Why did they drop phonics in the first place?
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.
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.
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?
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.