New York Is Forcing Schools to Change How They Teach Children to Read
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...
If you have kids or like to teach them how to read, get this book. You won’t regret it.
A whole bunch of school districts are juuuuuust now figuring out it was a dumb idea and replacing it.
https://www.fountasandpinnell.com/textlevelgradient/
From all the gobbledygook on that page you'd be forgiven for mistaking this for an evidence-based technique to teach reading.
It isn't.
But Heinemann continues to defend it as if it is.
https://fee.org/articles/learning-styles-don-t-actually-exis...
The reasons for why the star changes are three part .
1. Lucy Calkins feel free to google her . (clarifying she is pedaling a bullshit program that for many years promoted anti-phonics. People bought into it as it was new and from Columbia university. So it must be good.)
2. Lucy Calkins Runs Columbia’s Teachers College to some extent. Combined with the bias that Columbia’s program must be better then anything else ever , because it’s “Columbia” and “ if you were this smart you would have gone here !”
3. Local school districts in NY State operate as defacto municipal governments. Orton Gillingham / science based literacy programs are not promoted as they are A. Thought of as not fast to teach and there for will cause added expense . B. The teachers who get trained and certified are not incentivized to stay employed where they were trained. They use it as way to make more money . C. Outside firms who provide OG based services to school districts ( Wilson , Spire etc ) tend to a charge the schools a lot . Remember in NY it’s not the state taxes paying for it but local residents. D. Teacher bias that only “ ADHD , Poor , Minorities ,Non Native Speakers etc etc “ students can’t learn to read .
So while NYC is leading the way the rest of the state needs to follow suit. To be fair many other states are failing for similar reasons. Florida state has a free OG based reading program . IIRC it’s 2-Clause BSD licensed .
He wouldn't have to if he redirected money from the grossly-bloated police budget.
Idk this just seems sensible?
It does, however, teach kids to skim and guess and parrot, which, given a bit of coaching and upfront memorisation, is perfectly sufficient for passing a literacy test by rote despite, in fact, being unable to actually read.
So we end up with perverse incentives for the school and kids with unfortunate gaps in their life skills.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-...
ah, linked and discussed previously
Yes, as you become a better reading, the individual letters don't really matter anymore, as it starts being parsed without effort. It is NOT, however, viable for new readers. Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?
Someone called Marie Clay, who apparently has something of a celebrity status among teachers [1]. My assessment is that her heart is definitely in the right place, but her rational brain didn't cover itself with glory here.
As the old German saying goes: with the heart you can move mountains, but without the brain, it's easy to put them in the wrong place.
We are too practical for something as Enlightened as republican democracy.
Did they seriously do an appeal to authority when dealing with childrens education?
A friend of mine lives in a well off school district that adopted a non-phonics approach. Her child was falling behind in reading, so she had to teach her phonics at home and then she caught up. She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them.
That is to be expected. But as it turns out, the alternative is holding most people back, instead of helping the ones who struggle.
Imagine not getting pleasure from helping your child learn to read.
Bizarre reply given the full context of the comment.
It's really frustrating when your kid goes to a place all day where their most important job, by far, is to teach the kid to read, and they fail to do it, and you have to pick up the pieces.
A parent who has the time, energy, and skill to teach their child to read after work is blessed. Same goes for the kid - sometimes kids come home tired after school and don't want to be subjected to more learning activities!
I say this as a parent who has spent a lot of energy teaching both of my kids to read. The younger one has been much harder than the other. And I am just praying that what the school is doing is working, because it's a struggle to get her to spend even more time sitting and focused on page after page of black and white.
I've seen some of the school materials and they are phonics-based, so I think it's on the right track, but a lot depends on the teacher. A couple months ago I went to a parent teacher conference for her where the teacher talked as if she could be sure the little one would be fine, because she'd taught her brother who got concepts very quickly. And I had to explain that actually no, the little one isn't the same, she isn't anywhere near where her brother was at that age, and I laid out the specifics. I did manage to get the teacher to make a bit of a surprised face and take some notes about it.
People sometimes romanticize the experience of having children too much. In reality it can be a struggle with no assurance that things are going to be okay. And the guilt of leaving your child struggling with an essential life skill feels like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My little one is currently very young but if she continues to lag, who knows what I will do? I might have to destroy my work schedule to home school her. I love my job and it brings in truckloads of money for the family, but am I going to spend all my time on that and let my kid be failed by the people I pay to help her? Not a chance.
