Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice | Hacker News Reader

Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice

theargumentmag.com

117 pointsthemgt17 comments

I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided.

I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.

Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)

I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.

Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.

[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]

This is why literacy improved: "The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound." The fact that the debunked "whole language" method is being used seems intentionally destructive

The other key element is holding kids back a grade until they pass reading tests, rather than allowing them to progress.

Destroying a child's social life in the name of bringing them up to a standard of state defined literacy is worse than the illiteracy. Consider Rousseau's, "Emile; or On Education." I was called a, "failing student" in school because I was sneaking off to the library to read Kant and Hegel as a teenager. I once got suspended for asking my math teacher about Godel's Completeness Theorems because it was, "smart alec'y"

Please apply the golden rule to your assertions and think of unintended consequences.

People who flunk 3rd grade reading do not sneak off to read Kant or Gödel.

I don’t think people who leave school being unable to read are likely to end up with a very good life either.

Is current illiteracy really founded in WHICH method of teaching to use? Or is that the kind of nitpicking that school districts, consultants and political campaigns love to battle over, while not doing a whole lot on the ground?

According to research, yes. Children who are taught to read by "guessing" are demonstrably worse readers, even when evaluated years later. I don't think there's much of a battle going on outside of the effort it takes push the fix out everywhere.

Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.

By this article's data and other data linked, reading scores have been FALLING since 2015 (2013 for other scores) - and through 2024. This cannot be because of NOT adopting some reform. Something else has to be in play. You cannot damage some production result merely by NOT introducing some change. That's insane. "According to research" has some explaining to do.

I'm not saying that changing the teaching method would or wouldn't help. I'm saying that something ELSE had to actively happen that caused the measured drop.

Yes, method absolutely matters

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/677722959/why-millions-of-kid...

>This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading that basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words. The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process and that with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.

>Yet scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read and have concluded that theory is wrong.

>One big takeaway from all that research is that reading is not natural; we are not wired to read from birth. People become skilled readers by learning that written text is a code for speech sounds. The primary task for a beginning reader is to crack the code. Even skilled readers rely on decoding.

>So when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, her teacher should tell her to look at all the letters in the word and decode it, based on what that child has been taught about how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds. There should be no guessing, no "getting the gist of it."

I find the debate really interesting because I have 2 sons who were early readers and they taught themselves by more or less guess / check. I watched them bootstrap by recognising whole words and memorising them. They start noticing "EXIT" signs and words in environment, asking what words on the juice box say, see common words in books etc. Once they've seen enough of them (it seems to require a LOT) they seem to naturally figure out how to decode. I have seen the neuroimaging studies that claim ALL word recognition is phonetic "decoding" but I just don't believe they mean what phonics proponents claim. Some kids will recognise whole words before they've learned the alphabet. How are they "decoding" the sounds?? I mean, the whole existence of logographic writing systems contradicts these ideas. Chinese readers could not exist if what they say is true.

My daughter's brain does not work in this way and she absolutely benefited from explicit and careful phonics instruction in school. Whole word recognition does not come naturally to her.

All of them were read to for on average an hour a day up to age 5, so thousands of hours, nothing happens "magically".

I think I can understand why phonics would be the better method of instruction for schools. It's slower, but has less variance. The "old way" of teaching was more or less telling all kids to try to copy what kids who learn to read easily do. I've seen first-hand that this doesn't work well for everyone.

One thing I do wonder about is changes in culture and home environment, alongside demographic shifts. If children are not having as many books read to them or there are fewer kids with the exposure required to bootstrap "whole word" reading, then the old "YOLO methods" (do $whatever reading activities that mainly serve to focus attention on the topic) would appear to steadily decline in effectiveness.

My observation has been that phonics as a method of instruction doesn't do much for kids who learn to read by themselves or at home. BUT - those kids don't need any help to hit educational targets. So in a "phonics only" setting the method "gets the credit" for their success despite it being tons of classroom hours that don't teach them anything except that instructional content "doesn't apply to them".

It's an interesting tradeoff because you could extend this to all areas. You could target ALL educational content towards kids who are going to naturally struggle, using "remedial" methods. I think there are strong equity arguments for this. You could argue that the purpose of school is to help everybody meet minimum standards.

An unfortunate side-effect is that schools run on this philosophy become basically daycare from the perspective of children who don't need this. They are left to do ad-hoc activities (because there is no formal content targeted to their needs) or goof off, while teachers focus all attention on kids who are struggling. I don't think this is "wrong" but I do think it's a tradeoff.

Illiteracy is a weapon. Get a critical mass of the populace to have no interest in Shakespeare, Goethe, Socrates, or Cervantes and these people will find other ways to amuse themselves. Eventually they will amuse themselves to death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...

I feel it's worth noting that while the outcome of these changes to teaching reading is a huge win for childhood education, this does not mean that Mississippi has a great education system. They are still in the bottom 10 states annually for ACT scores and although they have improved learning outcomes for students the issues of equity within their schools still exist. It's also worth noting that the state is a net consumer of federal tax dollars year after year, using $2.34 in federal aid for every dollar they give in taxes. I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own.

> I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own

I don't think the success of a literacy program is negated by the existence of crime on college campuses. I also don't think it's the fault of MS that its citizens generally produce less tax revenue than Californians or New Yorkers.

The expression is "credit where credit's due" and I'd say in this case, credit's due. Well done Mississippi.

Re: "I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own." - you have your priorities, other people have their priorities. My priorities for example are reading and math proficiency.

Well done Mississippi on your students' reading progress!

Unsurprisingly, educational reform in Mississippi that started in 2013 has yet to percolate up to high schools.

As to equity, Mississippi is doing better for black students than almost anyone else:

> Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)

As to your other point, Mississippi receives the same amount of federal spending per person as New York: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-P... (page 11). New York of course pays more in taxes—because it has Wall Street and Mississippi doesn’t.

How does phonics based reading work? Is it anything like the “initial teaching alphabet” which left many unable to read “real” English?

Phonics based reading is all about sounding out unknown words. The idea is that the student would understand if somebody else read the text out loud, so if we can teach the kids how to convert the written words into sounds, they can understand many new words they first come across. The core idea is to teach the kids that certain letters or groups of letters map to certain sounds (phonemes) at a start, and then gradually introduce more and more rules of English phonetics, allowing students to successfully learn to sound out even more complicated words.

The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well.

Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).

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