The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools | Hacker News Reader

The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

slate.com

33 pointsrntn82 comments

This was a pretty poor article. They never really explained what balanced literacy is, what its key positions are, or how it measured success. Nor do they really explain how their ideas would be better, or adress failings of balanced literacy.

It certainly doesn't present an uncontested view of the evidence.

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

https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-lit...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-i...

Yeah, what's odd to me reading this article and then going and reading elsewhere about "balanced literacy" (which I hadn't heard of before) is that it sounds like this parent's teachers weren't using balanced literacy at all—what they describe is just the whole language method. Balanced literacy supposedly was meant to bridge the gap and use both whole language and phonics in the same program, and the author is pretty clear that phonics didn't feature in their instruction at all.

It sounds to me like either someone in the curriculum development process or the teachers themselves were anti-phonics and stripped them out of the "balanced" process, so this parent's experience may not be reflective of the typical results of a truly balanced method.

My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy" is a reasonable-sounding concept that has been so widely used as to become almost meaningless, and, in particular, that there was not much balance in Calkin's method.

This opinion is undoubtedly influenced by my skepticism over the reasons offered for substituting exercises like guessing the word for those involving "sounding out' a word. While practiced readers do use context clues a lot (probably too much, IMHO, to the detriment of critical analysis), it does not follow that guessing games will lead to basic competence. As for children stumbling over "spelling out" exercises, that is to be expected. They do the same with arithmetic, so should we be teaching them to guess the answer, and hope that, through doing so, they will infer how to get correct answers? And, as others have pointed out here, the premise that literacy comes as naturally as language itself seems to be empirically false and even self-contradictory (so why, then, do we need to be teaching it in schools?)

I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive).

In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather than handling the physical pieces themselves.

Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties.

Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to.

In any field there occasionally seem to be these ideas that emerge fully formed with a hallelujah chorus. These days it’s usually accompanied by a book, a book tour, podcast interviews, and a TED talk. Everyone who is anyone agrees that this idea is the smartest thing ever and probably right. The person behind it is very often from New York. When this happens, get skeptical.

> In any field there occasionally seem to be these ideas that emerge fully formed with a hallelujah chorus. These days it’s usually accompanied by a book, a book tour, and a TED talk.

Meh. The flipped classroom was one of those ideas, and it seems to work just fine.

I don’t think just being evidence based is going to cut it. Yada yada yada, replication crisis in psychology (and every other science, including physics.) There was a time when evidence based teaching included “Power Poses.”

"Replace conservative with evidence based."

I think it doesn't matter what it's called. Most of the fads do have evidence. It's just that it might not be measured in the right way, or ignoring other effects.

As an example, the balanced reading approach has evidence that it does work. However, the practical implementation of this approach has numerous interpretations. It's supposed to include balanced meaning between meaning and phonics. It's not supposed to be putting kids in the position of independent reading prior to being able to read. That's just a shitty school, lesson plan, or teacher. Its also supposed to include 1-on-1 reading instruction. I wonder how many kids are getting that at school with the instructor to kid ratio...

Now, maybe the systemic phonics approach will work better, but that's possibly due to the key resources (essentially lesson plans and materials) that the school is using. If it doesn't include forcing kids who don't know how to read to read independently, then any implementation would be an improvement over that, including if it was still an alternate implementation of the same system.

> Replace conservative with evidence based.

Sure, but that implies a system of pilot studies and increasingly larger studies to make sure that the intervention scales and it wasn't working due to factors inherent to the original population. You need to create an entire body of evidence, because every random fad has at least a single study to back it up. But single studies aren't that predictive, that is to say P(discovering some new fundamental truth | single study published) is rather low, as the replication crisis is showing us. Your changes are probably going to take 20-40 years to iron out all the details and suss out all the subtleties. And real, useful, interventions are going to be delayed in exchange for preventing harmful interventions from propagating.

That puts you pretty deep into conservative, risk-adverse, territory. Firmly in the Eisenhowerian "Let us make our mistakes slowly" camp. I feel like the characterization is accurate here.

Yeah, well sadly there are publishers that have an incentive to sell. As I look back on my education I see more and more clearly a corporation was lurking in the back of the classroom looking for profits.

I suppose it need not be destructive so long as the product being sold actually does do well in aiding teachers to educate students.

