as a grumpy Xennial, but the more I interact with people in professional roles (attorneys, doctors, nurses, teachers, managers) the more I'm convince the majority of people are just incompetent. Sometimes I try and reframe this into "you have unreasonably high expectations maybe because of some personality/upbringing weirdness", but, ongoing battle haha.

Sold a Story isn't alone; John McWhorter (a Columbia professor of linguistics) has a very similar take on phonics and has written about it in The Atlantic and the NYT.

As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...

Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.

Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.

Sapere aude

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