Perhaps not so much with reading. But with reading, parents don't really need to get into all the pedagogy; just reading to and with your kids will help a lot.
When viewed from that perspective our expectations should be high, while not dismissing our our part as parents and supporters of the school. I don't like the north American attitude toward teachers, but i disagree we should not absolve education system of basic education responsibilities.
Kids with dyslexia or other disabilities affecting reading will need special help (this includes the case of kids who simply need glasses so they can see the letters properly!), and for some severely intellectually disabled kids, they may never be able to read.
One of the promises of "Reading Recovery" (the non-phonics based approach) was that it would help the 10-20% who were still struggling despite phonics at school, and if it had done that it would have been worth celebrating. The problem is that switching to that approach in schools actually massively reduced the proportion of proficient readers.
The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane, and there were even a couple of small studies backing them up. And there are a minority of children (more often than not from well-to-do households) who do indeed pick up reading without any formal instruction in phonics; trying to replicate their experience for everyone else too seems like a virtuous project. The problem is that, according to a lot of substantial scientific research, this no-phonics approach simply does not work for a majority of children, and leaves them functionally illiterate - that or your parents, if they notice and afford it, hire a private reading tutor so the effect of no-phonics reading instruction in schools is actually to widen rather than narrow demographic gaps in reading.
I don’t think this assigns sufficient fault to the teachers. Being insufficiently skeptical of newfangled approaches to something fundamental like how to teach kids to read is blameworthy.
It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation.
(There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.)
Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.
I would actually make a more grounded analogy.
Let's pretend for a moment there exists some very large, well-studied and scientifically-valid body of research which says object-oriented programming is unequivocally bad. Programmers who follow object-oriented development practices are invariably less productive and create more security vulnerabilities. While these findings have been well-known to computer science researchers for decades, they have been unilaterally ignored by the technology industry, which continues to use languages such as Java and C++. Software engineers with experience in object-oriented development are paid higher salaries. Object-oriented programming continues to be taught at colleges and universities.
Eventually, the research about OO hits the mainstream press. Experts calculate OO is responsible for a zillion additional ransomware attacks per year, leading to numerous deaths at hospitals around the world.
Would you hold individual programmers responsible for using object-oriented programming?
You can replace OO with whatever holy war topic you prefer. Memory safety. Strict typing. React. Electron. POSIX. Serverless. Scrum. In at least one case, it's probably true.
There is a school in London that eschews modern teaching (no group work, etc. teacher is the authority). It gets great results but is a pariah as it subscribes to no modern education doctrine:
https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/
Education feels like a test laboratory where every (sorry) idiot can bullshit people into doing insane things solely based on emotions and a handful (of probably useless) studies.
The same problem exists to some extent with Marx himself, whether or not you agree with Marxism (I don't), I'm with Freddie deBoer that Marxism is a MATERIALIST not a SPIRITUAL movement; Marx does not want workers to "feel valued" while laboring for their capitalist overlords, he wants them to own the means of production! Some of the "Marxists" in today's university social justice circles would do well to notice that.
All that said the older a kid gets; by 8 or 9 say, the more I tend to suspect there's an issue with the kid or the parents. I think your can use the worst possible teaching technique and by that age most kids should be able to read.
The U.S. puts teachers on a pedestal though where they can either save or ruin children. I don't think it's an accurate view. It puts parents off stage.
According to the "sold a story" podcast (discussed recently on HN too), that's not true: until kids acquire the skill of decoding the letters on the page, they cannot read unfamiliar words. Teaching them to look at the first letter, then take a guess only makes it worse as you're actively teaching them not to decode, this is how you get the andecdote from a middle school teacher on the podcast about the kid who "read" that "in 1939, Germany INVITED Poland".
We'd do just a single column of words each night to start. (The book starts with 3 letter words and just that 25-ish words was enough to get them started and interested, then we'd switch to a Dr Seuss or similar kids book for us to read to them.) Later, we'd add more words or longer words as their mastery progressed, and would pick out a challenge word from later in the book. I can still recall my older kid's joy at figuring out the word "television" when they were still at the stage of reading 3 and 4 letter words.
https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Drill-Book-Phonetic-Approach/...