I agree on the digital stuff. I really don't like that kids are primarily using Chrome books and stuff as their primary mode of learning. Maybe that would be fine in high school, but I feel that elementary and middle schools should be taught with physical media.

I'm touring schools in my area now (k-8) to figure out where we want to send our kids. One school says the kids get hybrid instruction, but every single class we walked past except an art class had the kids working on their device. Hybrid my ass. It's easier to teach and grade using the tech, so that's what they're going to use. I question how durable that type of learning is vs things like handwriting notes (shown to increase retention).

I hate it. The over reliance on “Canvas” Which on the surface seems like such of a convenience. But every time I watch my kid turn in his math homework by holding his 2-sided worksheet up to the webcam I just cringe. He’ll never get any reasonable feedback on his work because it’s impossible to read.

Some assignments have “spot check” questions where you input the answer on Canvas. Instructions like “make sure you spell it right”, “use ‘i’ for infinity”, and “do not put spaces after the commas” should’ve made the teacher realize it was a bad idea. But alas.

And the teachers are SO GOOD otherwise. It makes me wonder how much of this is being forced ON THEM.

Absolutely a lot of it is forced at the district or school level. I had a friend who decided they didn't want to teach because of the policies they encountered student teaching (and partly the apathy and behavior of students). I have another friend who will only teach at private schools, even if they pay less for similar reasons.

For context, my introduction to elementary school and formal reading instruction began about 1970 in the U.S.

My recollection was that we were introduced to the alphabet and the phonetic sounds for each of the 26 letters with an image of a thing that began with that letter. As an example, I remember "m" was for "mice" ... and a picture of a pair of mice neatly represented the two humps of the letter "m".

Combined was a very simple reading curriculum of the "See Dick run" variety but concerning a frog family (one of the frogs name was "Tad").

Likely the above was Kindergarten.

By I believe 1st grade (and perhaps a grade or two following) we had something more akin to an independent reading curriculum that consisted of assignments from a kind of vertical-file-like organizer that used a color-coding to indicate difficulty and proficiency levels.

You would pull out the first (U.S. letter sized) card from the SRA Reading Labs organizer that was for the "Aqua" reading level. You would read a simple story and then answer a kind of quiz after — like, "Who did Sally meet in the park?"

There was an achievement-like appeal to me when I completed the "Aqua" level of stories and then moves up to the "Blue" level.

I have no idea the degree to which this system was effective. I'm just reporting on one way teaching reading was done during what I think in hind sight was kind of a progressive era of education in the U.S. (but still seemed to have one foot in a kind of old-school (ha, ha) tradition of education).

I recall that same color-coded SRA system. I remember doing well at it (climbed to "higher" color levels than many in the class), but I can't say how much it did to teach me, as opposed to measure where I already was.

The three things that did help me a lot were 1) my mom taught me the alphabet before I started kindergarten[0], 2) Dr. Seuss books (first text I was able to read on my own was the The Zax from his Sneetches book[1] after having it read to me a number of times, along with other illustrated stories) and 3) lots of reading material around the house, from Golden Book encyclopedia to Life/Look magazines and newspapers.

So I guess that does support the family & environment effect.

[0]while not from a rich family, it was much more common back then to have stay-at-home mothers

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...

> I remember doing well at it (climbed to "higher" color levels than many in the class), but I can't say how much it did to teach me, as opposed to measure where I already was.

I had the same experience in the late 1980s, and I suspect that the SRA system was much more likely to be an effective teaching tool for those who were not like us—closer to (or even below) their grade's reading level.

Huh, wow, yeah I never heard of this but that makes complete sense.

I spent a bit of time helping by at an elementary and though it took a bit to click, it was painfully obvious that a lot of the worst behaved kids were doing so as way to hide the fact that they could not read.

And yeah, the idea of trying to get kids to read by just making them read does seem like bullshit vs teaching it as a skill.

Am also a NYC parent, 15 years of deep school involvement. The critiqued curriculum from Columbia TC was supplemental for us and excellent. With all respect to those conducting reading studies of various kinds, and of course to parents whose kids were suffering, many of the broad claims in this piece are bewildering and are far from what I observed directly and indirectly. My views are perhaps colored by my low opinion of current leadership, which hung its hat on this curricular change but in general seems to be making one questionable decision after another, along with the mayor, who is corrupt and incompetent on a nearly criminal level. So it goes.

