Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.
Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.
The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].
I read Pournelle's column in Byte in the late eighties and at times he bemoaned the lack of phonics in modern reading curriculum while also pumping his wife's expensive phonics-based reading software. I ran this by teachers I knew and the general response I got was a confirmation that teachers use phonics all the time, along with some frustration about the rather common misunderstanding, which is at times promoted by people with their own agendas.
As someone who knows teachers but doesn't have kids and has not been motivated to learn a lot about this stuff, I've found that the above pattern often holds. Teachers baffled and annoyed by the misunderstanding of what they're doing with regard to phonics, a somewhat political origin of the critique of reading education from people who are inclined to criticize public education more broadly, sometimes there's a product to sell...
Dealing with "phonics parents" who have bought into this is probably a bit surreal and frustrating. "You've spent time working with your child on lessons outside the classroom and they've displayed improvement? What an important and forgotten education principle you've discovered."
Moreover it is factual that universities instructing teachers were for decades only teaching the whole language approach. Implementation varied state to state, but you can literally look at curriculum material used in various states over time and see the shift.
The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I also know some teachers, but that's just anecdote and fairly parochial.
I mean... would you remember? Pretty much the only thing I remember about the relevant early years of kindergarten and elementary school is the time I went to school sick and threw up on my desk. (then again, I'm old)
> The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I actually have no idea how to confirm that, but I'm sort of willing to take your word for it. By contrast, it's easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents, like the one I mentioned in my post. Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
To be clear, I don't think those lessons are necessarily useless. Time spent with kids outside class on their education is a positive thing.
> Implementation varied state to state
I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
Yes. I distinctly remember sitting through a whole year of other kids struggling to guess what a word was based on context clues in some rabbit related reading book written for whole language instruction. It was painfully slow and boring. I distinctly remember having been taught by my mother to sound out letters, so I didn't have to guess and the teachers telling me not to do it.
> I actually have no idea how to confirm that
Marie Clay is the name you want to google.
> easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents
The reason there was a market for this is because what schools were doing was not working.
> Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
It's important to step away form the culture war aspect of the "reading wars". There is simply put an evidence based and scientific way to teach reading, and one based on wacky theories fro mt he 1960s that don't work but were popularized by hucksters. The excellent podcast series sold a story has great coverage. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (I wish they published long for text, and its ironic I know, but here we are).
> I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
This is to an extent true, but teachers have to get trained on instruction in literacy and for many years colleges were all teaching utter nonsense.
That said, it's important not to over focus on the mechanical part of reading, phonics, because background knowledge and vocabulary are key to using phonics well.
I'm very skeptical that the aforementioned "consultants" made money off of the phonics controversy in a way that was comparable to those selling home lessons, but that's my main quibble at this stage.
> for many years colleges were all teaching utter nonsense.
That must be an exaggeration. It made me realize I actually have no idea how many different streams of methodology there are in education, outside of what we define as the mainstream. Certainly phonics is a part of Montessori education. Ah well, another thing to read about someday.
Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.