Most of the younger teachers fell for the fad with limited results. The 'old school' teacher consistently produced a class of kids who were reading proficiently by the end of the year, while other classes struggled with that success rate.
It's completely natural for a child (a person) to try to wing it as they go. But that's exactly the wrong thing when you are trying to learn to read. If you miss you learn nothing. If you hit, you still learn nothing. But when the mistake is caught and you are forced to undergo the technical process of reading, letter by letter, then you actually learn what this word is.
I have no idea what's so unique about English language that the strategy of winging it started to be encouraged. I haven't heard of any other language that was taught this way.
Maybe it's the bizarre spelling? But many languages have their fair share of that. You just teach children on regularly spelled words first.
Like many great lies, it has a kernel of truth. If you read the word "horse" and have the vocabulary, then related concepts like "saddle" or "pony" might be activated in your brain so you can "autocomplete" them if they come up later without sounding the word out.
Similarly, if you are reading a text about a horse called Bucephalus, then after decoding it the the first couple of times you will have it "cached" and can skim-read it the next few times it appears.
(If you didn't notice that the word "the" was repeated in the sentence above, then you're also not sounding out every word individually as you go along.)
The problem with the method is that it completely fails as a way for new readers to decode text their "autocomplete" is not already trained on. So you get students reading "horse" when the word is "pony" - and teachers arguing that it doesn't matter because they're getting the meaning out of the text which is what really matters, after all.
Except for that proper placement of adjectives thing. That's freaky predictive.
For pronunciation, though, Sam Johnson and Daniel Webster have a lot to answer for.
For this purpose the program is much better than the standard curriculum. Also notice that this was social studies and not English class. Reading and writing is a holistic experience that is required for any academic subject and should be reinforced in every subject.
My wife has informed me that phonetic instructions for first-time readers was already in the program when she was trained almost a decade ago, a revision based on clinical feedback.
My wife fought tooth-and-nail to get rid of the 1960s curriculum of hammering grammar into 9 year olds at the school she was dean of curriculum at here in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Reading and Writing Workshop has been under assault from the popular media recently so now a few teachers are rallying to bring back the 1960s.
The truth is that reading and writing have very little to do with sounding out words and following rules. They are key epistemological activities for humankind.
There’s not much point in teaching people “good grammar” (of which I am a big fan of because I’m a word nerd) beyond social signaling. It certainly isn’t very useful.
The goal of education in our republic is to create an ever-expanding citizenry capable of self-reflection and self-governance. These are Enlightened ideals but so is this entire political project that we’ve been undertaking.
Is this even possible? Look at who could vote in 1781. Would you call them literate? What does literate mean? Does it stop at a 12th grade level? Are you somewhat illiterate if I make a reference to Greek mythology yet you don’t know what the word means? Sure, maybe I should pick “rock” and “hard place” instead of Scylla and Charybdis, and maybe I could limit my vocabulary to just 1,000 basic words, but that comes at a cost.
What self-governance requires is not utilitarian but deeply philosophical in nature. It require a deep love of knowledge for the majority of people who are polled.
This seems to be the motivating factor behind the Reading and Writing Workshop, instilling the love of reading and writing in students, at least from what I have seen second-hand.
This is the key part.
These are all incredible goals to strive for once the kids are literate in the trivial basic sense of being capable, when handed an unfamiliar text, of working out what the words are.
If they are literate in that simple trivial way, instilling the love of reading and writing is a worthy goal and they are capable of becoming literate in the various wider political / social senses you describe. Even if they can't yet read in the sense of knowing what all the words and concepts mean, they can at least now encounter and name the things they don't know, and so have paths they can follow to find those things out.
If they are not in this way literate, no amount of instilling the love will help. The texts they are presented with might as well be in Linear A. There is no path to get the words from the page into the child or vice versa, and so the child cannot come to love the activities of reading and writing, wrestle with the ideas they encounter or any other fun enlightened things.
Teaching must begin with the basic building blocks before any other structure can be built above them. Any call to skip that first step before a child has mastered it is a call for lifelong ignorance.
What is missing from the criticism is any sort of purpose or ideal for education in the first place.
Literacy starts with phonics but it must never end there!
It’s sort of like bikeshedding. I guess we can all agree that, yes, we use a phonetic alphabet and learning how to sound things out is going to be a valuable lifelong skill. It’s also hilarious when the technique is applied to names from other languages.
But that’s not… reading.