What do you mean by 'was supplemental for us'?

I suspect the gulf between your experiences and what others have been writing about is that for others, the critiqued curriculum wasn't supplemental, but was the only source for learning to read in school.

I can imagine teachers with sufficient prior experience, and the self-confidence that came with it, using these methods as supplementation, while those recently out of school and having no mentors would use them exclusively and by-the-book.

If you want kids to read, you need to give them a reason to want to read. For myself, I was given a trunk of about 200 superhero comic books around age 5. Nobody had time to read them to me, so I had to learn how to read them myself. And I still remember the day I realized Peter Parker had books on his shelves I'd seen with my mother's books - so I tried to read Herman Hesse about age 8 because it was a book Peter Parker had on his shelf.

I’ve often wondered if a similar result happened for me. Six year old me got Pokémon Blue, which is pretty much all text based. Coupled with comic books at a friends house, I had great internal motivation to figure those out!

Adjacent, but this video on the science of reading is fascinating. tl;dw:

   1. We don't know for sure how humans happen to be able to read.
   2. We know it didn't evolve; as recently as a few hundred years ago a large majority of humans didn't read.
   3. We think edges and intersections and fundamental shapes are key to being able to recognize things in general.
   4. We think writing/reading evolved (from pictograms) to fit what our brains are good at.
   5. Our brains are ridiculously good at it.
   6. At least once we're good at it, we don't sound out words, or even see words individually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt7rR0MCYsg

Sounds like another wretched case of human nature at work. Why would anyone care about actually achieving X in the real world, when they could instead do so much better (for themselves) by creating, promoting, and arguing about fancy BS-filled theories on how to achieve X? And, quite logically, all the real-world failures of their fancy BS-filled theories must be the fault of the little people...

Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I never encountered an illiterate person and never heard of a student who could not read. The fabled Korean obsession with education is surely important, but I do believe the sheer ease and clarity of the Korean alphabet plays an important role in universal literacy there. A lesson for English speakers?

Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.

> We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.

That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be teaching kids to read and write using a system their own parents can't comprehend. It would be an absolute disaster.

You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America."

A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision by China in the 1950s to adopt a simplified system of Chinese characters (the so-called 简体字), breaking with millennia of tradition. Now, most of the world learns (to my private despair) the simplified system when studying Chinese. Billions of hours cumulatively saved in learning and writing the complexities of the older 繁體字. Foolish China.

And, I presume that being a traditionalist you eschew the crippling changes to American spelling of the past and use only "colour", "centre", and "theatre"? The horror of it all.

And, one must also note, it's "havoc", not "havok", which is the rational, and hence forbidden, spelling

Here's realism: There is no authoritarian communist party of the English speaking world which may impose the kind of reform you proposed, so your idea is thankfully dead on arrival. You clearly covet that kind of power though, which is disturbing.

If the scope of the change you're proposing is limited to petty changes like color to colour or vice versa, then I'm confident that your changes would be ineffectual at improving literacy rates. There is no evidence that one spelling or the other is easier for children to learn.

But petty inconsequential changes like that are not what you're actually after. I think that you, with your obvious admiration for murderous authoritarian regimes and grandstanding against tradition, want to make 'traditional English' unintelligible to people who are only taught your new English. In this way you might hope to build a wall between young people and literature and other cultural materials from the past. Another Cultural Revolution is what you want, right? Tear down all that is old, purge society of traditional culture and probably murder millions of people along the way. Just as the CCP did. 枪杆子里面出政权 You admire and covet this kind of power, I can tell. Your little off topic mini-rant about tax policy tells me that you are not merely a would-be language reformer, but temporarily embarrassed head of state as well. Why not tell us about your agricultural policy too? I'm sure that somehow relates to the discussion just as tax policy does. Let me guess, step one is killing all the sparrows who eat our seeds.

You attribute to me a wish to forbid certain spellings, but which of us truly has this wish? Me, who has nothing but apathetic tolerance for the differences between American English and British English? Or you, who wishes to impose harebrained reform on the entire English speaking world and shamelessly uses the CCP as your model for how this might be done?

