New Bill Would Require Phonics-Based Reading Instruction in California

I think the more modern problem is that a lot of parents offload things like this to the education system, so they become classified as emerging education issues. There's probably lots of cause and effect incentive system related reasons for that. I had three siblings that weren't served dinner unless they taught me to say a new word.

This seems a bit out of place. How are ACT scores relevant to phonics-based instruction? Typically the ACT happens a decade after a kid learns to read, right?

The need for heavy-duty phonics instruction depends somewhat on the language. For example, languages like Spanish and Italian are quite phonologically regular, so once you learn what sound each letter makes, it's easy to read. In English, the mappings between letters and sounds is much more complicated, so teaching the various rules and exceptions is more important.

Phonics may or may not be the best way to teach reading in a classroom setting to students of diverse skills, but it's a really hard problem to solve. Even agreeing on the evaluation of outcomes is difficult. (e.g: should your scoring function be about getting kids up to a minimum standard, average performance, or increase from beginning of year?)

Couple the higher effort with the financial interest in producing new materials aimed at the easy road and you get corporate interests using emotional arguments like the easy methods are "more equitable" (which is untrue). The political argument was used as a sales tactic, and it fell on ears already predisposed to hear it. The result was administrators across the country representing corporate interests under the guise of righteousness.

So no conspiracy but the usual profit motive couched in feel-good political language. But that's a guess.

Phonics seems really dry, and "schoolma'amy". "Here's a bunch of rules on how letters make words and a big list of apparent exceptions to memorise."

There's also the expert problem, where anybody teaching reading has long forgotten just how hard it is to learn. It seems totally natural to most people in the modern day to be able to read. But it's actually totally unnatural. Hence why you have a bunch of methods designed to get kids to start "naturally" reading, without all that nasty, boring, rule-teaching stuff that old stuffy teachers in boarding schools used to do. Not like us modern, cool, hip teachers who actually like kids, etc. Etc.

It's as much about identity as anything else in my opinion. Like many inexplicable things.

Yet I'm still as puzzled as you are. I'm not homeschooled pe se, but learned to read at home, as did my mom. In our culture, it was just how things were done. You learned to read when you were ready. My mom taught my brothers and me from reproductions of some schoolbooks from the 18th century, plus stuff from the public library. Later on, my spouse and I taught our kids in the same way.

From my standpoint, "phonics" made sense, as it used a built-in feature of the language, and thus didn't really need any kind of formal method. Also, it lent itself to one-on-one with the kids because we were sitting and reading to them anyway. It was easy to stop, point to a word, and ask them to sound it out.

My kids went to a public school with a high population of educated parents, and the majority of kids were reading by the start of kindergarten, for many it was their second language.

This quote seems almost absurd on its face, but I've seen other articles that mirror the sentiment. Essentially, teachers didn't like the "robotic" and "dehumanizing" drilling in phonics, and some EdD's provided them with a comforting "progressive" alternative that was stamped with the authority of the academy.

[1] https://archive.ph/2022.08.12-141010/https://time.com/620508...

A big part was guilt by association with a behaviorist view of education. Phonics is very rote and mechanical, which clashes with notions of whole, meaningful problem solving. By analogy, think reps on Spanish flash cards vs speaking Spanish to solve a mystery or order lunch. At first blush mechanical drills feel divorced from an authentic lifelike context, which can lead to poor engagement and generalization.

Then there’s the affective layer—how you feel about the subject and your ability in it. If all you do is drill Spanish flash cards, you might worry that a lot of kids will hate Spanish instruction. Alternative reading methodologies put a lot of emphasis on kids falling in love with reading.

But it turns out that in all the well-intentioned holistic thinking they basically they forgot/missed that decoding phonetic information is just super important as a discrete outcome, and you can’t skip addressing it directly or many kids will fail to infer it on their own.

And turns out it’s not so boring for little kids, because it’s new to them, and decoding skills give them much-needed momentum to read literally any text they encounter in their daily lives.

Other commenters here have already provided links.

This suggests it could be a way to game test-based systems for ranking teachers.