The English language will continue to change over time, as it always has, as all languages do naturally. What will not ever happen is a new system of writing being imposed on the entire English speaking world by fiat. Even if you became Supreme Leader of the People's Republic of America and forced your new system on the entire country, you would be dismayed to find that the overwhelming majority of English speakers do not live in America, nor any other single country. There is no single central authority for the English language, no governing body to capture. Imposing reform like you suggest is literally impossible so your proposal is beyond worthless. English is used by too many people in too many countries, you can't conqueror and subjugate them all.

Whoa, as the Brits say "Honi soit qui mal y pense"!

Your hermeneutic skills seem a mite lacking today. Did you miss my ironic comment on the PRC imposition of simplified characters: "to my private despair"? I do loathe them and salute Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong for resisting their use. Then, too, PRC Chinese pinyin (Chang -> Zhang, Chin -> Qin etc) is especially ugly.

Nevertheless, it's hard to deny that English spelling is slowly trudging to the point, where almost no one, including PhDs, can reliably write sustained prose without a spell checker. Hence all the internet use of U, gud, watsup, gimme, etc. etc. It's not the case for other languages that writing is so out of synch with pronunciation. Koreans can learn to read years faster because their alphabet fits the language around them.

In your world, it would seem (correct me if I'm wrong) that you shrug your shoulders and tell the children, "hey, just grit your teeth and learn this clunky writing system that will scar many of you for life as too stupid to read or spell, all the people out there in the world demand you pay the price, while they whiz ahead with their easy systems".

I'm dubious of almost all invocations of "structural racism", but this might be an exception.

You claim the PRC's imposed language changes are "to your private despair" as you publicly extol the supposed practical virtue of what they did and hold it up as a model for what you'd like done to English. You offer up token criticism of what the PRC did then lead immediately into "Nevertheless..." praise for the supposed benefits of what they did. I have seen this manner of duplicitous authoritarian apologia many times before, you aren't half as clever as you think.

Far from making things easier for children, you aim to make it far harder for them to access their cultural heritage by deliberately neglecting to teach them the language skills needed to access all extant English literature. I don't believe for an instant that this has escaped your consideration. You wish to deface the past so you can rewrite history; it's a form of book burning.

And structural racism? I guarantee you that any English speaking family with the means to do so would have their children privately taught to read traditional modern English, even if they had to do it themselves personally. You would create an underclass of quasi-literate English speakers, how is that supposed to address structural inequality? What you propose is not intended to promote equality, drop the bullshit.

Thou dost maketh a most excellent argument, yet methinks thou mightst have carried thy reason to its just termination. The grandeur of the English tongue did attain its apogee in the time of Shakespeare; therefore, 'tis meet that we should converse and pen our words in the idiom of that age, rather than employ the clumsy, degenerate form that hath dwindled through the succeeding years.

The words to describe what you want are "Orthographic reform". There will be no further English orthographic reform. The last successful reform was Webster in the 19th century. Webster didn't make drastic changes, yet he's why Americans and British people spell words differently centuries later.

Changes to orthography are much harder once you have printing and then again once you have mass literacy, because now your Flag Day applies to literally all of the humans who use the affected language, and humans hate change. They'd probably lynch you, except that you can't succeed so they needn't bother.

There have been many successful orthographic reforms in many languages, including recently (1996 for German). It probably can’t succeed in English, because no English-speaking country has any culture or history of state language regulation, and even if they did, it’d be tough to get them all to cooperate. Also, the most powerful English-speaking country is unable to meaningfully reform anything because of its deadlocked and hyper-polarized political system. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible in general. For German only Germany, Austria and Switzerland had to agree, all of which, unlike the US, have normally functioning political and administrative systems.

My son (7) is going to a bilingual school and he is currently learning how to read. Both German and Romanian had pretty standardised implementations of the Latin alphabet. He learned pretty fast that we sound out the S in German but not in Romanian, and that sometimes he needs 3 letters for a sound, while the other language only needs one. His two languages come with different rules, but there are very very few exceptions.

I am really curious how a child from an English-French speaking family fares in school, given that both languages take such a "historical" approach to spelling.

I think the note on classism is basically the entire story. Avoiding phonics probably works great for families who have already taught kids to read by the time they reach school.

I could intuitively sound out words by the time I was in grade school. I also had parents reading books with me multiple times a day my entire life up to that point. We made games out of reading the book backwards because if you read words backwards it sounds funny. Being able to do this implies already being proficient in phonics.

By the time I was in grade school, what I needed was a quiet place and dedicated time to practice reading short, easy novels (which I continued to do at home every day). Doing this without already being able to read sounds like nonsense.

Three thoughts,

Is it really true that 1 in 4 schools stopped teaching kids to associate sounds with letters so they could sound out words? That sounds so insane it beggars belief. If that's true then no wonder people don't trust schools; trust isn't warranted. But the idea is so insane on the face of it that I have trouble believing it.

Secondly, if 1 in 4 schools did this and half of the students in these schools fail at reading because of it, then "and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams." seems a bit dubious. If school's adopted this program independent of school size and half of the students at those schools struggled to read for this reason alone, then I'd expect roughly 1/8th of all students nationally to be negatively effected, not one half.

Third, it would have been nice for this article to go more into the history of the idea. It pretty much lays all the blame on this Lucy Calkins and Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, but also blames this line of thinking for a 1973 SCOTUS decision. That was several years before the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was founded, but the article doesn't go into this history.

> Is it really true that 1 in 4 schools stopped teaching kids to associate sounds with letters so they could sound out words? That sounds so insane it beggars belief.

It's way worse than that. The "1 in 4" amount is for one particular way of doing it.

Here's an older article about the topic in general: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonic...

> The debate — often called the “reading wars” — is generally framed as a battle between two distinct views. On one side are those who advocate for an intensive emphasis on phonics: understanding the relationships between sounds and letters, with daily lessons that build on each other in a systematic order. On the other side are proponents of approaches that put a stronger emphasis on understanding meaning, with some sporadic phonics mixed in. Balanced literacy is one such example.

> [..]

> In a 2019 survey of 674 early-elementary and special education teachers from around the United States, 72 percent said their schools use a balanced literacy approach, according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonprofit organization in Bethesda, Md. The implementation of balanced literacy, however, varies widely, especially in how much phonics is included, the survey found. That variation is probably preventing lots of kids from learning to read as well as they could, decades of research suggests.

Balanced literacy is one way of deemphasizing phonics, and was at 72% in 2019. The "1 in 4" amount is one particular curriculum for doing balanced literacy.

my three year old (just this week, 4) had somehow learned to read on his own (he is on the spectrum). He seem to have picked up both sight reading and phonics as best as I can tell. He will try to sound out the word sometimes, but largely just looks at the word. If it’s big word a , like “awesomeness”, he will try to sound it out, at least a bit.

The Dr Seuss books are a piece of cake and he could read them at 3 1/2.

This was me, only pushed back by about two years. I entered first grade unable to read, and left it reading full novels. All credit to my first grade teacher for whatever she did do, but other kids in the class didn't undergo that same transformation.

I think education as a scientific discipline suffers from the credentialism that has required increasing numbers of teachers to get graduate degrees.

The focus in departments granting professional degrees is going to inevitably be on those students, and the dollars they bring with them, rather than on research.

It makes no sense to me that they had the idea that reading will just naturally arise like speech. Like, how did they come up with that?

We have ample evidence that human infants spontaneously generate language. If you're unlucky enough to be born profoundly deaf in a country without an existing programme of sign language for deaf infants, you'll sign anyway, just there isn't anybody to provide a vast menu of existing signs and a grammar for them, and those you're communicating with wouldn't know it if there was. So your signs will be primitive and you'll struggle unless/until introduced to a full sign language. [Sign languages are languages, they're not just spoken language somehow transliterated into signs - so e.g Mexican Sign Language is a thing even though in Mexico the spoken language is Spanish]

Writing seems to have arisen independently only very rarely. Some tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously invent written language, and a larger but still small fraction will spontaneously acquire this technology if exposed to the writing. Everybody else must be taught if you want a literate society.

I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching.

> I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching.

Apparently only a tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously follow links in the article to vet that same article:

> She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.[1]

Even if a shitty math curriculum consisted solely of kids memorizing times tables, such a curriculum is obviously distinct from a school hoping the kids will absorb math "without teaching." I've heard many parents talk about "sight words" before, so I know that concept has been used in the U.S. for quite some time now.

Just to be clear-- I've cited a single sentence, from one minute of skimming a single link from the article we both read. I have no idea about the efficacy of phonics vs what's called "balanced literacy" in the article. And I don't know what, if any, other teaching techniques are included in either the theory or practice of balanced literacy. (Or phonics, for that matter.)

What I do know is that "you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching" is divorced from reality.

What I'll speculate is that ad tech indirectly delivered a low-effort article to your eyeballs and tricked you into riffing on a faulty premise.

1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

Apparently only a tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously follow links in the article to vet that same article:

> She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.[1]

What I do know is that "you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching" is divorced from reality.

What I'll speculate is that ad tech indirectly delivered a low-effort article to your eyeballs and tricked you into riffing on a faulty premise.

Edit: well, not exactly "tricked you." More like for every N eyeballs will be connected to a brain that takes the bait. Today, you were the lucky winner!

1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

And what fraction manage to post essentially the same comment twice ?

Critics of "Balanced literacy" sound like they have similar complaints to those for "Intelligent design". They believe Balanced Literacy isn't really a new thing, but an old discredited idea ("Whole language" literacy education) given a re-branding to escape criticism, just as "Intelligent design" is Creationism again.

And "Whole Language" is exactly what I discussed above, a belief that "learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally". A laughably false idea.

> the goofy glasses teachers wore for group reading time to make the written word less intimidating; in the assurances to parents that the best way to help children read was to read out loud to them to instill a love of language and literature; in the artfully arranged reading nooks stocked with cushions, mats, and an appealing array of books; in the hours that teachers instructed young children to sit in those nooks with books of their choosing.

I have gone through this with my kids. Out of all the options and educational models, it’s unsurprising they picked the laziest one. They don’t have to struggle and correct kids. Just put goofy goggles on. Or, stick them in front of a tablet and let that babysit them until parents pick them up.

lol you really want to drive this point home? Hate teachers much?

>lol you really want to drive this point home?

Sure but why laugh out loud about it? Not sure what's so funny about it.

> Hate teachers much?

No not really. Do you? They have a hard job, are underpaid, and they are usually unappreciated by the society in large. There are also overbearing parents to deal with, some threatening law suites and such.

So given all that what reading and educational model they'll pick? One that necessitates more correcting and confronting students, or the ones where they can just say "reading will be absorbed magically" by simply being around books.

Well, that was anticlimactic... I was expecting an article on teachers unions being ruled illegal and the significant minority of totally incompetent teachers the union enabled for all these years being fired.....

At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one will like and learn from a teacher that the other kid struggles with etc.

So perhaps it’s about teachers being good and effective for one child but not for another, and few are objectively bad for everyone?

I think they're talking about the notorious room in the NYC school system where the dozens of teachers that have been declared unsuitable for teaching in any capacity, but who are unfireable, are forced to log their days.

They sit and do nothing, in a barren and unpleasant environment, and the school system hopes they'll quit.

From my experience, I think it's a minority of teachers probably between 5-20% that are objectively bad for everyone, but that's just my highly guesstimated sample size of one experience upscaled because I think I was in a "good" school district and I assume there are double to triple the number of objectively bad teachers in "bad" school districts. If that assumption is wrong then the number would be closer to 5%. I also upscaled a bit from my experience 20ish years ago because the number of indoctrinated whack jobs pulling insane woke nonsense like getting white students to apologize to black students appears to have risen from zero during my time to some number that is way too high.

If I'm wrong, I don't think I'm that far from right here though. I didn't classify my teachers as bad because I didn't like them, I classified them as bad because they failed at teaching the whole class, or they did other criminal things like overbuy pop for student union fundraisers so they could drink the pop for free for the whole year (I should probably thank the teacher that did this since here being so terrible got me to read the teachers union contract and realize why she still had a job, which got me on the road to an economics degree and my current success). The failed to teach thing also seemed to happen disproportionately for the specific reason of seniority protected by the teachers union keeping old teachers, who have checked out, employed for the last decade or so until they could claim full pension.

The teachers union keeps all these people employed, harming our kids, by making the firing process byzantine and extremely time consuming and lengthy.

Too much focus on phonics could turn off some kids. It's not a one size fits all. The other half she's referring to could better spend their time reading since they already know how to instead of spending additional time on phonics. I hated how long they taught phonics, which is really saying something considering I don't remember too much else from that early.

How is the political group using the science of reading to undermine public schools?

Contrary to stereotypes, kids are not "turned off" by more direct instruction methods. They enjoy the challenge, it's quite fun for them as long as they're not failing completely at it or being bored to death by something that has become trivial. Think about how videogames are designed to be engaging and almost addictive, good instruction should follow along the same principles.

"Contrary to stereotypes, kids are not "turned off" by more direct instruction methods."

I'm not aware of that sterotyoe at all. That highly depends on what the instruction method is, as wella s the child. In this case it was because it became trivial because they dwelled on it for years.

It seems they're looking for a one size fits all solution. I don't believe that exists. If half the kids do well in one method and the other half do better in a different method, then perhaps they should figure out which is the "standard" method and create a second track or IEP for the others.

I thought this was going to be about the look-say method, another dubious reading education fad.

My own kids have just gone through Kindergarten and first grade and the impression I get is that they were given some mix of a phonics and look-say approach. They seem to be doing okay.

OMG if teachers don't want to teach, at least park the kids in front of "The Letter Factory" once a week and then "The Word Factory" for a bit. IMHO two videos that teach the basics and are fun for kids.

English as a language doesn't help, being a disaster for learning to read. My native Swedish is annoying and hard enough for my kids and it's a paragon of logic and consistency compared to English.

Native english speaker here -- while I understand it's easy to come up with lists that show off the worst inconsistencies, I honestly think of those as the exception rather than the rule. Can you list out some of the most common, worst issues you see with english? I'm really curious.

In case you haven't seen it before, check out the chaos poem: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Sure, they're the exception, but the sheer volume of exceptions is staggering compared to Swedish (and Swedish is pretty bad imo!).

Look at the simple sentence I wrote naturally above. There are so many violations of "sounding out" logic there! "Sure" should reasonably be spelled "shur", "they're" is a big topic in itself, c vs s spelling is all over the place, silent e at the end of words randomly, "compared" has a silent e IN the word because you have to know that it comes from "compare". And writing this explanation of the problems, I had to use even more words that are illogical, like: sentence, wrote, there (not counting words with c for s).

The tug of war between phonics and sight reading continues.

You need both skills.

But only one of those needs to be taught directly, and that's phonics. Sight reading can be left to emerge later on as the amount of reading increases. English is not Mandarin Chinese, we don't need to guess the meaning of words from what they look like, we can mostly read out how they sound.

I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.

Children's early aptitudes for all these non-trivial skills vary enormously. There's also minimal later consequence. Basically the fact your five year old can multiply and mine can't count properly actually isn't strongly predictive for which of them is going to be a Fields Medal winner.

Kids who exhibit interest in acquiring written language skills should be encouraged, but so should kids who are interested in dancing, or playing a musical instrument, or a hundred other things. Unless your kid's main hobby is torturing flies or something they should be encouraged to do things they enjoy, especially before school makes them do some things that, inevitably, they don't enjoy, whether that's writing things down, climbing, or learning about stuff that happened a long time ago.

It sounds like the author didn't even attempt to teach their children how to read prior to entering 1st grade, due to the "unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read."

Seems nuts to me, I thought the unspoken contract is that parents read to their kids at night and teach them to read at the same time. I guess the author thinks only rich parents can do that (come on now..)

Teaching is a skill, which is why we don't ordinarily just let random people off the street start teaching kids. So you may not be any good at it.

Also the kids vary a lot in what they're interested in and what they exhibit a natural aptitude for. You seem to suppose that all the world's four year olds want to learn to read and are naturally good at that, but, the evidence strongly disagrees. If you only needed, say, 10% of your population as literate scribes then relying on this approach would work, but our society is predicated on an overwhelming majority of literate adults.

> Teaching is a skill, which is why we don't ordinarily just let random people off the street start teaching kids.

We do in fact. Parents (what you term "random people off the street") are expected to take an active role in educating their children. Ask public school teachers in America what frustrates them the most and the two top answers will be their administrators and parents who aren't involved in the education of their children. Parents like the article author who think there is a "unspoken contract" that schools will handle all education are the bane of teachers. Teachers hate people like this. I have several school teachers in my family and they all rant nonstop about parents like this.

If a parent tries and fails to teach their child how to read before the first grade, that's fine. They can let the teachers know that and the teachers can start giving that child special attention right away. But a parent who doesn't even try because they think the education of their child is the sole responsibility of the school are the kind of parents that teachers hate. It's neglect, not legally actionable neglect but certainly neglect nevertheless.

By the time a child gets to the first grade they are already 6 or 7 years old and the window for easy reading acquisition is almost closed. The article author found this out too late and now her daughter still struggles to read. Incidentally...

> When it became clear that my daughter was also among the roughly half of all kids who will not read fluidly without explicit phonics instruction, I left my job, in part to help. [...] My daughter’s progress has been slower, perhaps because her tutoring took place online.

She left her job to help her daughter learn to read, yet her daughter is being tutored ineffectually on the internet. Why isn't she tutoring her daughter in person, if she left work to help? Because...

> I left my job, in part to help. I also embarked on a doomed crusade to persuade our school’s administration that—

Her idea of "leave work to help" apparently means leave work so she has more time to write angry emails at the school. The teachers must absolutely hate her.

Yeah I get it, not everybody knows how to teach kids to read, but she took off work for this so she should have the time to figure it out. She should go to a public library and tell a librarian that she wants to use the phonics method to teach her child how to read. Librarians can direct her to appropriate books and probably give her a ton of supporting material as well. But she's not going to do this because she's locked into the mentality that teaching her kid to read isn't a job for her. She wants schools or internet tutors to do it for her, and when that doesn't work she takes to writing articles complaining about the situation instead of doing it herself. Meanwhile the days tick away and her daughter becomes less and less likely to ever read well.

> Unless your kid's main hobby is torturing flies or something

That's called research on model organisms. As long as the kid has gotten proper approval by the ethics review board, they'll do just fine.

Fine, I find it absurd that the author did not already TRY teaching their kids to read prior to kindergarten.

My parents tried to teach me to read at an early age, and it was a disaster. When I was about five the skill pretty much emerged, full formed and unprompted. I jumped from not reading at all to reading full novels in a few months.

This pattern of me being incapable of learning pretty much anything from my parents continued for the rest of their lives. :-/

I teach for a living. I'm currently at a community college, but I spent most of the last decade teaching high school. I even did a little 4th grade. (Yes, it is unusual for any teacher to teach that range of grades.)

Educational administrators are idiots. They can not do basic tasks. Give them a list of industry certifications like the one I will link below, and ask them to figure out which classes currently offered in their school or school district might be appropriate to prepare the kids for those certifications, and they can not do it. They yell at the teachers to figure it out instead of providing clear instructions to the teachers.

A big chunk of their funding depends on getting their students certified, and they can not make a plan to achieve that.

After we know what certifications go with what classes, I suggest they pay the certification fees to get their teachers certified. They yell back that they do not get paid to have the teachers certified. I know that, but do they really expect teachers to prepare students for certifications the teachers do not have?

They say it is the teacher's responsibility to keep their certifications up to date. That only applies to their state occupational license to teach, not to industry certifications. School administrators do not understand the difference.

I already had the industry certifications because I subscribe to the TEA newsletters, and anticipate next year's goals.

I ask for funding for my kids to take the certification exams. The administratoras yell back that either the students need to pay for it or I need to pay for it. School administrators do not care that the extra funding they would get from getting students certified would more than pay for the vouchers. I finally get an administrator with a brain to fund the vouchers.

I get about half my students certified. The administrators say that is worthless. They threaten to fire me because if one single student does not get certified, my whole school year is a failure. I am literally the only teacher in the school who got kids certified (that I know of.)

The list of certifications is a PDF linked to from this web page: https://tea.texas.gov/academics/college-career-and-military-...

Here is a direct link to the PDF: https://tea.texas.gov/academics/college-career-and-military-...

>A big chunk of their funding depends on getting their students certified, and they can not make a plan to achieve that.

>I am literally the only teacher in the school who got kids certified (that I know of.)

These two things (as explained by you) cannot be true at the same time, or the school could not exist. Could you explain the nature of the funding? Is it supplememtal? Who is supplying the funds?

Welcome to public school education where nothing makes sense and teachers are fleeing in droves.

This. My 2 relatives, 2nd and 4th grade teachers just both "retired early", but should be considered lucky... Having conversations with them about teaching was horrifying at times.

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